Anna Party?

As its latest version plays out,some unhappy features of the Anna movement seem more distinct than before and,going by the thinning crowds at Jantar Mantar,they are also taking their toll on the mobilisation. An over-reliance on weapons of last resort,such as the indefinite fast. The apocalyptic tenor of discourse. An excessive focus on individuals,with a too-neat sorting of us versus them. A shifting of goalposts is Team Annas primary target the Lokpal or the SIT probe into the 15 politicians on its hit list? And,most of all,a tiresome ambiguity about its political ambitions. Of course,the cultivated political fuzziness has always provided only a thin cover for Team Annas ambitions to lay the Congress low. From the beginning,the mobilisation has targeted the party more than the government: it plunged into the Hisar campaign against the Congress and has,at various times,lent its stage to RSS-style messages and imagery. But now the time may have come for Team Anna to make a voluntary disclosure of political interest.

Hazare has indicated that Team Anna may be readying to come out politically. He has acknowledged that the fast and the protest may be losing their popularity and has spoken about the need to shore up a political alternative. But a more full-throated acknowledgement of political ambition may be the call of the moment,if Team Anna has to recapture the interest of its dwindling audience. It is not just for its own sake,however,that Team Anna needs to reinvent itself by shedding the hypocrisy of political neutrality. It must also do so because in a democracy,there is only one legitimate way to test claims of representativeness of the kind Team Anna has been making all along.

Its been a long and noisy journey for this band of campaigners and one lesson must hopefully be clear to them by now: for all its shortcomings and closures,politics is the arena that encompasses Indias diversities and also ensures a modicum of accountability. Team Anna may have to take on the hard labour of politics if it wants to move on from here. After all,the returns from high-voltage anti-corruption spectaculars are diminishing.