Antics Hazare and his cohorts are at it yet again

Babu Rao Hazare is a truly great man.  He is relentless in pursuit of the Congress party and is hell bent on embarrassing the party.  If you have noticed I have stayed away from making any new posts for nearly two months.  It is not because, I had nothing to say.  Remember I am one who loves to rant, so there was a lot to rant about.  However, I held my counsel and decided to stay away from posting because I thought my posts, like Indian politics would become repetitive (truth to be told they have already become repetitive, so I was trying to not repeat what I had already repeated).  In all the time that I was quiet, many things have been happening; and all of them have just repetitions.  In the case of the Telangana question the leaders including the irrepressible K Chandrashekhar Rao and his son have been dishing out the same old threats and the Congress party has been responding with the same old answers which do not mean anything.  The TDP is still sitting on the wall waiting to jump to the side which will begin electoral gains.  The party's supremo's two eyes are carefully watching both the sides from the wall and therefore the mice on either side are also being very alert. So for the time being let us leave this issue and get on with the issue that is the story of this blog.  And dear reader, this post will not be very long and put you to sleep, so just read on.

So we comeback to Babu Rao Hazare, the Great Dictator.  Germany had its great dictator, a man called Hitler, Italy's great dictator was Mussolini and there have been so many tinpot dictators in the world that it is pointless to name them.  General Pinochet, Colonel Qaddafi, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and even Osama Bin Laden.  India too has had its great dictators.  But there are slightly different.  One category of great dictators is the teacher.  But that is the subject of a different post which I hope to make after this one.  But perhaps India's greatest dictator (prior to Hazare that is) was Veda Vyasa.  The popular story that does the rounds is that the great Sage wanted a scribe to write the Mahabharata while he narrated it.  The only one who could write was Vinayaka but he had a condition that he would write only if Veda Vyasa dictated without pausing.  Veda Vyasa put his own condition and that is Vinayaka or Ganapati had to understand what he was writing and that gave Veda Vyasa the time to form his verses.

Hazare has been carved out of a different stone.  He is no Veda Vyasa.  In fact he is the exact opposite of Veda Vyasa.  Hazare neither has the gumption or the education that Veda Vyasa had and therefore depends on others to dictate things.  However, he is not Lord Ganesha either and that rules out his being a scribe.  So the dictators behind his diktats are the four people still behind him, the father and son Bhushan, Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal.  The first two being lawyers it would be safe to assume that there would be enough scribes to take their dictations.  Kiran Bedi is now maintaining a very slightly low profile since the scam where she showed inflated bills for her NGO apparently so that the organization could be better funded, but still a scam is a scam. Babu bhai (meaning Anna) should not have tolerated this at all.  After all his inspiration and hero, the Mahatma always said there could be no separation of means from the end or ends from the means.  His anathema, Niccolo Machiavelli believed that ends could justify means and it is obvious despite being in the camp of a so called Gandhian, Ms. Bedi is a firm believer in Machiavelli.  So what if the bills were inflated (means), the money thus generated was useful for a noble cause i.e to run her NGO (the end).  In this happy confluence of the Mahatma and evil Genius sits the entire campaign against corruption.  Mr. Kejriwal is yet to find his hero but has successfully found his nemesis.  He has been man handled and was made to look dishevelled in front of the media.  The Gandhian, perhaps under the influence of the Machiavellian heaped approbation on the person who slapped Sharad Pawar and stopped short of asking for an encore.  This in turn earned him well deserved opprobrium from all people who had any sense left in them and that leaves out the middle class and the rich class, so that means that a small group of anonymous Gandhi admiring people was the only section of society apart from some journalists to find this reprehensible.  

However a big figure like Hazare cannot be deterred by small set backs and therefore he is continuing the motto that he learnt while driving jeeps (or trucks) in the army; bash on regardless.  A couple of times he protested in Delhi and was joined in the protests by the BJP biggies.  As is his wont, Hazare (remember he is the great dictator, only that he has to be dictated to first given the absence in him, of the main ingredient that is an absolute necessity for any kind of thought to emerge) has been issuing ultimatums.  Apparently there were many pleasant people in the Congress who have tried to please him a little and included the Prime Minister within the ambit of the Lokpal (this huge extra constitutional demon that Hazare and his cohorts are trying to manufacture).  The BJP though rubbing its shoulders with the Hazare Cohorts, found it difficult to rub the same with the Congress and so has started protesting about it.  To cut a long story short, nobody is happy with the Lokpal Bill.  Babu bhai, fearing the Delhi cold perhaps, has decided to stage his hunger strike sit in at the MMRDA grounds in Mumbai so that he can experience not only the warmer climate of the place but also to show his strength in the form of the middle class idiots who will sport I am Anna topis and enthusiastically go to jail and the younger ones in this class will consequently have police records against their name and hence will find employment with the government difficult if not impossible in the future.  

Babu Rao Hazare shifted to Mumbai, because he can speak in his mother tongue Marathi and there are more middle class people in amchi Mumbai than the babudom dominated Delhi. Now Hazare seems to be equipped with long range missiles, so he will be launching them from Mumbai towards Delhi.  At this point we have to ask ourselves, "what is Hazare's real agenda"?  This lokpal thing looks less and less convincing because the country is now witnessing so many other crises which are tending to make the central government look as if it is experiencing a legitimation deficit if not a full blown legitimation crisis and these crises are a little more fundamental to the country than black money stashed away in Swiss Banks or the bribes that C grade employees are taking.  I have started hearing many conspiracy theories, all of which are amusing and way of the mark (of reality that is).  One theory is that Hazare's inner wear is saffron even though his visible clothes are more in conformity with those of the traditional but non saffron politician.  The second theory is diametrically the opposite of this theory.  It argues that Hazare is a creation of the Congress itself and is using him to divert the attention of the people from issues that are otherwise threatening to explode.  A third theory is that given the propensity of Kejriwal to multinational funding for his NGO, it must be the huge multinational corporations who are in doldrums world wide and are sick of paying huge bribes to our politicians, that are behind Hazare Cohorts.  Nobody has any kind of data to substantiate any of these conspiracy theories so they remain Urban Legends.  Whatever be the real purpose of Hazare and his grim men and whoever maybe the strength behind them, the Hazare antics are no longer amusing.  It is a side show that has becoming repetitive like our politics and my posts, so Hazare needs to move on.  Good thing he has made a start by moving from Delhi to Mumbai.  I hope he will soon confine himself to Ralegan Siddhi and that people there will decide about watching his antics or not.

P.S:  I said that this would be a short post.  It is obvious that I lied.

P.P.S: Not proof read.  All grammatical and semantic errors are mine and mine only.  Please bear with me.