The many failings of Team Anna

Writing in a national daily last week-end, Mr. Arvind Kejriwal insisted that Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign was not “anti-Congress” and that the only intention was to get the Jan Lokpal Bill passed.

In support of this contention, he asserted that the Hisar campaign by some of the “core members” of the team was prompted by the Congress' tardiness about a written promise, given by other parties in support a strong Lok Pal Bill. Had the Prime Minister written to Anna in time, the “campaign would have been avoided”.

Mr Kejriwal also assured the reader that Team Anna would have launched a similar campaign had the BJP been in power at the Centre.

The critical issue here for Mr. Kejriwal is the premise that all corruption flows from the absence of a Jan Lokpal Bill and that it is the UPA alone that can steer it to fruition. He assures us that even if Ms Mayawati were to attempt a strong anti-corruption deterrent she would have been unable to deliver one, since that is the job of the Centre.

Graft Oversimplified

Mr Kejriwal's implicit assertion that all corruption flows from the absence of a strong commitment by the Union government to deal with its perpetrators has a Manichean appeal: the Union government is at fault, and everybody is hurt in the bargain. Its appeal lies in its beguiling simplicity: since the fountainhead of corruption is located in the Union Government, the struggle against that slothful machine unites the good against the bad.

Such an attenuated view of corruption's origins and its resolution — located geographically in Delhi and politically aimed at the UPA alone— turns the struggle into a narrow political battle between two contending powers. Much as Team Anna may consider the struggle as “people's politics” it is so only in the most conventional way: Hisar showed up not the universality of Team Anna members' anti-corruption campaign, but its narrowness.

When efforts at rooting out corruption move strategically to the national capital and collapse into a struggle for a single legislative change, inadvertently they enter the arena of power struggles. That would require an agency equipped to contest the government's claim to power.

Empty discourse

Such a reduction of the anti-corruption struggle from a mass movement's potential to a power struggle's seductive gains, creates its own rules of engagement. This has been evident ever since the mass movement, that began with Anna Hazare's brilliant strategic fast from August 16, ended in a sputter.

It should not have surprised anyone that the UPA has launched its alleged “witch-hunt”, or that core members of the team should have had the unpleasant experience of their linen being washed in the glare of the media. Or that some key members should have raised issues of ego clashes, or hinted at the supreme leader's acquiescence to power politics.

When Mr Kejriwal dismisses the possibility of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh being capable of tackling corruption because of her inability to legislate on the Jan Lok Pal Bill, he is right in the narrow sense of the battle that he and his colleagues are currently engaged in.

But he is profoundly wrong in dismissing her vested power to check corruption at the state level. By ascribing limits to power as Chief Minister in containing the disease of corruption that haunts that state (like so many others), he dismisses the manipulation of office for personal as opposed to collective good at every level of administrative power.

Team Anna's anti-corruption stir, by taking the battle to Delhi and the UPA, has been remarkably silent on the invidious misuse of power by state and village level officials, and on the rampant exploitation of natural resources by commercial capital.

In a media-hyped exercise, Anna Hazare may be called the new Gandhi and his team members may consider themselves in the mould of the father of satyagraha; but they are as far removed from the moral and ethical basis of satyagraha led by Mahatma Gandhi as anyone else in formal Indian politics.

The moral basis and universal appeal of civil disobedience arose from the embrace of abstinence by a whole nation as a strategy of anti-colonialism, apart from the ethical force that Gandhi represented, with his frequent fasts or turns at the charka. The Salt March was the most potent opposition to the Raj's oppressive discourse because it constituted an act of renunciation by the ordinary Indian.

Such an ethics-driven and universalising discourse in opposition to the government is missing in Anna Hazare and more specifically his team members' position against corruption. By restricting the struggle against a pervasive disease to a purely formal attack on the political status quo, the core members have stripped the movement of any semblance of ethics it might have evoked, and, in fact, nullified the the mass movement itself.

Start from the village

Anna Hazare probably recognises such flaws in the team he leads. Which is why reports from Ralegaon Siddhi mentioned a revamp of the core team (a Kamaraj-type plan?), a “constitution” guiding the conduct of core members. Interestingly, this was read out by Mr Kejriwal as Anna Hazare's communiqué. The event was redolent with the symbolism of renunciation: the leader on a vow of silence, one of the “errant” disciples reading out fresh synodal decrees of personal conduct.

Much as Anna Hazare might transmit a message of political cleanliness (narrow and partisan as it is) it will be lost till he seeks out a strategy that takes him away from the convolutions of New Delhi's power politics.

Perhaps, he can take a strategic cue from the Maoists stripped of their violent objectives: start from the weakest “link” in Indian society, the village: That's where the “corruptible seed”, to use Bob Dylan's memorable expression in his song Blind Willie Mctell , takes its biggest toll.