ANNA - CHECK & MATE?
When parliament passed the resolution on the Lokpal bill last August the mood of the whole nation was upbeat. The visual media shouted victory for Anna, picking every small piece of loose information, dissecting and presenting it as a grave misdeed of the ruling party. From the silence of the prime minister to every comment by his ministers was used to dampen the image of the chief party of the ruling coalition. What they failed to read was that every move on the part of the government could have been a well maneuvered move of a game of chess that shrewd rulers often played. It was akin to the games that the corporate world played quite routinely when dealing with aggressive unions.
With the government burdened with cases of corruption against its ministers, the group of civil society timed their move perfectly last April. All they needed was a face to their movement. Anna Hazare fitted the billboard perfectly. To substantiate, the uninitiated to see Kissa Kursi Ka, a movie of the Emergency era that showed how an illiterate non-entity became the prime minister of the country. Whenever frustration crossed a certain breaking point, people would accept anybody with the slightest credentials to lead them.
Since graft was something that everybody suffered from, it was not unusual for the movement to fire the peoples’ imagination particularly the idealistic youth. It did not matter what the Jan Lokpal Bill said. The elite and the intelligentsia who came out to support were not the kind that could be dealt with a little bit of police high-handedness. Realizing the awakening of the middle class, the government diffused the immediate situation as soon as it could.
My opinion of the main party was that it was a very shrewd one that kept all its cards to itself. Having been at the helm of affairs during almost every major crisis in the country over more than a hundred years, it has mastered the skills to handle virtually every situation. The government’s invitation to Anna to discuss the anti-corruption bill that gave a feeling that it had gauged the will of the people was merely a tactical withdrawal. Actually it needed time to assess the whole situation and buy some time for itself. As Anna was not the author of the bill, he was accompanied by his team, a set of disgruntled ex-government officials with an axe to grind with the party in power, and a couple of eminent lawyers.
There were nine meetings and the media reports were replete with many ambiguities. The more we read about them the more it appeared to be a charade being routinely enacted by the government representatives. I had seen similar meetings with the union before in the organization I worked, as a prelude to an impending strike by the workers; this time the players were the self-appointed civil society representatives of the middle class and the government. These meetings were held only to gauge the merits in Team Anna’s case. The public spats with the civil society members were merely diversionary methods, used to judge the mood of the people, which was far from amicable. What we were actually witnessing was the initial of pawn moves in a chess game. From the transcripts of taped recordings of the meetings it was clearly evident that the government had no intention to accept what has come to be known as Anna’s Jan Lokpal bill. Nevertheless, the political class did realize that the time for the Lokpal Bill had indeed come. Only its ultimate form remained to be decided.
Now, no one in the political dispensation wanted to lose their privileges curtailed through a Lokpal Bill. Nor did they want to be seen on the wrong side of the people they represented. No wonder that every political party, including the main opposition one, remained non-committal and waited on the sidelines like vultures. With no inputs coming even from its allies, the government chose to present the bill in its weakest form to the parliament. Even if it had intentions to ultimately present a stronger Lokpal, it made sure that it would make everybody sweat and commit to it. What was slowly emerging was the truth that we have always suspected. All the parties fought bitterly in public but they were all together behind the curtains.
Come August 16 and history began to unfold in a different way. Anna Hazare stuck to his guns to go on a fast till his demands to hold the all the three pillars of our governance, namely, the politician, judiciary and the bureaucrat responsible for their action. What followed was something that had never happened neither in this country nor anywhere else in the world ever before. Even the Jasmine Spring paled before Anna’s violence free movement. If the government erred in arresting Anna, it made up by the police refraining from being high-handed. The baton was visibly missing. Errors of judgments by managements was not unusual but good managements always had follow up plans of correction on course, a forty percent correct decisions being considered as efficient.
Nothing happened between the two sets of peoples’ elected and unelected representatives for almost a week except for some feeble attempts to make Anna break his fast. The scene was similar to the events when there was a strike for the first time in our organization and the management and the union leaders went into a deadlock. The road to reconciliation only commenced when the workers began to feel the pressure of being without work began to tell. The difference was that while there was no time frame to end a union strike, here the deadline was Anna’s health.
