India makes do with 'sense of victory' from 'sense of House' resolution

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday what Anna himself called a “half-victory” has now been upgraded to a full-fledged slam-dunk triumph of “people power.” Arvind Kejriwal, playing the opening act to Anna Hazare’s much awaited sip of coconut water and honey, made it clear that victory was a big tent with plenty of room for everyone (except perhaps Swami Agnivesh). [caption id=“attachment_71686” align=“alignleft” width=“435” caption=“India is celebrating a sense of victory. Reuters”]  [/caption] He thanked among others – the youth, the volunteers, the Art of Living folks, the parliament, B.R. Ambedkar, the doctors, the Delhi police, the media, the netalog. Yesterday’s villains were all touched by Anna’s magic wand and rehabilitated, given a virtual hug in a heartwarming show of national reconciliation. And the media has played along with the victory parade because every great fight needs its grand finale and who wants be the party pooper? Television led the way with the banner headlines proclaiming “People power triumphs.” The Times of India gushed in all caps: ANNA WINS IT FOR THE PEOPLE The Hindustan Times enthused: PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY One of the few to rain on the parade, at least on its front page, was The Asian Age. Its front page had a more sobering assessment of the face-off and its ultimate dénouement: Anna Sees Reality. It points out that what Anna got finally was a “sense of the House” resolution, a curious creature that promised little except that a standing committee would look at the feasibility of his team’s demands. “If we accept Anna’s demands and make a law, then it will be beyond the Constitution and declared ultra vires by the Supreme Court,” said BSP MP Satish Chandra Mishra. People power is good for toppling leaders like a Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Law making though is inherently less dramatic. It’s all about quibbling over arcane details. For example, will the inclusion of the lower bureaucracy in the Lokpal cover Class IV employees as well? That’s not an issue that will be, or should be, decided on the Ramlila grounds. Yet ultimately it was sticking points like these that were made out to be the only things that stood in the way of Anna and his coconut water. It was not so much what was in Anna’s three demands. It was really that there needed to be three demands that both sides could point to in declaring an end to the face-off. We won’t get the satisfaction of seeing a Mubarak fall. That was not what this fight was about. Instead we all got to gather around the straw men of those three demands, demands that most of us never really knew about when he embarked on his fast, but which somehow over the course of 13 days had been elevated to some kind of hallowed status by the media with its drumbeat of “Team Anna’s three demands.” Thirteen days ago when Anna had embarked on his fast, if he had told us he would be holding out until he got a “sense of the House” resolution about the standing committee “considering” the possibility of a Lokpal like Lokayukta in every state, we would have scratched our heads in confusion. Now by a sort of mutual agreement we all pretended to ignore that what we are wrapping up as a grand victory for the people was something as vague as a “sense of the House” resolution. Parliament, to its credit, offered it up as a face-saving moment, for itself, the media and Team Anna. And we took it, because having hyped it, built it up and jumped on the back of the people’s revolution Duranto express, we all needed a way to get off. The media is already starting to move on to its usual game after any big showdown – identifying the winners and losers. Sandeep Dikshit, we are told raised his profile from being “the low profile jholawala MP son” to a “key interlocutor,” one of the first Congress MPs to publicly criticize Anna’s arrest. (Of course, Dikshit’s own mother is fighting off charges of corruption from the Commonwealth games). Kiran Bedi, after her bizarre dance of the keffiyeh, was quickly sidelined. Pranab Mukherjee gets to be statesman as does Arun Jaitley. T.N. Seshan came back from the cold. Manmohan Singh, yesterday’s has-been prime minister is now credited for overruling the party’s hardliners. That might be cold comfort to the PM. His party and his government might have survived this battle but has taken mortal wounds in the larger war. It might not recover in time for 2014, especially since its favoured son who “broke his silence” with such fanfare in Parliament, showed himself to have maximum force and minimum charisma. The Congress obviously didn’t realize that the nation’s attention was on an old man breaking his fast, not a young Gandhi scion breaking his silence. But the question remains who really won and who really lost? Perhaps it does not matter. In a messy democracy, amidst the media chorus, perhaps what we all need is a “sense of victory.” It’s good enough for now, at least as good as a “sense of the House” resolution.