Anna, Arvind and AAP

Anna Hazare, the social activist who considers himself a Gandhian, has had a hard time adjusting to the meteoric rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) formed by his one-time 'disciple' Arvind Kejriwal. Anna, as he is referred to almost everywhere, has pursued many interesting methods of affecting social reform in his native village of Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra; not all of these methods were non-violent. Quite apart from the prime drivers of his agenda, what I find most intriguing about him are the pronouncements - delivered with a wagging finger and a stern expression, reminiscent of the headmaster of a high school - that keep coming out of him. Of late, these have been laced with more than a little bitterness towards Kejriwal, the estranged follower who has gone on to be very successful in the Delhi assembly elections of 2013. From prohibiting the use of his likeness by the AAP to ordering Gopal Rai, an AAP member, out of a public meeting held in Ralegan Siddhi when a tiff ensued between Rai and former Indian army chief, V.K. Singh, another political mercenary who perhaps nurtures political ambitions of his own; to his apparent forgetfulness of Kejriwal's role in the 2011 anti-corruption movement when Hazare thanked the political class for finally providing him with the same Lokpal bill that he considered worthless only 2 years back; to his refusal to attend Kejriwal's swearing-in ceremony as Chief Minister of Delhi, Anna Hazare has looked quite petulant, certainly very un-Gandhi like. 

I do not wish to demean Hazare; he seems to have contributed significantly to the well-being of his village with most of his village backing his methods. What I do find strange is how a person who says that he is a Gandhian and puts the interests of the nation first can be so mean when someone he trusted so much achieves some measure of success, even if it's in the arena of politics that Hazare has long derided. It makes you wonder about the limits of relying on a Gandhian figure when that particular combination of political shrewdness, professional training and moral clarity that was so essential to Gandhi's success is so lacking in such figures. Kejriwal, on the other hand, has been an astoundingly astute exponent of the art of politics. Anna Hazare instinctive aversion to politics is hard to square with the idea of democracy. The representatives of the people are supposed to be responsible to the people, and when there is a real break between the ideal of politics and the reality of it's practice, there needs to be a cleansing both within and without. Such movements have happened at critical junctures in Indian democracy - Jayaprakash Narayan's movement is the best known example of it at a national scale. But Hazare would rather always lecture politicians from outside, seeing politics itself as an inherently corrupting choice rather than the empowering one that it should be. While opinions regarding Kejriwal's model of participative and consultative democracy can be divided, the anger at a broken system that pays no heed to the voice of the common man has correctly found a universal outlet in his party. His diagnoses are right even if not every solution proposed may work. To his credit, he has been honest enough to admit those limitations. These are only early days; the danger of political power going to the head is very real for anyone, even the legislators of AAP. Slaying the politician-demon when the AAP did not have to work with the current the system of governance was easier than making that same system work for providing the good governance that was promised.