Opinion The making of a hero

If the ministers who dealt with Anna and his committee had made their valid doubts about the bill public,it is possible that his supporters may have understood what the problem was. But,in keeping with the general philosophy of the UPA government,they remained secretive. In the past week,I must have called five senior ministers to try and understand why the government had arrested Anna and his aides and only one called me back for a very brief conversation.

Being elusive is this government’s leitmotif. Its main leaders,Sonia and Rahul Gandhi,rarely deign to talk to mere mortals and the Prime Minister follows their lead. Last week,at the height of the Anna crisis,there was a brief sighting of Rahul in Delhi,but he appeared only to vanish again to be next sighted in a remote village in Maharashtra. Was the police firing that took him there really more important than the thousands of middle class youths rallying to Anna’s call and marching through the streets of Delhi shouting Vande Mataram?

Anna’s movement may not succeed in reducing corruption but it has awakened a constituency that not just Rahul Gandhi but most of our political class has completely ignored. Urban,middle class people who see a total disconnect between themselves and government. They blame this on corruption because whenever they encounter an official or a policeman to ask for some legitimate service,they are nearly always forced to bribe them. They think this is only because they are powerless citizens but do not realise that the only difference between them and rich businessmen is that those who have more money are forced to pay more in bribes.

One of my main objections to Anna’s movement is that his aides are leftists of almost loony proportions who believe that anyone who has made money in India,is a crook. They repeat,ad nauseum,in their television interviews that there would be no corruption in India,if there had not been economic reforms in 1991. It is a ridiculous and dangerous charge but Anna’s middle class supporters seem not to notice that they themselves may not have existed in such large numbers without the economic reforms. In the old,socialist days,middle class Indians were so insignificant that politicians could not be bothered to woo them as a constituency. Most of our political class remains stuck in that time warp which is why the seething rage of urban,middle class Indians went unnoticed till Anna came along.

We now have the BJP trying to piggyback on Anna’s movement but the Congress Party remains confused and uncertain of what to do next. If there had been even a handful of alert,political managers in Rahul Gandhi’s stratosphere,they would have advised him to go to Tihar jail to persuade Anna to negotiate instead of packing him off,yet again,to some village. And,speaking of villages,may I suggest that Anna’s ardent,young supporters make a field trip to his village,Ralegan Siddhi,to see if the kind of lifestyle he considers perfect would really suit them. He is known to severely punish those who drink and to strongly disapprove of creature comforts of any kind. He once banned his village from watching television and is proud of having made the village temple his home for most of the years of his life. Is this the ‘corruption-free’ India,young,urban Indians want?

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh