Who benefited the most from Anna Hazare's fast

Anna Hazare's campaign for a stronger Lokpal Bill and his 12-day battle against corruption has given the Opposition, mainly the BJP, to present themselves as a party which can replace the ruling coalition at the Centre.A STAR News-Nielsen survey conducted across 28 cities with close to 9000 respondents after Anna ended his 12-day long fast – has revealed that the BJP will garner 32 % of the votes across India if Lok Sabha polls were held in the near future, while the Congress will manage to win just 20 % of votes.

According to the survey, the BJP has turned out to be the most favoured party across all regions – 40:27 in the north; 20:15 in the east, and 46:15 in the west – barring the south, where 20 % respondents still prefer the Congress, while 16 % prefer the BJP.

The numbers mentioned above is in stark contrast to the ones that came out in a similar survey conducted by STAR News-Nielsen in May 2011 – before the Anna movement gripped the country’s imagination. Barely four months ago, was the Congress leading the pack with 30 % of the vote share while BJP had only 23 %. Also, except the west, the Congress was leading in all zones.In the current Lok Sabha, Congress has 207 seats and BJP has 115 seats.

Anna’s movement, and the way the UPA government handled the situation, seems to have swayed a number of people who voted for Congress during last General election – around 11 % of the respondents who voted for the Congress last time now intend to vote for the BJP, while only 5 % are switching away from the BJP.

Throughout Anna Hazare’s campaign, several UPA leaders, most vocally Kapil Sibal, had said that a few thousand people supporting Anna, do not represent a country of 1.2 billion. They even challenged his team members to prove its legitimacy in the elections. But if they were to contest elections against Team Anna members tomorrow, the politicians would be in for a surprise.

In a Kiran Bedi vs Kapil Sibal contest, 74 % of respondents in the STAR News-Nielsen survey would vote for the iconic former IPS officer, while Sibal would manage just 14 %. Similarly, a contest between Arvind Kejriwal and P Chidambaram would end up in a defeat for the home minister — 58 % of the respondents claim they will vote for the RTI activist while 24 % would choose Chidambaram. Interestingly, the Anna campaign has given the country a brand new youth icon. Around 62 % of the respondents feel that
Arvind Kejriwal, the most vocal member has as the new role model for young India. He has significantly higher approval ratings in north (75 %).

Respondents however do not lay the blame for corruption on the doors of any particular political party — a third of respondents (75 %) believe that all parties are equally responsible for corruption. Another 49 % of the respondents believe that feels that giving or accepting bribe is in the fabric of the country and it cannot be stopped by people in India. A similar number — 46 % — believe that corruption can be stopped if people unite against it.

What the Anna Hazare movement says about our patriotism

Time was when not everyone could get to brandish the national flag. Today, anyone can. On select occasions, like Independence Day, they erupt all over the place like multicolored mushrooms. And at Ramlila Maidan last week, everyone was armed with a flag. Or so it appeared on TV. Not a good sign.

Why would you need the national flag for an anti-corruption campaign? Is corruption an external enemy, against whom the Indian state is waging war? One answer trotted out is that flag-waving is an expression of one’s pride in being Indian. But what does it mean to be Indian? When there is no war going on, and no external coloniser (like the British were), where are we going with this overflow of patriotism?

Patriotism of the kind that drives you to follow a messiah or to die for a cause is a tool meant to fortify a person against her own humanity. So that she can better serve a larger, non-human, entity — such as a country. In fact, whenever you’re told you’re serving the country, rest assured you’re only serving the interests of those who control the country, which is always an elite, unrepresentative minority. (If you want to know how ‘representative’ our democracy is, compare the percentage of our MPs who are crorepatis with the percentage of our electorate who are crorepatis.)

Patriotism deflects the anger of the deprived toward an external enemy. For example, the US defence budget, which should have shrunk after the end of the Cold War, actually shot up. The rationale given for the increase? War against Terror. Given the increasing — and increasingly untenable — disparity between rich and poor, states that abandon their welfare role were in danger of losing their moral authority to govern. They hence need terrorism to justify their existence.The aforesaid ‘development’ being best piloted by an elite band of technocratic, entrepreneurial Indians who have a monopoly on merit, efficiency, and expertise and are thereby the privileged custodians of the answer to the question, “What is good for the country?’

It is this technocratic class that is driving the Lokpal bill movement. They tapped into the legitimate anger felt by a people fed up with the oppressive power wielded by a corrupt state and an unresponsive polity. Anna was merely the poster boy, acting on instructions, and content to do so. And their destination is not so much an equitable society, but a future where there won’t be messy potholes of democracy on the country’s highways of commerce, and no political bottlenecks will slow down the swift transfer of public/communal resources into the clean hands of private capital.

This technocratic authoritarianism — proposed as an antidote to a corrupted democratic process that has failed to deliver — is a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Yes, corruption is bad. And we all want change. But not all change is necessarily for the better. When it involves a lot of flag-waving, it is usually for the worse. It’s not for nothing that Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Shashi Tharoor-Anna Hazare not voice of the people

Member of the Indian Parliament, previously served as the UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information and as the Minister of State for the Ministry of External Affairs.Firing a salvo at Anna Hazare, former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor has said how can a person "who never stood for elections" claim to be the voice of the people. Asserting that laws can be made only by Parliament, Tharoor, who is a first time MP from Kerala, said, "We cannot have a small group of unelected people imposing their will on Parliament because in the long term the danger will be to you the people.

"I do not believe that we can conduct democracy either from the Ramlila Ground or from television studio. Democracy must be conducted through both Houses of Parliament." The Congress MP said there are more than 500 MPs and thousands of people's representatives in state assemblies who have gone out to seek votes of people and have to preserve the support they have got.

"If such people cannot claim to represent the people of India, but somebody else, who never stood for elections but has lot of television cameras around him and a few thousand people in a Maidan.... Will he be the voice of the people? Is that democracy?" he said addressing a gathering at Jawaharlal Nehru University here last night.While stating that arresting Hazare was a "mistake" and that no government can disagree with the cause of the anti-corruption crusader, Tharoor stressed that the "question is the means".

"Saying that I will starve to death thereby potentially unleashing disruption violence and anarchy in the country unless you pass a bill which says exactly what I see it should say. Is that democracy? That is the question we have to ask," Tharoor said during a question-answer session with students there.Noting that the country has a constitutional system that has kept it together for 64 years and in which people can tell their representatives about the issues, Tharoor said, "If these representatives do not pass the laws you want or pass the law you
do not want, vote them out an get other representatives." At the outset, he said that nobody can be opposed to one's right to protest or fast or the idea of the Lokpal for which Hazare stood. "I think it was a mistake to arrest Anna Hazare," he said.

The lawmaker, however, wondered what is the guarantee that the Lokpal will "magically" be something different from other agencies, which were created to fight corruption. He at the same time made it clear he admired Hazare, who has "lot of good qualities" and an "exemplary record of service to the country". "I am certainly not one of those to suggest that he is anything but a man of great integrity," Tharoor said.