To add to the government’s headache, the media built up a crescendo painting it as the only villain in the whole act. In any case, media always projected an image that it aired only what it felt that people wanted to hear, so much so that it was accused of being undemocratic itself. If some government representatives were hardliners well so were at least two of the civil society members. The difference was that the former were called arrogant and the latter barely aggressive. For every to and fro movements in the back channel talks, it was the government that was projected to be taking a hard line stance. No corporate management gave in easily either. The discussions went to such an extreme that government representatives suggested even the media to be under the Lokpal bill!
Nevertheless, one must give the media its due. Wittingly or unwittingly, it became a forum educating the viewer about things that they might never have learnt in a political science class in Cambridge, Stanton, Harvard or any IIM. Out of the chaos a pattern of sense was emerging. For the first time in our history the phrase ‘We the People’ of the Indian constitution is being interpreted with the same intellectual vigor as ‘Call me Ismail,’ in Moby Dick in a literature class. The Parliament was supreme in making laws but not the parliamentarians. We were also beginning to learn how intricately our forefathers had compiled our constitution and how the role of every area of area of governance was defined. People learnt the difference between the role of a statutory body or a parliamentary committee, and why it took such a long time to make a law. Nor did one know that the government took the views of all the parties, both at the center and the states, before incorporating a law and the sense of the federal independence of the states and a lot more.
Any corporate execute would tell you that whenever you went into discussions with any ruling government, you had to be prepared to make concessions. Every intelligent union leader knows this and so does every management. Both will leave a maneuverable space for each other to save face in case of crisis. At the end of the day both needed the workers for their ends. If there was one grave error on the part of Team Anna, it was to insist that the Lokpal bill had to be what they presented in full. By doing so they left no room for the government and a negotiation turned into confrontation. The other mistake it made was that by giving it a middle class brand, a large population of the lower segment of society felt alienated.
By the second week of Anna’s fast it was realized that he was made of tougher material than the yoga gurus of the modern age. That gave more time to the government. While the media and the press were drilling it for its ineptitude, it was actually more in control than Team Anna. The fatigued crowds could become restive and easily get out of hand. By now other intellectuals had put their foot into the door with the media and were giving their opinions as well. Very soon the imperfections of Anna’s bill began to show. What made Team Anna think that only they could come up with the most perfect law? It would be years before the efficacy of the Lokpal bill could be known. A government could be held responsible for making a bad law that could be amended. Who was Team Anna responsible to if its version of the bill turned out to be a bad one?
The belated support to Anna by the political opposition did little to dent the government’s image. A new set of players were brought in by it. It was time for the middle game on the chess board. The pawn game was taken over by bishops, knights and castles. The civil society knew that they were now fighting for time. The slightest sign of serious deterioration to Anna’s health would give the government reason to remove him from the Ramlila grounds. Other backdoor channels were opened. When the Prime Minister finally broke his silence to begin the debate on the bill in the parliament, it was like a corporate CEO taking the final call to end a strike. Members of parliament gave some of the best speeches heard in the long time. Every speaker admitted the failure of political parties to the people. Meanwhile behind the scene parleys continued. The end game of chess shifted to the queens with both kings safe on their respective sides as the scene finally moving to the Prime Minister’s office. The sense of the house that was deemed to have been adopted was a carefully crafted selection of words by the leaders of the opposition of both houses and the treasury benches in a classical Orwellian style as in the book Animal Farm. Anna broke his fast bettering all his previous records!
Game drawn!
Six months later we are on the verge of the formation of the next governments in the five states and the Lokpal Bill was not even an election issue but corruption was. The attempt to pass it in the last parliament failed miserably with political parties finding more than a hundred and eighty objections! Team Anna received a luke warm reception wherever they were. What went wrong?
The movement was doomed to failure from the very beginning. Anna might have achieved a lot in his village Ralegon but lacked the education to negotiate at the high table like Gandhi could. Whereas each time Gandhi went on a fast it was for a different cause, the Gandhian went three times for the same cause. Gandhi never made anything personal; Anna’s team targeted the ruling party in a by-election and ridiculed its leaders. By taking a rigid stance they portrayed a draconian image and forgot that the masses could accepted anything but not at the cost of democracy. Instead if they had led a non-cooperation movement at the grassroots against graft, there was a possibility of forcing the entire political class to its will. Such mobilization required skills of a different kind and they just did not have them. In the present day the middle class do not have time even to watch a movie fully twice; they don’t have time for the tantrums thrown by the civil society representatives either. Like always, they gave their space away to lesser players and made Anna practically irrelevant for the future, leaving the politician to check and mate him without even playing a game.
