The economist said he had a better story. In the late 1970s, when Manmohan Singh was a secretary in the finance ministry, the two had lunch at the India International Centre. After the meal, the economist asked Dr Singh: ‘Do you mind if after dropping you at South Block, your car drops me at my office on Ring Road?’ ‘Do you mind if it didn’t?’ answered Dr Singh, a brush-off as gentle as has ever been delivered or received.
When he assumed office in 2004, Dr Singh was by some distance India’s best educated prime minister. He was the most widely travelled since Jawaharlal Nehru. He was the most honest since Lal Bahadur Shastri. He had a wide range of experience in government, having served as, among other things, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, governor of the Reserve Bank, and finance minister.
There were great hopes of Dr Singh as prime minister. Some thought that the co-author (with P.V. Narasimha Rao) of the first generation of economic reforms would further free entrepreneurs from state control. Others looked forward to the experienced administrator modernizing the civil service by encouraging the lateral entry of professionals. Still others believed that the former secretary of the South-South Commission would adopt a foreign policy independent of American pressures. And everyone expected that a person of rectitude and personal honesty would promote probity in politics and administration.
To those who knew him or knew of him, Manmohan Singh appeared to be a throwback to the age of the honest and intelligent politician: the age of a Jawaharlal Nehru whose main income was the royalty from his (well written and finely argued) books; of an E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who, after serving three terms as chief minister of Kerala, had his house broken into, the thief escaping with 800 rupees and a gold sovereign.
And yet, in a twelve-month period (roughly) beginning September 2011, the government which Dr Singh headed was revealed to be complicit in a series of scams, the most serious of which related to the misappropriation of funds for the Commonwealth Games (CWG), and the underpricing of spectrum allocated to telecom companies. The loss to the public exchequer in these scandals ran into billions of rupees.
Investigations showed that, in both cases, the prime minister’s office had been warned about the diversion of funds as they were taking place. The men in charge of these schemes, Suresh Kalmadi (for the Commonwealth Games) and A. Raja (for the spectrum allocation) had been, if not on the take themselves, clearly in the knowledge that other people were on the take. However, Dr Manmohan Singh did not take any action against either man. Eventually, as a result of concerted pressure in the media, in the streets, and in Parliament, and from the courts, Kalmadi and Raja had to leave their respective posts.
III
About twenty years ago, I found myself in the same room as Anna Hazare, at a meeting organized by the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. Mr Hazare was becoming known in environmental circles for the work he had done in his native village, Ralegan Siddhi, which is located in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. His successful programmes of watershed conservation and afforestation stood in stark contrast to the efforts of the state forest department, which had handed over vast tracts of virgin forests to industry. Moreover, whereas the forest department was hostile to community participation, identifying villagers as ‘enemies of the forest’, Hazare had energized peasants to care for and renew their natural environment.
When Anna Hazare came into that Delhi meeting room of the early 1990s he wore the same dress as he does now—white kurta, white pyjamas and white Gandhi cap. He exuded the same simplicity. But, as I recall, he spoke softly, even with some diffidence. He was not entirely at home in a hall filled with urban folks whose cultural, albeit not moral, capital was far greater than his.
It is said that power and wealth make men younger. So, apparently, does the attention of television. As we become older, the rest of us grow less alert, less energetic, less combative. In the summer and autumn of 2011, Anna Hazare defied this law of biology. For the man Indians then saw on their television screens was not the man I once saw in that seminar room in New Delhi. He challenged and taunted the central government and its ministers, wagging his finger at the cameras. Once, Hazare was the voice and conscience of the village of Ralegan Siddhi; now he demanded that he be seen as the saviour of the nation itself.
In August 2011, while Anna Hazare was fasting in Ramlila Maidan, television channels claimed that Anna Hazare represented the overwhelming bulk of Indians. Print, cyberspace and soundings on the street suggested a more complicated picture. Liberals worried about the dangers to policy reform contained in street agitations led by men whose perfervid rhetoric undermined constitutional democracy. Dalits and backward castes saw it a reprise of the anti-Mandal agitation, led and directed by savarna activists.
