The Baba boomerang

It is fairly obvious the Baba Ramdev affair has been a public relations disaster for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. In facing a challenge of this nature — thousands of people congregating under the mesmeric influence of a preacher, making moralistic but ultimately impracticable demands — how should a government respond?

In cold-blooded, value-neutral terms, there could be three alternative responses. First, the government could be muscular and bring to bear what used to be called the “majesty and might” of the state. In plain English, this means using strong-arm tactics from moment one, not in some farcical, anti-climactic finale. Actively prevent crowds from gathering; keep Ramdev followers from crossing into Delhi — however anti-democratic, these are tactics governments have used in the past.
Second, the government could simply surrender and succumb. It could sign a peace deal and mimic the late Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain, at Munich — which in any case seems to the UPA government’s precedent of choice in domestic and foreign policy alike. This would allow Baba Ramdev to declare victory.
Third, the government could play subtle and crafty politics. It could run a propaganda offensive against its opponent, whittle away at his credibility, spread facts and factoids — and often an artful mix of the two — about Ramdev’s sources of funding, political associations and ambitions and attempt to get neutral people to question his credentials.
However immoral at least the first and third may be, all three approaches are fair game in politics. The key is to adopt one of them and stick with it, showing consistency and drive. The UPA’s blunder in the past week was that it tried all three approaches in parallel. As such, while Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh was vilifying Baba Ramdev and finally labelling him a “thug”, his party colleagues — ministers such as Kapil Sibal and Subodh Kant Sahai — were inviting Baba Ramdev for intimate negotiations in a five-star hotel suite. They were treating him as some sort of Pope.
Indeed, in sending four Cabinet ministers — led by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee — and the Cabinet Secretary to the airport to receive, cajole and “explain the black money issue” to Baba Ramdev, the UPA was signalling unconditional surrender. This indicated the government had lost its nerve. That gesture rightly encouraged Baba Ramdev to play hardball and take a maximalist position.
Most people don’t have an opinion on Baba Ramdev. His followers and disciples clearly revere him, but there is a broader India that, till a few days ago, was undecided on him. It identified broadly with his crusade against corruption, though it had some misgivings about his wish list. Others were uneasy about a figure like Baba Ramdev leading an anti-corruption struggle but still decidedly neutral on the man himself.
By attacking a sleeping throng — men, women and children who may have been naïve, stupid, angry, disgusted or merely in thrall of a yoga guru and televangelist, but certainly constituted no immediate threat to law and order and to public peace — the UPA and its police force have only ended up garnering sympathy for Baba Ramdev even among the hitherto uncommitted.
What Ramdev demonstrated in Delhi this past week was that he has a network and a mobilisation capacity that runs across at least urban and small-town northern India. He believes this is only the vanguard of a much larger silent majority that is upset and disappointed with the serial scandals the Manmohan Singh government has presided over. That perception may or may not be true; we don’t know yet.
Yet the fact is in using abusive language against Baba Ramdev — calling him a thug, calling anybody a thug, on national television is not guaranteed to win you admiration and hand-claps from most normal people — resorting to tear gas and truncheons against his supporters and throwing him out of the capital is going to push the neutrals, those who had no strong position so far, into the other camp.
Even if they don’t suddenly become devotees of Baba Ramdev, their distrust of and hostility towards the UPA can only grow. The government may have nudged this segment into the non-Congress corner for the foreseeable future. If electoral politics is about assiduously putting together social coalitions, the Congress is doing quite the opposite in the build-up to 2012-14 — a period that will see elections across northern India, followed by the Lok Sabha election.
We live in an age driven by audio-visual images. Courtesy camera phones and YouTube, visuals can go viral in next to no time. The power of the visual image and the frequency of transmission can combine to give the action against Baba Ramdev’s adherents a far greater meaning than it perhaps deserves.
An example would help. India has had bloody religious riots for decades. The Gujarat violence of 2002 was certainly not the worst. Even so it was the first set of riots to be recorded in real time, to be captured by television cameras. That is why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) still pays a price for it. Images from Gujarat 2002 — sometimes suitably edited to heighten the “action” — have been used in a series of elections, most tellingly in the 2004 general election, to damage the BJP.
The Ramdev images are likely to be put to work in a similar manner. In some states, they will be given a Hindu spin. In other states, they will be given a Yadav spin — Baba Ramdev is an OBC Yadav and that is why Mulayam Singh Yadav, who faces elections in Uttar Pradesh in 12 months, has backed him. In all states, they will be used to paint the Congress as anti-democratic and somehow trying to shield the corrupt.
Populist movements and crowd management may seem overwhelming but they confront governments in India on a daily basis. How a government tackles these is a test of its administrative deftness and political finesse. The UPA, unfortunately, swings between panic and craven submission on the one hand and brutal violence on the other.
It took one “fast unto death” by an electorally weakened regional leader for the Union home minister to throw up his hands and announce that a separate state of Telangana would be created. Juxtapose that with the Ramdev business. It leaves the UPA administration looking decidedly amateur.

Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com