Congress must learn lessons, not teach Team Anna new ones

Caught on the wrong foot repeatedly during the Anna Hazare movement, the Congress has let loose the hounds on members of Team Anna. It appears to be in unholy hurry to teach them a lesson. The problem is it has not learnt its lessons from the developments over the last few months well. If its action reeked of arrogance and muddled thinking earlier, it swings between the vengeful and the desperate now. While the vengeful part explains itself in the light of the running animosity between both sides, the desperation part appears intriguing. Someone with political common sense would let the dust settle before launching a calculated assault on one’s adversary. Even better, one would try to bury the bitterness, however difficult it is, and gain some PR (public relations) points out of that. But the Congress does not seem to be guided by common sense these days nor is it bothered about its public image. It is consumed by the malicious eagerness to show Team Anna the powers of the state and the party. [caption id=“attachment_76448” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“In the current climate of distrust, any move by the government against Team Anna will be attributed a motive. AFP Photo”]  [/caption] A couple of days after the government slapped a notice on Arvind Kejriwal, asking him to pay up Rs 9.27 lakh for violating bond clauses while going on study leave for two years, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh has charged him with flouting service rules as a serving Indian Revenue Service officer and collecting lakhs of rupees for his NGO through donations. In the current climate of distrust, any move by the government against Team Anna will be attributed a motive. It is a certainty that neither of the charges against Kejriwal would wash with the public, irrespective of whether they are genuine to some degree. It is interesting that senior members of the Congress, who are no novices in the games of trickery, fail to grasp this. Their unreasonable insistence on cutting to size Kiran Bedi and Prashant Bhushan, other members of Team Anna, through parliamentary privilege motions appears aimed at assuaging hurt egos more than anything else. The party has diminished a lot ever since a spate of big ticket scandals surfaced in the last couple of years; it diminished further due to its inept handling of the Anna movement. Now it does not care. It’s either too arrogant to see the reality or too incapable of accepting public humiliation with some show of grace. A misplaced sense of heroism seems to have consumed the members of Team Anna. Their continuing combativeness, even after the heartening developments in Parliament, is confounding. They still look confused between the government and Parliament. All the members, including the venerable Anna Hazare, have been busy calling people names over the last week. Anna called the Centre a ‘government of fools’ and Chidambaram a ’liar and a cheat’. He has threatened that the civil society would go on war path if the government did not mend its ways. Kiran Bedi has asserted that she is not sorry about her comments on parliamentarians, and promised to re-enact her ghoongta skit before Parliament if required. Kejriwal maintains his confrontational tone in all his interactions with the media. Is it the sense of disappointment speaking out? Despite all claims of triumph in the media, Team Anna would be nursing the hurt that in reality it has achieved little in terms of its original goals. In hindsight, the government did not give up as much as it had expected. That the Jan Lokpal Bill was put on an equal footing with four other bills would be hurting too. The only success of the team – a significant one though — was to force Parliament to accept its suggestions. With all parties looking equally bad, the government did not have much to lose. With neither side relenting on attacking the other, both end up looking ugly. Moreover, it is pointless at this juncture. Team Anna should be focusing on a renewed mobilisation for other worthy causes. It has done its bit for the Lokpal Bill; it should look beyond it. The government must focus on other business and stop looking more and more stupid by its actions on Team Anna. It’s time for a truce, ceasefire at least.