The four mistakes of Team Anna

Anna Hazare’s continued hospitalisation has raised doubts whether he will campaign against the Congress in the forthcoming assembly polls, as announced. The ‘Mumbai setback’ forced Team Anna to cancel  some plans they had put into motion — like Jail bharo, and demonstrations outside Sonia Gandhi’s home. They even cancelled their core committee meeting to take stock of the latest situation.

There are four essential mistakes made by Anna and his team. The first was to mix anti-corruption with anti-Congressism. The two should have been kept separate, no matter what the personal views of many in the group.

This is not to absolve the Congress for the mega corruption unearthed in scam after scam in the last year and half, which created a certain ‘enough is enough’ mood in the country, into which Anna tapped. It would have made the campaign, which was against political corruption, for the passage of the Lokpal Bill and for electoral reforms, more effective.

Hissar was the turning point. For Team Anna to enter the poll campaign against the Congress — in a constituency where the Congress had been number three even when it won all other Lok Sabha seats in the state in 2004, and was pitted against candidates whose image was far from shining — only raised doubts about its non-partisan character.

The argument for Team Anna campaigning against the Congress — that as the ruling party it was responsible for enacting the Lokpal Bill — did not wash. This became amply evident the day the Rajya Sabha took up the Lokpal Bill, after it had been passed by the Lok Sabha.

It was Congress ally Trinamool who threw the spanner in the works, and joined hands with other regional parties to oppose the Bill, till the provision to create the Lokayuktas was removed.
Look at the irony. It was the Congress that took  a position akin to the one held by Team Anna — that the creation of the Lokayuktas be made mandatory under a comprehensive central legislation on the Lokpal. The opposition parties opposed and derailed the vote.

The second mistake was to tar every politician with the same brush. Though the white kurta-pajama figure has become a dirty word today, this was neither fair to those who are not corrupt, nor a farsighted view to take, given that, in the final analysis, the Lokpal Bill had to be passed by Parliament, and it required the support of politicians of different hues. Kiran Bedi’s ‘ghunghat’ act against all politicians at the Ram Lila grounds had riled the MPs more than any other single act.
The third factor was the frequent use of the weapon of ‘fast’ by Anna, when the fast has been viewed as an ultimate weapon to exert moral pressure when all else has failed.

And finally, there was a misjudgement on the part of those who were conducting the movement — though they had managed to mount a campaign from which many could learn — about when to move towards a settlement. Since a movement cannot go on indefinitely, its leaders have to judge the peak point, when they move from, as Mahatma Gandhi had said, the agitational phase to the constitutional front.

That would have been the moment to extract the maximum advantage and settle for as effective a Lokpal Bill as was possible — and lived to fight another day for further improvements. This would have enabled the movement to go deeper and mount pressure on every party to field candidates with a clean image in elections.

The failure to do this stemmed from a mindset that Team Anna knew best, and anyone else who had a different view was either corrupt or compromised.

Having said that, what we witnessed during 2011 was both unprecedented and historic. The upsurge amongst the Indian middle class, the involvement of people in the lawmaking process, and the deepening of the democratic process that this represented, is now a known story.

That it has not left politics untouched is also clear. Mayawati has been forced to sack 21 of her ministers who were corrupt, even though it has come on the eve of elections. Though the BJP inducted some of these tainted MLAs (like Babu Singh Kushwaha) in what was seen as a politically expedient move, it has unleashed a tussle within the party. So also is the case in the Samajwadi Party over the proposed entry of BSP leader and mafia don DP Yadav.

These are only straws to indicate the new environment that has been created in the country, demanding a greater political accountability.