Opinion | Why you may not know that Anna Hazare is on a fast

In some intellectual fields, success occurs when influential people misunderstand a piece of work. Revolutions, too, succeed when they are misunderstood by the right people. Anna Hazare, for instance, could create a public frenzy in the summer of 2011 because of a string of misinterpretations, delusions and naive beliefs within some cabals.

On Thursday, he went on a death-fast again chiefly to coerce politicians into appointing virtuous anti-corruption super babus who will have power over the very people who appointed them. Even if he chooses to actually die rather than drink the orange juice of failure, here are the reasons why Hazare will fail to create an anti-corruption movement a second time.

Now they know him too well in Delhi. You will find it hard to believe this but the fact is that in 2011 when he arrived in Delhi to sit on the death fast, Delhi’s editors had very little knowledge of who exactly Hazare was. They thought he was an endearing and inconsequential old man from rural Maharashtra. They were not aware that he was philosophically closer to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh than to European enlightenment. But this factor, on its own, is not so important. There is something more interesting.

At the time of Hazare’s fast, the top rung of India’s television news was in a moral crisis following the revelation of the Niira Radia tapes, a set of leaked telephone conversations between a lobbyist and public figures that showed some influential journalists as pawns of corporations and the government. Hazare’s “anti-corruption” movement gave powerful journalists an opportunity to posture that they could “speak truth to power”. As a result, Hazare’s movement got the support of both the liberal media and the fledgling other side, leading to a news coverage that was extraordinary and disproportionate to the actual size and scope of the movement during the first 48 hours of what was merely one of Hazare’s many fasts.

Among the journalistic stories that build public perception, some emerge from beat reporters and some from their bosses, the editors. The public perception that the “right to information” was an achievable vital right emerged from reporters who covered a modest semi-urban movement for many months. The public perception that Rahul Dravid is “The Wall”, and that being “The Wall” was a precious talent, did not emerge from lowly sports reporters but from aesthete editors. Usually, the perceptions that emerge from reporters have more substance but the perceptions that editors build are often more powerful. Hazare’s revolution was the creation of editors. But now, too many things have changed for him to be a beneficiary yet again.

In 2011, much of India’s urban middle class was politically naive. It ought to be noted that at the time, in Kerala and West Bengal, where the political faculties of the middle class was highly evolved, the anti-corruption movement made little impact. In those two states, people did not start strutting around in the “I Am Anna” caps and regular citizens did not start spontaneous death fasts of their own. But for other urban Indians, the fast was their first glimpse into a political movement, and they transmitted the revolution through the current of naive passion. Now, the urban middle class is far from naive; it is deeply political.

The fact is that Hazare dislikes the urban upper middle class. In fact, in 2011, the first two days of his revolutionary fast were not merely anti-politician, it was essentially anti-rich. He and his followers lamented that politicians were building roads and airports when farmers were starving. But when Team Anna saw the support of the urban middle class, the anti-corruption movement became a clearly focused movement against politicians.

In that form, it was an anti-Congress movement not only because the Congress was at the helm of the government. In fact, the anti-corruption movement got urban support only because its arch villain was the Congress. In public perception, the Congress party has a monopoly over corruption in a way the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has a monopoly over communal injustice even though all significant political parties in India have been revealed as corrupt and communal. Charges of communal atrocities just don’t stick on the Congress for the same reasons that charges of corruption don’t stick on the BJP. Hazare is going to find out that this time he is suddenly not as contagious as in 2011.

But there is a triumph that the liberal media has won for the Congress in the recent months, which is to show farmers as a distressed community. Once you define someone as a vulnerable group, it is easy to show the BJP as a majoritarian villain. If Hazare’s latest fast was entirely dedicated to the cause of the farmers, he may have greater success.

Hazare may still have succeeded if he had one important quality of Gandhi. Gandhi was a part of the ruling social elite who had to masquerade as a poor man. He could set the agenda. The elite were with him. Hazare is not a part of the contemporary elite. Forget setting the agenda, he was probably used as an employee by a section of the middle class to bring Narendra Modi to power. His true loyal base is the impoverished small farmer.

I do believe though that Hazare does not contest elections for the same reasons as Gandhi—pride presented as disdain for electoral politics. But then the only way to sustain a political movement in India is by accepting that it is political. 

Manu Joseph is a journalist, and a novelist,most recently of ‘Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous’