By Patricia Lee Sharpe
It’s hilarious. A Prime Minister from the Indian National Congress, which led the movement for Indian independence, thinks to silence a picture perfect Mahatma Gandhi impersonator, his weapon a hunger strike, by throwing him in jail.
“It’s blackmail,” the PM sputters. “You can’t use this cheap trick of fasting to put pressure on the government.”
So—does the police action work? Not in India. The upstart’s appeal is enormously enhanced. More people take to the streets in support of their anti-corruption champion.
Why the appeal? History. Plus a fine union of style and substance, all magnified by the modern media.
Aside from the fact that maintaining its hold on India was getting prohibitively expensive, the British colonial regime found it hard to cope with an opponent who wanted to fight with moral force rather than violence. That was Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, who perfected the tactic of non-violent resistance, which included some cliff-hanging hunger striking by the Mahatma himself.
The issue today isn’t independence. It’s corruption and whether the government is willing to deal with it, not cosmetically, but effectively. Graft, bribery, palm-greasing—this is the daily reality in India at all levels. India is 87th on the corruption perception index, in the middle essentially, but that’s not good enough for Indians. The all pervading stench (and financial drain) of systemic corruption doesn’t make them happy. Nor are they deceived by bureaucratic responses to demands for reform.
So Anna Hazare, a retired military man cum social worker from Maharashtra, decided to reincarnate himself as a modern day Gandhi. Note the white cap and the home spun khadi cloth his clothes are made of. Shades of Jawaharlal Nehru and the other freedom fighters. Note the tactic of the hunger strike, by which one puts one’s own life on the line. As a septuagenarian with caved-in cheeks Hazare even looks like the aging Gandhi.
So the issue is of urgent universal appeal and the tactics build on the most vital symbols of modern Indian history—and Indians were responding fervently. Surely the government should have been more cautious in its approach. Surely Prime Minister Man Mohansingh might have guessed that arrest would have been counter-productive. Why has the Congress-led government been so clumsy?
I have a hunch. The Congress Party is, to a certain extent, a family affair, and there is an heir apparent: the great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the grandson of Indira Gandhi, the son of Sonia Gandhi, current leader of the Congress Party and widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who was the third in his line to be prime minister when he was assassinated. Because Rahul Gandhi needed seasoning and a little time to demonstrate charisma, character and competence, Man Mohansingh, the eminently respectable and highly respected economist, has been filling in as PM.
Rahul Gandhi, a young man of privilege and position if there ever was one in modern India, set out to position himself as a man of the people, a noble but unrealistic aspiration. Although he’s never been exposed as a rank hypocrite and he’s managed to get himself elected to Parliament where he’s an entirely competent Member, but he hasn’t exactly caught the imagination of the Indian people as a whole.
And then, out of the blue, comes this nobody who has the pulse of the people. How galling!