Nitish and The Anna Effect

Hari Ram Pandey
If you are a dynast or a lawyer in the power game, you could never understand politics. Both the Congress and the BJP do not understand politics, which is why they are helpless in the face of the dramatic rise of the Anna Hazare movement. The one politician who does understand politics and has, therefore, unsurprisingly supported Anna Hazare is Nitish Kumar. Nitish Kumar is neither a dynast nor a lawyer. He will go places.

There cannot be a more privileged Indian dynast than Rahul Gandhi. Although he had no hand in the early release of Anna Hazare from detention, the slavish Congress machinery is already making him a hero, a line willingly toed by some newspapers. But that is irrelevant detail. The big story is Rahul Gandhi will never be PM, not unless he gets over the fright of the job, which he will fail anyway. You cannot get to be a bigger dynast than Rahul Gandhi. But the way to the top is still closed for you, or the summit scares. The Gandhis of today do not understand politics.

So the Gandhis hide behind lawyers, and the Congress party is chock-a-block with lawyers. There is smarmy P.Chidambaram who nobody believes any longer. His 2009 election stands challenged in court. Then Arun Shourie called the other Congress hotshot counsel, Kapil Sibal, a buccaneer in print. And there is Manish Tewari, who has no notion of political decorum. This band of dynasts and too-clever lawyers is running the Congress party -- and running it rapidly to ground.

The BJP is scarcely better. One of its prime-ministerial aspirants is Arun Jaitley. He has never fought a Lok Sabha election so you cannot say for certain he will ever win one. That nevertheless does not preclude him from getting the top job in the fashion of Manmohan Singh, but Manmohan Singh cannot be anyone's ideal today. Jaitley knows no politics, and, worse, appears not to care. This is the result of having journalists as advisers. Jaitley is part of the status-quoists in the BJP who hope to ride the Anna wave to power in 2014 or earlier.

Trouble is being status quoist (which a grounded politician never is) won't assist either Jaitley or the BJP. The Jaitley/ BJP position broadly is that the executive can push the most perverse bills through Parliament and only civil society's right to protest cannot be curbed. The party which appears increasingly to be lead by lawyers (see the fate of Pakistan, a nation brought into being by a deceitful barrister) fails to answer some obvious questions. Who elects Parliament? It is not the MPs, surely. And who backs the Anna movement? Not some foreign power, even though the Congress may expect you and me to believe that. The people are behind Anna, and the same people elect Parliament.

Therefore, like it or not, Parliament has to engage Anna and his team that have come to represent the people presently. (The fact of mid-term election upsets in the US suggests no government can claim to be solely representative for its entire term.) Public opinion manifestly is against the UPA, the most corrupt government since Independence. It cannot be trusted to fight corruption, and its version of the Lok Pal is an affront to the Indian people. The BJP cannot take refuge in narrow constitutionality. It cannot think it can leech on the Anna movement even while preserving the present order for its advantage. Only a party of lawyers would scheme so shamelessly, and fail without knowing why.

In a sentence, the BJP has to get back to basics. It has to shed its lawyers and commence learning politics all over again.

If politics had prevailed, the system would have gained by Anna Hazare. The UPA correctly made the Anna team joint drafters of the Lok Pal bill initially. The Indian state is famed for politics. Politics is the core reason for its survival despite the multitude of contradictions. Politics heals. There is no call to believe that an agreement between Anna's team and the UPA couldn't have been reached. The PM has to be under the Lok Pal. The judiciary has to have another independent oversight institution. This is what will eventually happen. It cannot be stopped. The UPA and Anna's team could have easily agreed on this, provided the UPA had honourable intentions, which it didn't.

So where does it all lead? The bare minimum that all of India expects of any Lok Pal law has been set out in the earlier paragraph. Any party that can deliver that gets India's vote. This is the clear message from the spontaneous nationwide support for Anna Hazare's mission. Any political party and any political individual that understands politics will immediately grasp this message. As this writer sees it, only Nitish Kumar today is fully alive to Anna Hazare's politics. If Nitish Kumar remains the only one to be honestly engaged with democratic politics, he will sooner than later get India's vote.