Published in Financial World in two parts on 21st and 22nd March 2011
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.a...
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.a...
Pali Reen
With the government burdened with cases of corruption against its ministers, the group of civil society timed their move perfectly last April. All they needed was a face to their movement. Anna Hazare fitted the billboard perfectly. To substantiate, the uninitiated to see Kissa Kursi Ka, a movie of the Emergency era that showed how an illiterate non-entity became the prime minister of the country. Whenever frustration crossed a certain breaking point, people would accept anybody with the slightest credentials to lead them.
Since graft was something that everybody suffered from, it was not unusual for the movement to fire the peoples’ imagination particularly the idealistic youth. It did not matter what the Jan Lokpal Bill said. The elite and the intelligentsia who came out to support were not the kind that could be dealt with a little bit of police high-handedness. Realizing the awakening of the middle class, the government diffused the immediate situation as soon as it could.
My opinion of the main party was that it was a very shrewd one that kept all its cards to itself. Having been at the helm of affairs during almost every major crisis in the country over more than a hundred years, it has mastered the skills to handle virtually every situation. The government’s invitation to Anna to discuss the anti-corruption bill that gave a feeling that it had gauged the will of the people was merely a tactical withdrawal. Actually it needed time to assess the whole situation and buy some time for itself. As Anna was not the author of the bill, he was accompanied by his team, a set of disgruntled ex-government officials with an axe to grind with the party in power, and a couple of eminent lawyers.
There were nine meetings and the media reports were replete with many ambiguities. The more we read about them the more it appeared to be a charade being routinely enacted by the government representatives. I had seen similar meetings with the union before in the organization I worked, as a prelude to an impending strike by the workers; this time the players were the self-appointed civil society representatives of the middle class and the government. These meetings were held only to gauge the merits in Team Anna’s case. The public spats with the civil society members were merely diversionary methods, used to judge the mood of the people, which was far from amicable. What we were actually witnessing was the initial of pawn moves in a chess game. From the transcripts of taped recordings of the meetings it was clearly evident that the government had no intention to accept what has come to be known as Anna’s Jan Lokpal bill. Nevertheless, the political class did realize that the time for the Lokpal Bill had indeed come. Only its ultimate form remained to be decided.
Now, no one in the political dispensation wanted to lose their privileges curtailed through a Lokpal Bill. Nor did they want to be seen on the wrong side of the people they represented. No wonder that every political party, including the main opposition one, remained non-committal and waited on the sidelines like vultures. With no inputs coming even from its allies, the government chose to present the bill in its weakest form to the parliament. Even if it had intentions to ultimately present a stronger Lokpal, it made sure that it would make everybody sweat and commit to it. What was slowly emerging was the truth that we have always suspected. All the parties fought bitterly in public but they were all together behind the curtains.
Come August 16 and history began to unfold in a different way. Anna Hazare stuck to his guns to go on a fast till his demands to hold the all the three pillars of our governance, namely, the politician, judiciary and the bureaucrat responsible for their action. What followed was something that had never happened neither in this country nor anywhere else in the world ever before. Even the Jasmine Spring paled before Anna’s violence free movement. If the government erred in arresting Anna, it made up by the police refraining from being high-handed. The baton was visibly missing. Errors of judgments by managements was not unusual but good managements always had follow up plans of correction on course, a forty percent correct decisions being considered as efficient.
Nothing happened between the two sets of peoples’ elected and unelected representatives for almost a week except for some feeble attempts to make Anna break his fast. The scene was similar to the events when there was a strike for the first time in our organization and the management and the union leaders went into a deadlock. The road to reconciliation only commenced when the workers began to feel the pressure of being without work began to tell. The difference was that while there was no time frame to end a union strike, here the deadline was Anna’s health.
To add to the government’s headache, the media built up a crescendo painting it as the only villain in the whole act. In any case, media always projected an image that it aired only what it felt that people wanted to hear, so much so that it was accused of being undemocratic itself. If some government representatives were hardliners well so were at least two of the civil society members. The difference was that the former were called arrogant and the latter barely aggressive. For every to and fro movements in the back channel talks, it was the government that was projected to be taking a hard line stance. No corporate management gave in easily either. The discussions went to such an extreme that government representatives suggested even the media to be under the Lokpal bill!
