The Cong plan to neutralise Anna is still on course

The first politician to shoot from his lips on Tuesday morning, after Anna Hazare, Kiran Bedi and Arun Kejriwal were taken into custody, was BJP’s  Prakash Jawdekar. He said the government had ‘gone berserk’.

He could be well wrong. The government seems to have chosen to deliberately provoke and measure the actual visible public support Hazare and his civil society colleagues generate across the country.

It is all going according to plan.

Apparently, the government and its strategists believe that the crowd that gathers around Anna, sends text messages flying across the country, and asks for the lights to be switched off on Independence Day for an hour at 8 pm would not be seen on the streets when push comes to shove.

If they do — that is, if its presumptions are wrong and they do turn on the streets — then the government could activate another plan. It can accuse them of sundry crimes, including potential violence. In fact, apprehension of violence is the stated reason for banning Anna’s fast at his chosen venue. Congress’s Ambika Soni has already said as much: “Who can guarantee anything in a crowd?”

Their assumption is Anna Hazare would stand exposed as a man who espouses a lost cause, notwithstanding the intense, minute-to-minute coverage that a breathless television has so far provided. In short, most of what has been said by Team Anna and it threatens to do is just lot of hot air.

The government is also assuming that much of the support is only coming from the twitterati and the guys who thumb out text messages.

The angst against corruption could, the Congress-led government calculates, wither away just as it did in 2008 after the Mumbai terror attacks. The initial days saw a huge surge of public protest in the form of candle-holding people around the Gateway of India. But it didn’t last. Such protests, as we have already seen, tend to get snuffed out. The middle class does not even go out to vote against a government that they think is insufferable.

You have to give it to these Congress guys. Their confidence stems from the ease with which middle class enthusiasm usually dies out. On-street demonstrations require an altogether different attitude, a kind of sturdiness which even the Left finds difficult to marshal these days. Beyond the reflexive re-transmission of lofty text messages, the middle class does not have the stamina for action.

Of course, if this time it’s different with the middle class, the government could be in for a surprise. In this case, a new India will be emerging. And that would be interesting.

But politicians are not fools. Nor are bureaucrats. After all, to most of them, graft is a serious business, a comfort to be sought and gained. Take it away, and politics loses its meaning. Politics and governance are not public causes but personal goals.

That is why they are unlikely to lose their heads over Anna. Even when senior ministers and bureaucrats from the PMO landed up at the airport to dissuade Baba Ramdev to call off his plans, they were trying to overawe him by assigning him disproportionate importance.

They failed and latched on to other strategies. One was exposure. The Baba is now under the scrutiny of the Enforcement Directorate and has not come out smelling of roses — going by the official leaks. Likewise, they pulled out a six-year-old report on Anna Hazare from the dusty shelves of Mumbai’s Mantralaya and confronted him with his misdemeanours.

The report, having been kept on the shelves for so long, itself shows the disinterest of the powers-that-be in making any significant anti-corruption moves. It attracted attention only because the dirty tricks department of the Congress was again activated to take on Anna.

Mark each and every statement from Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Salman Khurshid, Manu Singhvi, and more often, the automated mouth of Manish Tewari, the Congress spokesperson, who tends to smirk whenever he makes a point in televised press conferences. It has contempt for public opinion. Let us sum these here:

• You ain’t clean, how dare you stigmatise the elected?

• How dare you then come up to the barricades and proclaim that parliament has to bow to the will of the people? How dare you tell us what to enact into law?

• Your business is just to come to the polling booth every five years and ritualistically vote and be satisfied that you are part of a great democracy.

Recall what Manmohan Singh said recently, just before Parliament commenced its winter session. The Opposition also has skeletons in its cupboard. There is this saying in Hindi, teri bhi chhuppi, meri bhi chhuppi. It was as if he was invoking the silence of co-conspirators.

So the selective arrest of top leaders of the anti-corruption agitation is a deliberate attempt to call their bluff. They ought to know that even if Anna Hazare cannot articulate the finer nuances of the proposed Lokpal bill in the rarefied committee rooms of the government, he can be bull-headed. He can stay the ground.

Should the provocation force the agitation to turn violent, then the detractors have a new whip in their hand. See, you are not even Gandhian; violence is so gauche in a democracy, you have lost all your arguments so you have taken to desperate means. After all the pious talk of democracy, see where you are! So don’t teach us what laws to make.

Should the agitation get out of hand, and the government loses face, it can always turn around and say, yes, we shall make changes in the content of the proposed Lokpal Bill and eat crow for a while. Once that is done, the issue would boil down to its legislation. Select committees can take several sessions of parliament to approve it.

After all, all attempts at a Lokpal law have been aborted in one way or another since the idea first germinated decades ago. The country bore it. It could be persuaded to bear it now as well, with mere promises of a better law. Public memory is short. So is public patience, especially of the middle class, the torchbearers of this campaign led by Anna Hazare.

That is the basis of the orchestration by a dispensation which cannot abandon corruption. It thrives on it.