Crusader-come-lately

In arriving at an estimate of who we are as a society, and when we evaluate our collective political selves, it seems hard to wriggle out of the belief that we are passing through distressing times. Any whippersnapper can pass by, stand at a traffic island, and unleash abusive vocabulary principally at those who hold the reins of office but also others.

What’s more, he can do so with profit as people flock to hear with an air of suspense what he is about to say next, even the more assured among them suspend incredulity, and some are so overcome that they are ready to fall in step with the Pied Piper, unaware, or worse unconcerned, that he may lead the children of the town away if his dues — as he reads the score — are not rendered.
Those who travelled in third- class train compartments in the Sixties, Seventies, or even the Eighties, encountered delightful souls whose clever ditties on public affairs kept the atmosphere live in those poverty-mired crowded spaces. These petty snacks, tea and toys wallahs with their trilling notes would typically be joined by rustic passengers who chimed in with their take on affairs of the day.
The declamations were only occasionally malicious or offensive, and the declaimers made their point with a trickster’s grace. They commented cunningly and somewhat truthfully, although seldom knowledgeably, on the goings-on in national life. It was pretty healthy fare for rulers of a young democracy to be taken to the cleaners by ordinary folk thus. In the end, everyone saw it as good fun and the plebeians just went home afterwards.
Arvind Kejriwal, who has plans to burst on the political scene soon, is fundamentally different from those simple people although he too deploys the seemingly innocent but clever-as-clever ways of the quick-sell artist. Unlike them, he is a demagogue. He addresses crowds with a purpose. He seems to have an agenda beyond anarchy which he conceals through his anti-corruption rhetoric.
This agenda doesn’t seem of the Left, invoking poverty and related questions in neither class nor caste terms. Nor are policy-oriented thoughts revealed on difficult political, social, or economic matters. By way of programme, there are only general thoughts in the direction of decentralisation of authority.
All this adds up to less than dung-pie. Which means that Mr Kejriwal’s future party leaves itself the room to slither towards any platform that is neither of the Establishment (in India broadly this still means the Congress, although this party is now a pale shadow of its former self) nor any shade or tribe of Left, on a strictly opportunistic basis. Traditionally, in this country those who have gone on about discontents based solely on corruption (generally high-profile individuals) have shown the remarkable ability to drift in the direction of the jingoist Right.
When Mr Kejriwal was an integral part of the forum led by Anna Hazare not so long ago, the group sometimes made the tactical mistake of making observations on ticklish questions such as Kashmir and taking support of the RSS. This led to utter confusion with discordant voices emanating from a cluster that had seemed united in challenging the political class and its unaccountable ways. Eventually the differences were swept under the carpet and the anti-corruption, anti-politician, anti-Congress notes once again swam over high octaves.
Having learnt from this experience, the demagogue stays mum on concrete questions of national life. This means that while Mr Kejriwal may dominate television space hours on end, we do not really know who he is or what he stands for. He and his acolytes fudge issues, utter half-truths, direct innuendoes at others, and speak as if they are in the grip of a moral upsurge, meaning that all voices other than theirs are false or belong to the
corrupt.
However, any comparison with V. P. Singh after his rupture with the Congress on the Bofors question will be
misplaced. The late Prime Minister had his quirks and negative passions, but he was still a Savonarola figure. He had ideas and a plan for change in hand. He projected these through his politics (which could be ruthless and Machiavellian), for which he had a rich imagination.
V.P. Singh also knew the country, its temper, and could distinguish agriculture from industry, and town-folk from rural folk, whose figures of speech tripped off his tongue. He was not a single-class fanatic (as Mr Kejriwal appears to be with his message packaged for the broad urban middle class). He fought the Congress hard, ousted it from power, and yet engendered friendship with that party towards the end of his life on account of ideological considerations that had to do with checking the BJP’s grip on power (a party he had helped bring centrestage in the first place).
If there is any uniqueness to be detected about Mr Kejriwal, it is his inability to take one step forward without television cameras panning on him. Perhaps, it may even be true to say that if this weren’t the age of television, there would be no Kejriwal. This is so because there is just no stuffing in Mr Kejriwal’s purported politics; it seems to be made of thin air.
He wants to savagely bring down a few personalities, but what is the brand he wishes to hoist? Wearing Gandhi caps inscribed with “Main aam aadmi hoon” or “I am an ordinary man” before televised protest actions by the former bureaucrat’s trendy followers belittles the grandeur of the ideas of the politician-saint to whom this country owes so much.
Perhaps it was confusion surrounding issues such as these that led even Mr Hazare — all said and done a man of substance — to distance himself from the anti-corruption bandwagon that the neophyte is now riding. Mr Hazare is clearly not taken in by the flimsy argument favoured in some middle class circles that to Mr Kejriwal goes the credit of seeking to batter the forbidden doors of Sonia Gandhi.
The premise of this is false. Before Mr Kejriwal directed his fire at Robert Vadra, Narendra Modi had raised sensational but bogus questions about expenses on Mrs Gandhi’s foreign visits. Two, history shows the Nehru-Gandhis have never been spared from criticism or propaganda, on policy issues and otherwise.
But here’s the rub. The Kejriwals of the world can rise only when the institutions of politics and its anointed keepers lose the way, when accountability is at a discount, and when the politician needs re-minting.