To these political reservations may be added the caution of the empirical sociologist. The population of the Delhi metropolitan area is in excess of ten million; yet at their height, the crowds in the Ramlila Maidan never exceeded 50,000. In May 1998, 400,000 residents of Kolkata had marched in protest against the Pokharan blasts. No one then had said that ‘India stands against Nuclear Bombs’. Now, however, as television cameras endlessly showed the same scenes at the same place, we were told that ‘India is for Anna’; even, at one stage, that ‘Anna is India and India is Anna’.
That said, it would be unwise to dismiss the resonance or social impact of the campaign led by Anna Hazare. It came on the back of a series of scandals promoted by the UPA government—CWG, 2G, Adarsh, et al. The media coverage of these scandals had led to a sense of disgust against this government in particular, and (what was more worrying) against the idea of government in general. It was this moment, this mood, this anger and this sense of betrayal, that Anna Hazare had ridden on. Hence the transformation of a previously obscure man from rural Maharashtra into a figure of—even if fleetingly—national importance.
Hazare had previously campaigned against corruption in Maharashtra. His fasts in New Delhi in April and August 2011 massively expanded his reach and reputation. The fasts were conducted to compel the central government to create a Lokpal, an ombudsman with the powers to arrest and convict corrupt officials. In another time the solution would have been seen as simplistic. But with the prevailing atmosphere of disgust with the government, Hazare’s programme acquired a compelling appeal. For, 2G and CWG were (admittedly colossal) symbols of a far more pervasive problem. Large-scale scams notwithstanding, at an everyday level the citizen was met with grasping policemen, tax inspectors, electricity and ration shop officials, et al. From registering your child’s birth to registering your father’s death, to getting a gas connection or a building permit, citizens knew that what was by law their right would only be granted if currency notes were transferred from them to an official of the state.
There were therefore, twin, complementary sources of Hazare’s appeal—his own sincerity and simplicity (he had no bank account and slept in the village temple) and the fact that more or less all Indians knew the impact of corruption at first-hand. Now, as he fasted in Delhi, the movement led by Anna Hazare gathered resonance and force. Lawyers and human rights activists clustered around him. Film stars turned up to show their support. In cities and towns across India, citizens gathered in markets and parks and street corners, discussing, mostly with admiration, the character of the saint who had come to cleanse the nation. Marches and candlelight vigils were held to show solidarity with ‘India Against Corruption’, the title now adopted by Hazare and his movement. The young people who participated in these marches had not previously heard of the miracle worker of Ralegan Siddhi; now, however, he had become the symbol and leader of a countrywide fight against corruption.
Hazare’s success, at least among the middle classes, was in part because he appeared to be everything the prime minister and his ministers were not—courageous, independent-minded, willing to stake his life for a principle. In an otherwise sceptical piece—which, among other things, called Anna Hazare a ‘moral tyrant’ presiding
over a ‘comical anti-corruption opera’—the columnist C.P. Surendran remarked that ‘a party that can’t argue its case against a retired army truck driver whose only strength really is a kind of stolid integrity and a talent for skipping meals doesn’t deserve to be in power’.
It was precisely these two strengths—honesty and the willingness to eschew food, and by extension, the material life altogether—that shone in comparison with the dishonest and grasping men on the other side. The contrast was then stoked and inflated by the electronic media, which repeatedly showed a split screen of Hazare on one side and the prime minister on the other. This was a face-off with only one winner.
IV
During Anna Hazare’s first fast in New Delhi in April 2011, he was often compared, in the media and beyond, to Jayaprakash Narayan, who, in the mid-1970s, had led a countrywide movement against the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. During his second fast, in August, Hazare was elevated further. Now, in news reports, columns, and chat shows, he was compared to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Father of the Nation himself.
