Team Anna remains trapped in its old ways, repeating many of the same mistakes that have been its undoing in the past.
Charges of Team Anna‘s RSS affiliations are not new. The latest Open magazine cover story, however, claims to have uncovered the proverbial smoking gun – on the campaign trail in Uttar Pradesh. Open reporter Dhirendra Jha followed Kiran Bedi, Manish Sisodia, Sanjay Singh, and Gopal Rai on a two-day, four-stop leg earlier this month. India Against Corruption has strongly refuted the Open story, and many of its claims.
Jha’s report from the ground offers some eyebrow-raising evidence. But is it sufficient to damn Team Anna? [We highly recommend you check out both the article and the IAC response to make your call.]
The Open article, titled BJP’s Team B, presents three pieces of evidence.
One, the organisers. Three of the four rallies were organised by known local leaders with RSS affiliations. For example, the meeting in Barbanki was put together by Rakesh Kumar Premil, “a prominent member of the local unit of the Sangh Parivar” known for “his aggressive Hindutva ideology.” Volunteers were drawn mostly from RSS-leaning NGOs as was much of the audience, which included teachers and students of various branches of the RSS-run Saraswati Shishu Mandir.
The one exception was the rally in Faizabad which was organised by Left and Dalit political activists, and included local Muslim leaders.
IAC response: “Our Fatehpur rally at Barabanki was coordinated by Dr Sajjan Lal Verma, who has been associated with the IAC movement since 5 April last year. Also, we don’t know any Ram Kumar Yadav, as mentioned by the reporter. Rakesh Kumar Premil has no association with the RSS or the BJP. However, Premil runs an NGO, Manav Utkarsha Sewa Sansthan, was part of the organising team. Gonda coordinator Dilip Shukla is a lecturer at Lal Bahadur Degree College, Gonda.”
PTI
My take: This may well be a matter of opportunism, for the lack of a better word. Team Anna does not have independent resources on the ground in UP. They relied on whoever offered to put the show together, be it the RSS, independent, or Dalit/Left activists.
Two, the rhetoric. Jha suggests that Anna’s vow not to campaign for or against any specific party was honoured merely in form not in spirit:
Though members of the Team asserted that they had not come to tell voters who they should vote for, their categorical attack on “corruption” in the Congress, “criminalisation” of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and “misgovernance” by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and high praise for the BJP government in Uttarakhand for bringing in a “really strong Lokayukta Bill” in the state left no doubt in the minds of listeners who they were being asked to vote to the new UP Assembly.
While Team Anna was tougher on the BJP in Faizabad – as a concession to their hosts, Jha claims – they never mentioned the party’s scandals in Karnataka or the issue of communalism, either in connection to Ayodhya or Gujarat.
IAC response: Their press release doesn’t address the issue except to say: “The coordinator of Faizabad rally was Gopal Krishna and he is well known for his criticism for any political party specially BJP.” This doesn’t refute the claims with regard to the other rallies.
My take: The UP campaign offers an excellent opportunity for the leadership to unveil a strong anti-corruption, non-partisan strategy – and refurbish its credentials as true mass movement. Hisar tarnished the movement with allegations of an anti-Congress bias and raised questions about its neutrality. Being soft on any one party is a critical mistake, and shows that Team Anna hasn’t learnt the lessons of Hisar.
It also points to the inherent dangers of running a campaign that relies on the largesse of others. Such dependence inevitably defines what can or cannot be said on the dais.
Three, the 13-point ‘letter of oath’. This is a pamphlet distributed among rally attendees as part of the voter awareness campaign. Some of the ‘points,’ as Jha points out, are just plain silly and unrealistic. For example, some points ask voters to get their candidates to promise that they will never sit in an AC room, travel in a luxury car, or keep a driver (also: to remove ACs from their homes).
More surprising is this:
The first pledge in the ‘letter of oath’, quoting Swami Vivekanand, invokes an idea of India that today only the RSS will endorse: ‘…that I am a citizen of India and every citizen is my brother. Indians are my life and Indian gods and goddesses my divinities. India and its society are the swing of my childhood, the garden of my youth, my sacred heaven and the Kashi of my old age. The soil of India is my highest heaven. My welfare lies in the welfare of India. And this whole life I will chant, day and night—O, Gaurinath, O, Jagdambe, make me more humane and take away my weaknesses and unmanliness.’
Jha rightly points out that the language is exclusionary and unlikely to appeal to anyone except a certain segment of Hindu voters. Hell, the reference to “unmanliness” even excludes women.
IAC response: “Even the reporter alleged that a 13-point ‘letter of oath’ was being distributed during the public meeting at Barabanki. IAC is surprised to learn such false claims through this magazine ‘OPEN’. Whatever official literature we distribute is always made available only on our website. During UP election campaign the handbills that we are distributing are focused on our forthcoming programmes called ‘Discussion Group’.”
My take: Jha doesn’t offer any evidence that the oath was indeed the brain-child of the Hazare movement. It may well have been created and distributed by one of the local groups. In Chandigarh, for example, the local Hazare organiser has condemned an anti-corruption pledge circulated by the NGO Awaaz, claiming it has no connection with the Hazare movement. But it is puzzling that neither the IAC or the local Barabanki organisers have not issued any such strong statement regarding the 13-point oath. I doubt if Jha was just making that up.
It’s hard to tell – without detailed knowledge of local politics and leaders – whether the evidence in Open is as damning as its writer claims. To the layperson, it reads like a he said/he said situation. But what is clear – at least to me – is that Team Anna remains trapped in its old ways, repeating many of the same mistakes that have been its undoing in the past. As a wise man (either Albert Einstein or Ben Franklin, depending on the source) once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”