No middle ground?

Once Anna Hazare had been taken into preventive custody early on Tuesday morning,government spokespersons laboured hard the rest of the day to take the sting off charges of dictatorial arbitrariness coming their way. These arguments,predictably,found little purchase in the sporadic demonstrations that broke out across the metros in support of Hazare and among non-UPA political parties,who stalled Parliament before their leaders went into a huddle to chalk out a future course of action. They demanded a statement in both Houses by the prime minister.

If the Central government looks outmanoeuvred for now,it need only recap its missteps to see why. Because,how did the debate shift from an assertion of Parliaments democratic sovereignty in law-making to what Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar called,in a feat of wild exaggeration,a rehearsal for emergency? The first misstep,of course,was the governments capitulation this April,when it met the arbitrariness of Team Annas demand on setting Parliaments legislative agenda by arbitrarily assigning membership of the drafting committee for the Lokpal bill. It was,as has become evident these past days,always going to be a fragile truce. It was,more importantly,one that shifted the government away from the middle ground. Instead of rationalising the rules of membership,the government put five of its own and five of Hazares on the panel. Team Anna was not looking to be co-opted. But it revealed the nerviness at the heart of government about meeting a crisis with action based on reasoned argument a nerviness that the opposition is now trying to exploit by stressing its demand for a free-wheeling debate in Parliament. The wobbliness in Hazares demand that his version of the Lokpal bill be passed,or else,was that it sought to undermine the legislature,and thereby the Constitutions delicate balance that underwrites Indias parliamentary democracy. Yet the government has been less than artful,engaged or responsive to meet that challenge by doing its bit to assert Parliaments unique place in the scheme of the Constitution. It has failed to initiate debates on the subjects of the day,and it has failed to initiate the transactions of give-and-take with the opposition on productively setting an agenda for the session.

There is a lesson from the pointlessness of the confrontations this new turn in the Hazare agitation has provoked,and it is this: the Congress,as the party leading a coalition at the Centre,cannot get on by dicing its plan of action into neat capsules. Progress will not come through arbitrariness,whether in taking up political causes in the states without considering the larger implications or in engaging with civil activists of ones liking by bypassing institutional norms.