Understanding the Anna Hazare phenomenon

It is easy to misunderstand the Anna Hazare movement as a middle-class, anti-corruption fad that will fade away. Rather, it represents another stage in Indian politics that has evolved from one-party Congress rule to coalition governance amidst growing regionalism, where the prime minister is now forced to cede a lot of his powers and political space to chief ministers.

If you take a detached view, it is no accident that the man to resist to the last Anna Hazare’s Jan Lokpal bill committee demand with 50-50 society-government representation was the PM himself.

With AB Vajpayee no longer politically active and the other stalwarts of his era with pan-India recognition long gone, India has no mass leader today. LK Advani is past his best and Sonia Gandhi has paled with voters. The perceptive root the ills and evils of the UPA to her. And of the third remaining mainstream party, the CPI-M, there is much to recommend in its general secretary, Prakash Karat. All the same, he is not a mass leader.

Whether the decline/absence of political mass leaders helped regionalism/coalition politics grow or vice-versa is a chicken-egg story. What is undeniable is that Anna Hazare has emerged as a powerful presence in this confused unfolding of India’s political narrative. Note that as strongly as the PM opposed him, not one chief minister, regardless of party/political affiliation, spoke against him.

Indeed, Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi openly supported him, and Anna Hazare’s memoir tellingly reveals the adoption of his rural-development programmes by present/former chief ministers like Ashok Gehlot, Digvijay Singh, and Chandrababu Naidu.

The very fact that Anna Hazare arouses profound reverence in rural Maharashtra should give the lie that he leads a middle-class movement centred on urban concerns against corruption. At the first hint of trouble from him, Sharad Pawar quit the GoM framing the Lokpal bill.

But Anna Hazare does not appear the sort to rest on his laurels, or indeed to be moved by the achievement of small victories. At the earliest possible, he has quit Delhi and returned to his rural roots, with sturdy plans to travel across India carrying the message. This is a messiah in the making. And with absent mass political leaders, Anna Hazare brings vast tidal forces with him.

Would his movement overrun Indian parliamentary democracy, as some fear? Never. But it will bring about long-needed corrections. The principle of constitutionalism will lose credibility if it means to tolerate and accept high-order corruption (2G, CWG, Adarsh), cash-for-votes (UPA-1’s tainted 2008 parliament confidence-vote victory), executive subversion of parliament (under Manmohan Singh), voter purchase (turned into low art by MK Alagiri), criminal politicians, and executive unaccountability to the people (seen in unprecedented price rise and brazen establishment corruption from the highest to the lowest levels). To wholly oppose the Anna Hazare movement means to intentionally/unintentionally to defend all this.

To be sure, the rot of 60 years cannot be removed by four days of Anna’s fast. And there are long-term projects that are not even up for debate, including transparent election funding, constitutionalising a recall vote, and moving to a sophisticated single transferable-vote system that more closely reflects voter preferences. But what he has managed is a feat, blowing a hole through the outer walls of a previously impregnable corrupt Centre.

A divided Congress party and UPA, a fragmented central government, a moribund opposition, a weak prime minister with no political base and zero voter credibility, and the mushroom growth of above par two- and three-time chief ministers, have contributed to Anna Hazare’s rise. Like Jayaprakash Narayan before, he has risen through a critical faultline in India’s polity.

None of the political factors that have flowered in the Anna movement are likely to change in the near term. The ruling class is desperate to unite against the movement.

But the same divisions that aid one section of the ruling class against another now make them powerless against Anna Hazare. Besides, it would be political suicide to cross him. For those in power, he represents the biggest threat, and for none more so than the UPA government, which is already in the crosshairs of the opposition and the Supreme Court.
 
NV Subramanian is a New Delhi-based political and strategic analyst, and editor of www.newsinsight.net 
Email: envysub@gmail.com