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ADMIRERS and supporters of the Anna Hazare-led movement against corruption must today be a worried lot. The heady days of the Ramlila grounds fast and rally which drew unprecedented support from a wide cross-section of the citizenry, aided no doubt by somewhat frenzied (and partisan?) 24/7 media coverage, eventually resulting in a climb down by an obdurate, if not arrogant, government, and their major demands taken on board for consideration by the select committee drafting the Lokpal legislation, now appear somewhat distant. Clearly, both the Anna team and the movement seem to be floundering, unclear about their strategy as they wait for the Lokpal Bill to be placed for consideration in the winter session of Parliament.

In part, this is not surprising; it is never easy to sustain high-voltage protest activity over long periods of time. Now that the select committee is seized of the issue, many supporters feel that it would be churlish to keep on accusing the government of bad faith, more so because, unlike in the past, most government spokespersons are currently being circumspect in their pronouncements, not proving easy targets for ridicule.

What, however, has created greater dismay in the ranks of the faithful is the somewhat intemperate behaviour of key members of the campaign, including Anna Hazare, considerably dulling their sheen. Few votaries of a tough anti-corruption law are equally enthusiastic about the attempt of the Anna team to widen the terrain of engagement and struggle, making high-sounding statements about referendums and right to recall elected representatives as central to electoral-political reform, as also wading into contentious economic policy arenas. The decision of some team members to intervene in the recent by-election in Hissar, calling upon voters to reject the Congress candidate, has also troubled those uneasy with a party-political stance. And though the Congress candidate lost, claiming the result as a ‘victory’ for the movement appears stretched. Worse, it resulted in two key members of the Anna team, Rajendra Singh and P.V. Rajagopal, disaffiliating themselves.

The greater blow, however, to the credibility and cohesiveness of the Anna team is the airing of differences between Prashant Bhushan and Anna Hazare over the former’s reported support to the idea of a referendum over the status of Jammu and Kashmir. It is no one’s case that all key members of a broad front/movement against corruption must share an ideological understanding of diverse issues and concerns. Prashant Bhushan has long been a strong critic of heavy-handed government action and policies, including in J&K. Anna Hazare, evidently, is a votary of a hard ‘nationalist’ position which supports tough action in the troubled valley. But his public denunciation of Prashant Bhushan’s position, in effect questioning his ‘patriotic’ credentials, is indicative of a divide that may prove too difficult to bridge.

Sceptics and critics of the Hazare-led movement are expectedly gleeful, pleased that the moralistic posturing is coming unstuck. They point out that they had long warned the gullible supporters about the ‘credentials’ of key actors; that the movement had a ‘hidden agenda’; and that had it not been for the clumsy handling of the agitation by an inept government, the movement would never have acquired the significance that it did. Political theorist, Jyotirmaya Sharma, writing in Mail Today (17 October 2011) goes further, accusing Hazare of being ‘no democrat in the sense the word "democracy" is normally understood’, ‘ that his model of rule, governance and statecraft is that of undiluted paternalism’, that Hazare is ‘medieval in outlook’, someone who ‘divides people into friends and foes and proceeds to pass moral structures against his foes’ – in short, a leader of ‘banal Hindutva’ whose actions damage Indian democracy.

Whatever the merits of this analysis, an obsessive focus on Hazare should not blind us from seeking to understand and debate the deeper, underlying problems with the extant imagination and practice of our model of social democracy and its disempowering impact on common citizens. The signs have been visible for some time, not just in the growing inequality and joblessness, but also the unprecedented concentration of power in an unholy coalition of political, corporate and bureaucratic elites who, despite protests, continue to pretend that nothing has changed. More than just a problem of lax regulation, we need to understand the hollowing out of our institutions of representation and governance and the growing trust deficit between elected representatives and the people. Hazare and his team may well be limited in their imagination and their ‘movement’ may well peter out. But, unless our elites seriously introspect and initiate moves for self-correction, we are likely to experience more such upsurges. And these, whether or not transformatory, may prove more difficult to contain.

Harsh Sethi