Let us take these comparisons in turn. Once a hero of the Quit India Movement, then a founder of the Socialist Party, Jayaprakash Narayan (known familiarly as ‘JP’) abandoned politics for social work in the 1950s. Two decades later, he returned to politics at the invitation of students disenchanted with corruption in Bihar. At first, JP focused attention on his own state; then, much as Hazare did three decades later, his struggle moved outwards to embrace the whole of India.
In the late summer of 1974, as his movement was gathering ground, JP went to Vellore for a surgical operation. While he was recovering, his associate Acharya Ramamurti kept him up to date with the struggle. Ramamurti’s communications noted, with some alarm, the entry of a political party into a professedly ‘apolitical’ movement. While JP was away, wrote his colleague, ‘the leadership of the movement at least at local levels, is passing into the hands of the Jana Sangh’. Ramamurti also worried that ‘the common man has yet to be educated into the ways and values of our movement, whose appeal to him continues to be more negative than constructive’.
After some weeks in hospital, JP returned to Bihar. In September 1974, he invited his friend R.K. Patil to come observe the situation at first-hand. Patil was in his own way a considerable figure, who had quit the Indian Civil Service to join the freedom struggle, and later worked in rural development in Maharashtra. He now travelled through Bihar, speaking to a cross section of JP’s supporters and critics, and to many bystanders as well.
On his return to Nagpur, Patil wrote JP a long letter with his impressions. He appreciated ‘the tremendous popular enthusiasm generated by the movement’. However, he deplored its disparaging of political parties in particular and of constitutional democracy in general. As a man of intelligence and principle, Patil was ‘well aware of the patent drawbacks of the Government presided over by Indira Gandhi’. But he did not think it ‘wise to substitute for the law of “Government by Discussion”, the law of “Government by Public Street Opinion”’. Patil reminded JP that ‘there is no other way of ascertaining the general opinion of the people in a Nation-State, except through free and fair elections’.
The materials of history thus suggest that the parallels between JP and Anna Hazare are less comforting than we might suppose. Front organizations of the Jana Sangh’s successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party, played an increasingly active role in ‘India against Corruption’. While Anna Hazare was perhaps not to be blamed for the infiltration of his movement by partisan interests, he certainly stood guilty, as did JP, of suggesting that the street—or the maidan—should have a greater say in political decision-making than a freely elected Parliament.
As for Gandhi, the distance between Anna Hazare and the Mahatma in terms of moral courage and political understanding is roughly equivalent to the distance, in terms of cricketing ability and understanding, between this writer and Sachin Tendulkar. To see how far from Gandhi Anna Hazare is, one need only read, first, Louis Fischer’s classic The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and, after that, Mukul Sharma’s recent book, Green and Saffron. Sharma is an admired environmental journalist, who did extensive fieldwork in Hazare’s village of Ralegan Siddhi. He was impressed by much of what he saw. Careful management of water had improved crop yields, increased incomes, and reduced indebtedness. On the other hand, he found the approach of Anna Hazare ‘deeply brahmanical’. Liquor, tobacco, even cable TV were forbidden. Dalit families were compelled to adopt a vegetarian diet. Those who violated these rules—or orders—were tied to a post and flogged.
Sharma found that on Hazare’s instructions, no panchayat elections had been held in the village for the past two decades. During state and national elections, no campaigning was allowed in Ralegan Siddhi. The reporter concluded that ‘crucial to this genuine reform experiment is the absolute removal from within its precincts of many of the defining ideals of modern democracy’.
During those fevered few days in New Delhi, when Hazare fasted with an image of Mohandas K. Gandhi behind him, a young journalist told me that ‘while Gandhi became a Mahatma through his own efforts, we in the media have made a village patriarch a Gandhi’. In fact, Hazare is not even a ‘Gandhian’. He has both preached and practised violence, and has never seriously pursued such quintessentially Gandhian projects as the abolition of caste distinctions, women’s emancipation, and Hindu–Muslim harmony. The distance between Hazare and Gandhianism can be judged if one visits the cooperatives and banks run in Gujarat by the Self-Employed Women’s Association, whose founder, Ela Bhatt, has successfully nurtured ideals of caste and gender equality, and religious pluralism, among lakhs and lakhs of previously sectarian and narrow-minded Indians.
