Manmohan, Sonia need to communicate more

The government’s handling of Baba Ramdev is not just about its flip-flops between June 1, when senior ministers rolled out the red carpet for him, and June 4, when the police cracked down against him and his followers. Those three days are essentially a story about how decisions are being made at the top.

The airport visit was the government’s cardinal mistake, and from which other errors flowed. It was not just that the country saw the number two in the government going to “explain” to a yoga guru what he was doing to curb black money, or parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Bansal going as his translator, or Subodh Kant Sahay, with his proximity to Ramdev, summoned back from Europe to receive him, and Kapil Sibal acting as the chief negotiator; the country saw a weak and panicky government prostrating itself before Ramdev.

Was there a “method” in this “madness”? One explanation is that the government wanted to build up Ramdev, who had announced a fast against corruption and black money, in a limited sort of way to bring down Anna Hazare. Anna and his team had threatened to walk out of the joint drafting committee if the PM and the chief justice of India were not included in the Lokpal bill. Baba’s demands about curbing black money were more generic in nature and easier to handle with the constitution of committees; Anna’s demand came close to the bone.

The central question that remains unanswered is what prompted the government to go in for the midnight crackdown, something it will take a long time to live down? Was it the breakdown of negotiations with Ramdev and his failure to end his fast by 4 pm on Saturday as promised? Minutes before Kapil Sibal made the agreement public to show that Baba had broken his promise (as per a written agreement signed by his aide Acharya Balkrishna), Ramdev told his supporters that the government had accepted 99% of their demands and they could go home soon.

And minutes after the agreement was made public - exposing Baba for cutting a deal with the government - Ramdev went ballistic and it was back to battle again. There are many who believe that Kapil Sibal, and the government, could have shown a little more patience before making the agreement public, particularly since the situation was still fluid. On the day of the fast, KN Govindacharya, who has acted as a bridge between the RSS and Ramdev in recent months, had publicly expressed his disgust about Baba being co-opted by the government.

Ramdev may well have been stringing along the mediators and may have been under pressure from the RSS not to give in. If there was a security risk — now wild theories are being bandied about imminent bloodshed — the Union of India had myriad ways of handling it than a midnight swoop.

Was the compulsion then to show “success” in getting Ramdev to end his fast, having botched up with the airport visit, failing which, to display a “toughness” to make up for the capitulation displayed three days earlier and which had invited widespread flak? The Congress party too had expressed its displeasure at the botch-up, and this too must have weighed with the negotiators.

The fact is that the UPA had Baba where they wanted him on Saturday evening. But they lost the plot when they sent in the police in the dead of night to evict thousands of unarmed people who were sleeping.

The upshot: It has united the opposition, giving the BJP a fillip when only hours earlier its Lucknow meet was a listless affair, and allowed Baba and Hazare to occupy the opposition space. Barring Laloo Yadav, no ally has defended the Congress. The action also united an otherwise divided civil society, making Baba the symbol of the anti-corruption movement, though it remains to be seen how this pans out now that Ramdev and his associates are under the scanner and the Supreme Court is looking into the reasons for the police crackdown.

The Congress, making a virtue of a necessity, has decided to go on the offensive against the RSS, even calling Hazare a RSS mukhota (mask), with an eye on consolidating its vote base in poll-going UP.

The Ramdev episode has underscored once again the absence of a clear command in the government and the absence of an effective communication mechanism between the prime minister and Sonia Gandhi. As a result, where the government should have acted firmly, it bent over backwards. Where it could have shown patience, it rushed into action.

— The writer is a commentator on political and social issues