If I am asked to name the one dominant characteristic of Anna Hazare's India Against Corruption (IAC) agitation that had been hogging the headlines for the better part of 2011, my instant response would be: Irrational exuberance. It was also its supreme weakness.

That was why it was so ill-conducted and ended up as a messy business. Only Anna's illness, coming in handy as a timely alibi, has saved it from being viewed as a rout. The paltry turnout of people at the vast MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority) maidan , and that too in his own home State, must have been too much for the poor man to bear.

With the jail bharo call withdrawn, picketing of residences of Dr Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Sheila Dixit and MPs dropped and the planned campaign against the Congress by Anna in the States going to the polls in February in doubt, the movement lies in a shambles. Even if an attempt were to be made by IAC to pick up the pieces and move on from where it left off, it can never regain its blinding luminescence. The magic is gone.

The political establishment as a whole, regardless of party labels and protestations of keenness to end corruption for public consumption, could not have wished for a more cheery outcome.

It has been saved for the present from the misery of having a Lokpal hanging like a millstone round its neck.

The problem with Anna was that having been a small-time social activist and public figure of modest background, he was carried away by the unusual experience of the adulation he received from the huge gatherings he attracted in the early stages of his movement. The electronic media for reasons of their own decided to give him a rousing build-up with their continuous coverage of his every move and word.

It was essentially a synthetic euphoria, and liable to go the way of all such phenomena once the public appeal waned for want of a solid and credible strategy.

WILY WAYS

Anna's repeated threats of going on fast soon failed to cut ice. Jail bharo and stuff also had long ago lost their novelty. For the governing class all this was old hat. It was not going to be shaken unless the resort to these methods was really on an unprecedentedly massive scale, drawing to its vortex hundreds of thousands of people all over the country over a prolonged period. This did not happen. So, once the initial shock wore off, the Government manoeuvred to put the Lokpal Bill in cold storage by adopting diversionary tactics and sowing confusion, dissension and division.

The only members of Team Anna who could have taken on the Government with an awareness of its wily ways and with the experience of handling complex issues were Justice Santosh Hegde and Messrs Prashant Bhushan and Shanti Bhushan.

In my opinion, they alone in the team had the necessary savvy to ensure that the movement did not lose its momentum and the Government was kept on a tight leash.

SPECTACULAR DISPLAY

But, these seasoned persons with matching credentials were sidelined and Anna became excessively dependent on Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi. Their understanding of the nuances of dealing with the Government was not equal to the demands of the situation. Anna's many flip-flops can only be explained by impulsive and counter-productive advice.

It is clear that Anna's movement would not have made the impact it did, if it did not have at its disposal enormous funds to take care of the infrastructural and organisational arrangements.

Does it mean that good causes are fated to fall by the wayside if the organisations fighting for them cannot muster resources of a similar order?

I think the more enduring model of civil society mobilisation for a cause, especially in a democracy, is that of Aruna Roy's Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (Workers and Peasants Strength Union) which laid the groundwork for the Right to Information Act without the kind of spectacle and drama associated with Anna's movement.

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