In the last week of August 2011—after the ending of Hazare’s second fast in New Delhi—I received a mail from a friend who lives in Maharashtra, and has three decades of experience as a researcher and administrator in that state. ‘That Anna Hazare is personally honest and frugal,’ he wrote, ‘is beyond question.’ He added:
What has really changed over the years is that probably because of the buildup by those in proximity to him, he has started seeing a larger, world changing role for himself. Unfortunately, this has not been accompanied by an enlarged world view or by access to advisers who could articulate such an enlarged world view. His seeming successes in getting Maharashtra to adopt an RTI act (admittedly weak) years before the Central Act and campaigning against certain Ministers in the then Congress–NCP Government in Maharashtra have imbued him not only with a sense of purpose but also probably with a sense of infallibility in the rightness of his approach to public issues. However, Anna’s ability to attract [people with] his standards of rectitude is in question. From personal experience, I can say that a number of those in different talukas and districts who have been nominated by him to man the local Corruption Eradication Committees were themselves of highly dubious quality. Some of them were even caught indulging in corrupt activities. While Anna did remove such persons as and when instances were brought to his notice, it does highlight the dangers of entrusting responsibilities on a large scale to persons whose integrity it would be difficult to vouch for. A similar question could arise in the context of the present agitation: can he vouch for the integrity and motives of even those closely associated with him?
The assessment was astute, as well as prophetic. Hazare’s limited world view was manifest during his agitation, as when he said that senior government ministers did not understand India because they had taken degrees at foreign universities. As it happens, among those educated abroad were the two greatest social reformers of modern India, M.K. Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar.
Meanwhile, Hazare’s judgement of whom to trust was also quickly called into question. One close adviser was found not to have honoured a financial agreement made voluntarily to his employer; another to have regularly fudged her travel bills. The amounts unpaid or pilfered were trifling compared to those stolen by gov
ernment ministers. Still, the fact that activists of an ‘anti-corruption’ movement were found guilty of deceit, even petty deceit, should have been reason enough for Hazare to dispense with them. But he did not, perhaps because he thought that they were necessary to act as intermediaries between him and the New Delhi television channels who had helped make him a national figure in the first place.
V
Shortly after Dr Manmohan Singh was sworn in for his second term in office, Khushwant Singh wrote that he was the best prime minister India has had. Khushwant is reliable on some matters: such as the history of the Sikhs, the attractions of Scotch whisky, and the poetry of Mohammed Iqbal. He is a man of enormous charm, with a large fund of good and bad jokes. But in so far as politicians go, he has a disastrous track record. He once saw in the ruffian Sanjay Gandhi the redeemer of the nation.
Even at the time, Khushwant’s praise of Manmohan Singh seemed excessive. But why has this honest, intelligent, experienced man been such a disappointment as prime minister? Here are four reasons, roughly in order of importance:
His timidity, bordering at times on obsequiousness, towards the president of the Congress party. Dr Singh was evidently so grateful to Sonia Gandhi for having made him prime minister, that he yielded to her on matters which were within his preserve rather than hers—such as the appointment of ministers, governors and ambassadors; and the framing of public policies and laws. In truth, Mrs Gandhi needed Dr Singh almost as much as he needed her. She did not become prime minister in 2004 because she knew she was plainly unqualified—never having worked in government, how could she conduct Cabinet meetings, have official meetings with visiting presidents and prime ministers, participate in international conferences on climate change, etc.? Mrs Gandhi had bestowed on Dr Singh an unexpected gift; however, by accepting it, he had done her a favour, too. He should have made more of this reciprocity—by, for example, insisting that incompetent or malevolent ministers be replaced.