A government under siege

The Manmohan Singh Government has mishandled the Anna Hazare movement at every step of the way. The tragi-comedy of the latter's arrest and the subsequent release by the Delhi Police is one more in a sad series of false steps and rank miscalculations ever since Anna Hazare dared to take on the Government on the issue last April. It is evident that the Government has run out of options, having tried every trick it knew and come a cropper each time. It first tried to run down the movement by the simple tactic of painting it in communal colours and, when that didn't work, tried outflanking it by propping up a parallel movement through yoga guru Baba Ramdev, and then attempted to stall the process through sham consultations.

What is most disappointing is that the Prime Minister chose, despite such overwhelming evidence of governmental failure, to recount merely to Parliament the sequence of events, besides trotting out some well-worn clichés about mysterious forces out to destabilise the country. He could so easily have given the debate a political context by conceding the point that his Government would be guided by the collective wisdom of the members of both Houses of Parliament. It is not as though the Government did not have a prima facie case on whether it is desirable to include the office of Prime Minister within the ambit of Lok Pal as also on certain other provisions that Team Anna Hazare proposed. It could, for instance, have easily argued for a clause-by-clause reading of the Bill proposed by the latter and left it to the collective judgement of the members of Parliament. Additionally, it could have also suggested that the key features of the Bill be discussed in the State legislatures and be adopted as House resolutions in the respective legislative Assemblies with such modifications as each individual State Assembly may deem fit. These two steps would have refurbished its credentials as fighting corruption in public life while also seeking public opinion in the drafting of the legislation.

The problem is that the Government is still heady with the success it had achieved in the electoral battle of 2009 and has assumed that such success confers on it political legitimacy for governance, as public opinion already stands expressed. Hence, nothing that civil society proposes has either political or moral authority going for it. The problem with this approach is that it ignores a fundamental precept that even one week may be a long time in politics. Dr Manmohan Singh may have succeeded spectacularly once in 2008, by refusing to budge on the question of the nuclear deal with the United States and got everyone to rally around him. He would do well to not adopt the same strategy this time round.

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