My take on Anna Hazare's crusade against corruption

I have stayed away from writing the blog for a couple of weeks deliberately.  One of the issues that I was writing about was the agitation for the separate Telangana agitation and I believe that I have said all that I wanted to and hence did not see too much point in continuing to write about it.  I was also busy with a couple of other projects so I thought it would be a good idea to give myself and my readers a break from me.  A couple of things that happened yesterday have brought me back to writing this blog.  One was that a couple of my friends wanted me to write about what I thought about Anna Hazare's "crusade" against corruption.  The other thing was a direct provocation from a friend who pointedly asked me why I was cynical about what Hazare is doing when I was pouring my angst out at the separate Telangana agitation.  In doing so he tickled my sense of disgust with the people of the country.  Well disgust is a powerful word but I use it knowing fully what it means.  My friend Kartik Kompella said that I was being silent and cynical about something like corruption when Hazare was doing something to awaken the people to fight against corruption and that I was writing when people wanted a separate Telangana state.  Not only did he tickle my disgust for people of this country in general but also got my anger going.

Let me put a disclaimer here.  I am "NOT OPPOSING" Anna Hazare's efforts nor am I "belittling" what he is doing.  Having said that now let me get on with what I have to say further.  Kartik has unwittingly drawn an amazing parallel when he talked about Hazare and Telangana in the same breath.  For me "people's" response to Hazare's call against corruption is comparable to K. Chandrashekar Rao's call for a separate Telangana state.  Let us get into the dynamics of how "people" stand for or against something.  We go on with our lives everyday worrying about our jobs (how they are horrible and how the boss is terrible) or about our children's education, or about how we get jilted by our lovers, or how we can go to Singapore, Malaysia or the USA and settle down in the last mentioned country or how we should ask for more rent for our properties or where we should buy land so that it escalates in price and fetches us profit or how we should pass the next exam and more such things. Our children are busy with plans of how to spend the day and money at which place with which friends. BPO executives plan their daily quota of romance and which pub they would go to in the evening and the software code writer only knows how to read and write C, C++, Java Scripts etc. Only some of us actually bother to pick up the daily newspaper and even fewer actually read it.  Most would like to go to supplements to see what our favourite film stars are doing or saying and some go to see if the sensex has risen or tanked.  We vaguely read about Raja, 2G scam and remember very few details.  Then one day when the newspapers are talking about Batcha we say wait a minute who is this now.  One day a friend wanted to know if Raja was also called Batcha!!!    

Those who prefer to watch TV are quite caught up in serials and those who want to watch news channels get to see false reporting and lot of literal bedlam in which real issues get properly concealed.  In all this one conscientious individual called Anna Hazare steps in, writes to the Prime Minister, gets no response and therefore decides that he has to go on a fast to get the Jan Lokpal bill passed in the parliament.  Anna Hazare is a great man, very few people have the conviction and the moral integrity to fight a gargantuan monster. So what I say next has nothing to do with him.  I whole heartedly "SUPPORT" what he is doing.  What is interesting is when  Hazare starts his fast the vast middle class of the nation wakes up.  In the day and age of the World Wide Web and Facebook and stories of the Jasmine Revolution in Syria and people's protests in Egypt, it is easy for us computer chair middle class people to see the next revolution in India.  Let us fight corruption, let us support Anna Hazare, let us make sure our money used for development and not to fill pockets of politicians who are corrupt and let us also fast for a day in support to Hazare are what the internet and Facebook are abuzz with.  I have more than five hundred friends on Facebook and I have so far received more than five hundred invitation on causes to join Anna Hazare in his fight against corruption.  And my friend Kartik was two days ago expressing surprise that nobody liked or said anything about Hazare.  On Facebook you can say I am in love and ten people will like it.  You can also say love is a bitch and ten people will like it. I hope we realize that in the end all those things mean very little.  When people say along with Anna Hazare that the Jan Lokpal Bill should be passed, do we even know what are the contents of that bill.  My friend and critic Pramod has put a post on Facebook saying that the version 1.8 of the bill for which Anna Hazare is fighting can create draconian monster that is not answerable to any constitutional institution in the country.  There are enough fascists in the world, so we have to be careful.  I have not seen the bill so I have no comments.

Now to come to the other scenario, the separate Telangana agitation.  In this part of India people wake up and like everyone else go through their day.  The urban individual in Hyderabad goes about doing what I said people do in one of the paragraphs preceding this.  In rural Telangana however things are different.  Farmers and peasants are concerned at the lack of income from crops and rising interests on their loans.  The unemployable (that is not a typo) youth ponder over the fact that there is nothing for them on the horizon.  They lament the fact that they went to schools and colleges where they were taught nothing and therefore never empowered to deal with the world.  Now enter K Chandrashekar Rao, the messiah for these people.  Fresh from his falling out with a megalomaniac called Chandrababu Naidu and looking for new business opportunities in politics he relaunches the separate Telangana movement that was originally launched by Channa Reddy.  To the hopeless there is suddenly hope, since there is a promise of a new state, new opportunities of employment in the government, writing off of loans and "people" agitate.  They do not bother to think about where will these jobs be produced magically and how will a government function if it writes off loans.  So people will jump into the fray, not even knowing clearly what they are fighting for.  Here it is the disempowered poor and heathen who want be a part of the revolution and not the middle class that is today so vehemently supporting Anna Hazare.  The middle class will not have anything to do with the poor, the wretched of the society.  A fascist friend of mine once suggested that the best way to eliminate poverty was to get rid of the poor, so just make them all stand in a line and shoot them and that will be it.

This all proves the one thing that I have said in one of my previous posts in this blog where I mentioned an experiment conducted by an anthropologist which say human beings are successful because they mimic and follow.  In that sense we are no different from sheep or the wilderbeast.  I have seen on Discovery Channel and Nat Geo Channel videos of the great crossing of the river and all wilderbeast and zebra gather together and wait for someone to take the lead of jumping into the river for the crossing.  When one does it, the others follow and many are sometimes washed away by the current or eaten up by crocodiles.  If we blindly follow without knowing what we are getting into a similar fate metaphorically speaking awaits us as well.  How many times have we seen the impatient people running red lights and because one does it many will follow.  Now is that not a breaking of rules?  When we don't have the patience to stand in a line we bribe somebody to do it for us.  We go to temples and bribe temple attendants to get quicker and longer darshans of our favourite deities.  In academics, people fudge theses for Ph.D's, steal articles for promotions and bribe clerks to get circulars that advertise for opportunities for going abroad so that they get them and not the others.  We see favouritism, nepotism in everything.  We do them too.  I say very bravely at some level or the other most of us are corrupt or have helped corruption grow.  That is why I am cynical.

And about the remark about why I write the blog my sincere answer is that I do not write to change the world, I write it so show an alternate perspective or sometimes to show that some of the things that politicians say are not accurate and sometimes blatantly false.  I can do that with integrity.  But when it comes to corruption, I cannot do that, for I have been corrupt.  I have not taken a bribe or fudged articles, but I have given a bribe to brokers in the RTA to get my licence faster.  I will be guilty of breaking road rules not always inadvertently.  I have been party to corruption.  I have no right to say I will fight it.  I have to drive it away from myself and that is when I can go to the public and talk about it.  

P.S: Very long post and I have run out of time and therefore I have not proof read.  Please overlook errors of all kinds.