Anna’s movement will only get more political

Obituaries are being written about Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement. Two core Team Anna members, PV Rajagopal and Rajinder Singh, have quit or moved away.After his support of plebiscite in Kashmir, Prashant Bhushan’s fate hangs in the balance, although his father, Shanti Bhushan, says he didn’t mean it.

So is it finito for the Anna movement? Are its ideological contradictions irreconcilable? The answer to both queries is ‘no’. But this writer thinks the anti-corruption movement will become more sharply political and get solider in its anti-Congressism.
It must be understood that Anna is the moving force behind the movement. His team members, important as they are, are still in the nature of add-ons. The parting of Rajagopal and Rajinder Singh will not affect the movement, because it has reached its present position organically.

Bhushan’s going away may be a setback in terms of the legal acumen he and his father brought to the movement. But Anna may be able to overcome even that, although it is possible that the Bhushans may not wish to leave. Anna provides a massive platform. The Bhushans have become national figures. Such celebrity is not easily spurned.

The ‘problem’ for the Anna movement has started with the Hisar election, which the BJP-backed candidate, Kuldeep Bishnoi, won. The number two candidate, Ajay Chautala, lost narrowly, while the Congress nominee, Jai Parkash, forfeited his deposit. The Congress suffered such a crushing defeat in 1977 when it lost national power to the Jayaprakash Narayan-led Janata Party. The significance of this historicity is more than ironic.

The Congress says it was anyway losing the election. Team Anna’s campaign against Jai Parkash did not affect the verdict one way or another, it says. Bishnoi and Chautala say the same thing. This has been quickly interpreted by reporters and pundits to mean that the Anna factor made no material difference to the Hisar poll outcome. This is both wrong and a little right, but Team Anna’s take on this is the most accurate.

In an earlier piece in this newspaper, this writer has highlighted the differences between Anna and JP. The crucial difference between the two lies in the degree of politicising their respective movements. JP, as everyone knows, went to the extreme of forming a political party, brought it to power, but expectedly refused office. Anna Hazare, on the other hand, is on the first stage of the politicisation of his movement, and as far as can be told from the outside, remains content there.

How does this first stage of politicisation work?
The Anna movement has identified the chief obstructer to its goal for a powerful Jan Lokpal, and this is the Congress at the Centre.

So it has set about demolishing it unless it relents on its chief demand. But while aiming to pummel the Congress electorally, it is not backing anyone explicitly. It did not back Bishnoi or Chautala or the 20 or so other candidates in the fray. The result of this limited but potent campaign was to divide the Congress votes on caste and other considerations and add it to those of the number one and two candidates, routing Jai Parkash.

This is the impact of Team Anna’s campaign. Bishnoi can’t say Team Anna helped him because it didn’t. The same holds for Chautala. So they are technically correct to base their performance on personal and other factors. But by cutting into Congress votes, the Anna campaign played the spoiler. This is the full significance of the Anna movement’s first stage of politicisation.

The pattern of the Hisar poll will be played out on a bigger scale in the Uttar Pradesh elections early next year if Team Anna works against the Congress. The Congress is losing UP. Its internal reports say so. Mayawati is slated to return. The Anna factor will worsen the Congress defeat in UP. There may be a washout.

This could be avoided or minimised, but that is another story. But the Anna movement’s evolution to this point of being sharply and growingly political is entirely organic and logical. After all, as a weapon, hunger strike cannot be often and trivially employed. A campaign against an obstructive power in an election is a natural second weapon and perfectly democratic.

Sometimes, Anna Hazare may appear to be faltering, succumbing to pulls and pressures. It makes him all the more human. But he knows what he is doing.