Anna 038; Baba

And the twain have met with 2014 their deadline. So why dont they come out about their politics?

And the twain have met with 2014 their deadline. So why dont they come out about their politics?

Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev have made some things clearer. In the joint programme of action,or agitation,they announced on Friday,they have publicly pooled their resources and resentments. It wasnt always this way. While the Ramdev machine had,by all accounts,contributed to the success of Annas mobilisation for the Lokpal in Jantar Mantar last April,Anna and his team were conspicuous by their absence from the Ramdev show against black money. Their respective camps have sustained a careful ambiguity about the apparently strained relationship. Now that a convergence of causes has been publicly proclaimed,that curiosity may be laid to rest . Their agitation,said Anna and the Baba,would begin with their separate yatras on May 1 and then stretch through to 2014 when Lok Sabha elections are due. This more relaxed timeline for the Lokpal is welcome and Parliament can now,hopefully,deliberate on the bill without being distracted by the blackmail that so cramped the debate last year.

But even as Fridays joint announcements answered one question,they have stoked another: now that the two have tweaked the timeline to coincide with the electoral cycle,why not cast aside the remaining ambivalence about their political ambitions? Given the trajectory the two mobilisations have taken so far,some might say a disclosure of political interest be it in the form of a party of their own or an open alliance with an existing political formation is in order. In Ramdevs case,a new political outfit was announced in 2010 but he appeared to have been struck by second thoughts,or an RSS diktat,a few months later. Even so,on his stage at the Ramlila grounds in June 2011,sants stood up,one by one,to issue a challenge to all those who question their right as against the netas to manage affairs of the state.

For all their efforts to obfuscate,Team Annas political peeves and aspirations have been no less obvious. They were framed in the RSS-inspired iconography of the Bharat Mata; visible again in Team Annas plunge into the Hisar by-election campaign against the Congress last year. Team Anna was always a curious mix Left,Right,political,apolitical so its too early to say what kind of promise this Anna-Ramdev coalition holds. Both will need to come out of their political closets if they want to be a factor in 2014. Watch this space.