This morning, newspapers announced that Mr. Anna Hazare has decided to campaign against Congress in the upcoming assembly polls in five states. The only way Congress can avoid this fate worse than death is by hastily agreeing to pass Anna’s version of the Lokpal bill, it seems. Anna, being a reasonable man, has told Congress that unless it (Congress) gives a lekhi (written) undertaking before Dusshera that it would pass Anna’s bill he’ll make good his threat, nay, promise. Dusshera, as any Indian looking forward to a long weekend would know, is tomorrow. It would be interesting to see what kind of tizzy Congress gets into over this ultimatum.
If Anna lives up to his promise, it would perhaps be a first in the post-independence Indian politics. I could be wrong but I have not come across any negative poll campaign so far. True, in the heat of elections, candidates have called each other names, have physically beaten each other up and, on (thankfully) rare occasions, even killed each other. However, no organised campaign – or, anti-campaign – has ever taken place. Congress and BJP have always campaigned with the main aim of winning elections for themselves. Even in Tamilnadu, DMK and ADMK, two of the bitterest groups of political antagonists, have always campaigned to win, rather than defeat the other. Defeat of the other is only a positive by-product. As such, to this extent, Anna would be a pioneer. Whether the electorate would pay heed to what is essentially ‘negative politics’, is anybody’s guess.
In the corporate world, there’s an un-written rule; when you go out to sell your stuff, you do not bad-mouth your competition. This rule has not come about due to ethics, as pious corporate honchos would like us to believe. This is simply because, the corporate world has found out – the hard way – that this is good strategy. In a sales meeting, if one talks only about how bad, abominable, uncouth, inefficient and useless is competition, its offering, its representative, it is bound to make the listener feel sympathy for the target of this tirade. We humans, at the atavistic level, are incorrigible champions of underdogs. This fact is yet to dawn upon Anna’s followers / handlers.
I am, for myself, hoping that Anna does make good his threat. The main reason is, in today’s greed filled and below-the-belt politics, the only assured positive take-home is mirth. When Anna, and his band of brothers (and sisters), wade full force into the deceptively smooth waters that are the domain of libel and slander laws, I am sure it will result in a fount of comic situations. However, my feeling is, Congress is not up to the challenge. It has guilt on its mind. A guilty person always tries to err on the side of safety – excessively so. I fear that’s what will happen. It’s not for no reason that Anna in Kannada (borrowed by Marathi) means big-brother or bhai.
Another question that begs to be answered is, does this move prove that Anna is being handled? Is he and his are so drunk on what they perceive to be success that they are turning arrogant? For, arrogance there is, no doubt, in Anna’s pronouncement. Arrogance, as we have seen hundreds of times before, invariably leads to denouement of the worse kind.
In spite of the attempts of a certain Nirmala Seetharaman of BJP to make political capital out of Anna’s pronouncement, it would be facile to see BJP’s hidden hand in Anna’s threat. Apart from the fact that BJP is rather flat-footed, just one look at Anna’s caucus makes it clear that Left is trending there. If it weren’t apparent, Arvind Kejriwal put all doubts to rest in a recent interview to Outlook magazine. Answering a question about ideological inclinations, he said ‘Our core team consists of 25 people and most of them are left of centre’. In effect, whatever success Anna and co meets, it would be very substantially guided by left(of centre)ists. Very clearly, that substantial part of Indian population of ‘non-left-of-centre’ persuasions has to be happy with the wooden spoon.
My guess is, Anna, one of the true remaining Gandhians, would not have knowingly agreed to any political ideology – left, right or centre – usurping his pure anti-corruption campaign. It makes me wonder, has he really understood that he’s surrounded by leftists – albeit of not very acute angles?.
Another thing that intrigues me is the support that Anna gets from Bollywood, India’s most prolific and least regulated money making machine. Main actors, character actors, extras, directors (led by a particularly vocal famous director – on Twitter), producers, singers and all the way down to the boys that carry reflectors, seem unanimous in their support for Anna. (The only – unintended – exception is Salman Khan, who, while announcing his unflinching support for Anna, had Anna’s supporters thrashed by his bodyguards! That, in my opinion, was absolute original thinking). While I can understand the extras and the prop boys supporting Anna (they are at the bottom of the Bollywood food chain), I cannot see any ideological reason for the Bollywoodians to be Anna friendly. Those who come from the theatre perhaps have some meaningful logic for supporting Anna but, as for the mainstream Bollywood, I am inclined to believe that supporting Anna is a curious mixture of fad and the follow-the-winner tendency.
In addition to threatening Congress, Anna has also announced a ‘limited’ fast. Indian Express quotes him as saying ‘I will go on a hunger strike for four days, starting three days before the Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh. It will be at Lucknow and only with the intention of appealing to voters in Uttar Pradesh to defeat the Congress’. Now, what good is a limited fast? Everyone, including Congress, knows that he’ll resume his regular food intake after those four days. Narendra Modi tried it and ended with a lot of stomach cramps and nothing much else. There’s simply no sting in such fasts. What makes Anna believe that he’ll move people with something as lame as that?
A necessary fall out of this latest Anna salvo would be, all our worthy 24 hour news channels will tie themselves in knots. at least for a day now (till the end of the Dusshera deadline), we are likely to hear nothing but Anna. Poor Anna might feel like Jim Carrey in Truman Show. I only wish even the movie channels follow suit and show Christopher Reeve’s Anna Karenina of 1985, it has been a long time since I saw this classic.
