With every breath he takes, Ramdev has Congress choking

At 5 am on Tuesday, Baba Ramdev, having spent the night at Ambedkar Stadium, asked his followers, who were camped there following their “detention” on Monday, to practice kapalbhati and anulom vilom yoga techniques. It could be mistaken for just another summer day beginning with the deep breathing and meditation regimen that Ramdev and his followers practice wherever they may be. Except that today, each lungful of air that is being taken in is laced with the toxicity of Delhi politics. And even though Baba Ramdev doesn’t say it in so many words, he is effectively employing the inhalation-exhalation process as a metaphor to arouse the political consciousness of his followers. The subliminal message that Baba Ramdev is conveying to his followers is that just as the body extracts life-sustaining elements from the air that it takes in and rejects all that is harmful to it, the body politic of today must also be cleansed. And the toxic element that he wants his followers to reject is the Congress, the party that has, in the popular estimation, done nothing about the countless suggestions that have been advanced to retrieve black money from foreign shores. [caption id=“attachment_416537” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  Ignoring Baba Ramdev has not worked for the Congress. AP[/caption] The Congress, he says, is the fount of corruption. And just as even the mighty Ganga will be polluted if Gangotri, the source, isn’t cleansed, the entire political ecosystem can be cleansed only by throwing out the Congress, he reasons. For all the nebulousness of Ramdev’s earlier claim to leading a non-political movement, that message has provided the platform for every non-Congress opposition party to come together to nudge the fragile UPA government and cause it to collapse under the weight of its own frailties. On Monday, Baba Ramdev demonstrated widespread political support for his cause, with leaders of the opposition NDA overcoming their inhibition and sharing the platform with him at Ramlila Maidan before he set out in the evening for Parliament. Janata Paty leader Subramanian Swamy gave a stirring speech in which he framed the political discourse as the “battle between Om and Rome”, an allusion to Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origin. Even leaders of parties that are notionally the ruling UPA’s allies have articulated their support for the cause of retrieving black money from overseas. The Congress has predictably taken comfort from claiming that Baba Ramdev’s  political posture has exposed him as the mask for the BJP that it has always claimed him to be. But the party is manifestly in a dilemma about how to respond to the challenge that Ramdev poses today. After their experience last year, when Congress leaders’ efforts to appropriate Baba Ramdev in their campaign to undercut the Anna Hazare-led movement backfired on them, they have been more circumspect this year. In their estimation, their hands-off approach to the Anna Hazare campaign this year has succeeded to the extent that Team Anna has been disbanded, and the movement has had to consider metamorphosing into a political party. Congress leaders reckoned that a similar aloof approach to Baba Ramdev’s fast would also see popular support for his cause wither away. But far from imploding, the Ramdev campaign has gathered even greater force - and garnered political support from unlikely quarters.  The Baba himself remains defiant, and  on Tuesday morning, he said that the government may seek to evict him from the Ambedkar Stadium. “Today is a crucial day,” he said. He is calling upon even more of his supporters to come to Ambedkar Stadium to join him in his campaign . There is even talk that Baba Ramdev might stay on until tomorrow, which is Independence Day, and hoist the tricolour at the Ambedkar Stadium Given that Delhi Police is keen to see Ramdev off ahead of the Independence Day celebrations, for which they have to unroll security measures at Red Fort, some kind of a confrontation appears inevitable today. It is this that has the Congress in a dilemma. Last year’s experience of hounding out Baba Ramdev by lathicharging his supporters recoiled badly on the government. Today, the political atmosphere is even more volatile  - and Ramdev appears to enjoy wider political support. The government’s record of inaction against corruption and its failure to initiate efforts to retrieve black money stand exposed even more glaringly. Any precipitate action on the part of the government would have far greater political repercussions today. Thus far with his latest campaign, Ramdev has remained one step ahead of the political curve.  With every breath that he takes at Ambedkar Stadium, he is effectively leaving the Congress gasping for breath.