Hype of the season
Anna Hazare has already been compared to Jayaprakash Narayan. His devotees also feel he is the new Mahatma Gandhi. But now one of his most high-profile acolytes, Kiran Bedi, has cast a new ray of bright shining light on the man: Anna is India and India is Anna, she piously informs us.
This echoes the Emergency days when Congressman Dev Kanta Barooah once famously declared, in utter seriousness, that “Indira is India, and India is Indira”. Ms Bedi is of a vintage that remembers those days, and no doubt as a police rookie must have seen up close what the guardians of the law were up to. And even if most of the crusaders who have rallied around the Hazare cause are too young to recall life in the ancient 20th century, some of us remember Indira Gandhi came to grief once the Emergency ended.
Arrogance of power can often blind. But less obvious is the arrogance of humility and righteousness. Mr Hazare’s blinded followers may be doing him an injustice. They are getting carried away by all the frenzied media attention which demands constant action, and nonstop hyperbole. Quiet, reasoned debate doesn’t play well with the mike-wielding television reporters standing by, not to mention the hyperventilating anchors. So every passing minute “Team Anna” has to invent a new phrase, invoke a new metaphor. Last we heard Ms Bedi was planning an entirely new spin — that Anna Hazare can even walk on water!
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