Nevertheless, one must give the media its due. Wittingly or unwittingly, it became a forum educating the viewer about things that they might never have learnt in a political science class in Cambridge, Stanton, Harvard or any IIM. Out of the chaos a pattern of sense was emerging. For the first time in our history the phrase ‘We the People’ of the Indian constitution is being interpreted with the same intellectual vigor as ‘Call me Ismail,’ in Moby Dick in a literature class. The Parliament was supreme in making laws but not the parliamentarians. We were also beginning to learn how intricately our forefathers had compiled our constitution and how the role of every area of area of governance was defined. People learnt the difference between the role of a statutory body or a parliamentary committee, and why it took such a long time to make a law. Nor did one know that the government took the views of all the parties, both at the center and the states, before incorporating a law and the sense of the federal independence of the states and a lot more.
Any corporate execute would tell you that whenever you went into discussions with any ruling government, you had to be prepared to make concessions. Every intelligent union leader knows this and so does every management. Both will leave a maneuverable space for each other to save face in case of crisis. At the end of the day both needed the workers for their ends. If there was one grave error on the part of Team Anna, it was to insist that the Lokpal bill had to be what they presented in full. By doing so they left no room for the government and a negotiation turned into confrontation. The other mistake it made was that by giving it a middle class brand, a large population of the lower segment of society felt alienated.
By the second week of Anna’s fast it was realized that he was made of tougher material than the yoga gurus of the modern age. That gave more time to the government. While the media and the press were drilling it for its ineptitude, it was actually more in control than Team Anna. The fatigued crowds could become restive and easily get out of hand. By now other intellectuals had put their foot into the door with the media and were giving their opinions as well. Very soon the imperfections of Anna’s bill began to show. What made Team Anna think that only they could come up with the most perfect law? It would be years before the efficacy of the Lokpal bill could be known. A government could be held responsible for making a bad law that could be amended. Who was Team Anna responsible to if its version of the bill turned out to be a bad one?
The belated support to Anna by the political opposition did little to dent the government’s image. A new set of players were brought in by it. It was time for the middle game on the chess board. The pawn game was taken over by bishops, knights and castles. The civil society knew that they were now fighting for time. The slightest sign of serious deterioration to Anna’s health would give the government reason to remove him from the Ramlila grounds. Other backdoor channels were opened. When the Prime Minister finally broke his silence to begin the debate on the bill in the parliament, it was like a corporate CEO taking the final call to end a strike. Members of parliament gave some of the best speeches heard in the long time. Every speaker admitted the failure of political parties to the people. Meanwhile behind the scene parleys continued. The end game of chess shifted to the queens with both kings safe on their respective sides as the scene finally moving to the Prime Minister’s office. The sense of the house that was deemed to have been adopted was a carefully crafted selection of words by the leaders of the opposition of both houses and the treasury benches in a classical Orwellian style as in the book Animal Farm. Anna broke his fast bettering all his previous records!
Game drawn!
Six months later we are on the verge of the formation of the next governments in the five states and the Lokpal Bill was not even an election issue but corruption was. The attempt to pass it in the last parliament failed miserably with political parties finding more than a hundred and eighty objections! Team Anna received a luke warm reception wherever they were. What went wrong?
The movement was doomed to failure from the very beginning. Anna might have achieved a lot in his village Ralegon but lacked the education to negotiate at the high table like Gandhi could. Whereas each time Gandhi went on a fast it was for a different cause, the Gandhian went three times for the same cause. Gandhi never made anything personal; Anna’s team targeted the ruling party in a by-election and ridiculed its leaders. By taking a rigid stance they portrayed a draconian image and forgot that the masses could accepted anything but not at the cost of democracy. Instead if they had led a non-cooperation movement at the grassroots against graft, there was a possibility of forcing the entire political class to its will. Such mobilization required skills of a different kind and they just did not have them. In the present day the middle class do not have time even to watch a movie fully twice; they don’t have time for the tantrums thrown by the civil society representatives either. Like always, they gave their space away to lesser players and made Anna practically irrelevant for the future, leaving the politician to check and mate him without even playing a game.
Published in Financial World in two parts on 21st and 22nd March 2011
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.a...
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.a...
Pali Reen
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