A deluded Team Anna is feeding a dangerous intolerance

It’s a mob out there. And some of the self-appointed leaders of Civil Society who sit on the dais at Ramlila Maidan and give their self-righteous opinions are now showing all the signs of suffering from delusions of grandeur. It starts from Anna Hazare himself. He now really thinks he is Mahatma Gandhi. Read his statements: “This is the beginning of India’s second freedom movement”, “I will fight till my last breath”, “They might put me in jail but there is a second line of command ready to take over”… [caption id=“attachment_65504” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Men and women with small minds are grappling with a situation that has gone out of control. Adnan Abidi / Reuters”]  [/caption] Anna has certainly read his Gandhi. But is Anna Hazare even a shadow of the Mahatma? And is an elected government like ours the same as an occupying imperial power that the British were? Try and suggest these ideas from the dais at Ramlila Maidan - and Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal will probably throw you into the angry arms of a crowd that is now so charged up with the corruption rhetoric that it will not accept any note of dissent. Bedi and Kejriwal are at the forefront of this intolerance: Bedi shouts down anyone with a different point of view when she is on television; Kejriwal was heard screaming down a woman who asked perfectly legitimate questions and the Bhushans had to step in to stop his diatribe. A few days ago I had asked similar questions of Santosh Hegde on a TV channel: First: An MP is introducing a bill exactly like the Jan Lokpal bill in parliament. The parliamentary select committee, which consists of ruling party and opposition party MPs, will debate the bill that Anna Hazare and company wanted to bring into law. So where is there any need now for an agitation? Second: Every draft bill that goes to the standing committee is subject to extensive discussions, which ultimately result in several changes. Some of these strengthen the bill by eliminating loopholes and legal lacunae, while others have the effect of diluting some of the provisions. This is the give-and-take of a parliamentary system, based on the premise that no one party has Right on its side. Does Team Anna insist that the Jan Lokpal bill should be passed in toto, without a single alteration? Does Team Anna then claim that all other viewpoints have no merit? Third: The Lokpal Bill will go through the parliamentary procedure of debate, re-drafting, finalising, putting to vote and so on. It’s not exactly an overnight process. Anna Hazare can take full credit for making parliament take up the bill and that too on an urgent basis. But what is he fasting for now? To hold a time-table gun over parliament? Does he want no debate, no discussion, no plugging of loopholes, correction of omissions and so on? These are all dangerous tendencies. They are made even more dangerous because we have men (and women) with small minds grappling with a situation that has gone out of their control. And they have the monster of television news as their supporting army.