2014: The Election That Changed India (14 page)

Since then, I had occasionally met ‘Guruji’ at the prodding of his followers, many of whom were wealthy and powerful women. ‘He is truly a man of God,’ is how one of his devotees described him. Dressed in signature white robes, long hair flying halo-like around
his head, he appeared to exude calm. He once held my hand, looked in my eyes and asked, ‘Are you happy, really happy?’

He may have been offering spiritual solace, but he was surely looking for a greater role for himself in public life. Be it Ayodhya, Kashmir or the Naxal issue, Sri Sri often tried to have his say. The anti-corruption movement offered him another chance. Sri Sri, according to some accounts, was to have been the original ‘face’ of the anti-corruption movement. ‘He was very close to the Sangh Parivar and wanted us to negotiate with the BJP leaders. Once, when we refused, he flew into a rage,’ recalls a Team Anna member.

But the Centre’s reservations over the nature of the anti-corruption movement didn’t stop it from initiating a dialogue with the Team Anna leadership. Here again, the UPA would stumble into a muddle. When Anna’s fast took off, a decision was taken at a meeting in the PMO to forcibly lift him from the stage and hospitalize him. But in a parallel process, then law minister Veerappa Moily claimed he had got the go-ahead from Sonia Gandhi to negotiate with Team Anna. Moily initiated talks with Swami Agnivesh who was part of Hazare’s group but also had an excellent relationship with the government. By 8 April, as the fast entered its fourth day, Moily drafted an agreement to set up a ten-member drafting committee to prepare a fresh Lok Pal Bill. The committee would have five ministers from the government and five representatives chosen by Hazare. It was seen as a compromise solution, but it was a bad compromise which only legitimized Hazare and his team as the official interlocutors on behalf of civil society. ‘It was typical of our confused mind. The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing,’ admits a former Cabinet minister.

Hazare called off his fast the next morning, but the government’s limitations and weakness had been exposed. Three months later, the same government would be brought to its knees as a charged-up Hazare decided to take his agitation to another level by threatening to launch another fast if the Lok Pal Bill was not passed by 15 August. As the deadline approached, the confrontation worsened. On 13 August, Hazare wrote to the prime minister asking him ‘to show
courage’ and instruct the Delhi police to allow him to go ahead with the proposed fast at JP Park in central Delhi. The prime minister declined to intervene.

Then something quite inexplicable happened. A US state department report appeared to back Hazare’s agitation and called on the Indian government to exercise ‘democratic restraint’ in dealing with the anti-corruption protestors. It left ministers and Congress leaders fulminating. ‘Who is Washington to talk to us like this, we must hit back,’ said one minister.

A meeting of senior party and government leaders was called on the night of 13 August at the Congress war room in Gurudwara Rakabganj Road. Rahul Gandhi was yet to return from the US where Sonia was undergoing treatment. At the meeting, the consensus was: ‘We must expose the Anna movement.’ Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari, who had left for Mumbai to be with his ailing mother-in-law, was asked to come back immediately and hold a press conference.

The next day, Tewari followed instructions and lambasted Hazare, suggesting he was ‘corrupt from head to toe’. It was an ill-chosen remark but one that had been officially sanctioned by the party. In his 15 August Independence Day address, Dr Singh was equally combative and said that the power to make laws rested only with Parliament. The battle between Hazare and the government had reached the point of no return.

But on the night of that very Independence Day, the Congress did another U-turn. Rahul had just returned from abroad and was angry with the criticism of Anna. ‘Kindly issue a fresh statement and let us distance ourselves from what Tewari has said about Anna. We must respect him,’ Rahul told chief Congress spokesperson Janardhan Dwivedi. ‘I felt totally abandoned,’ Tewari told me later. He had become the fall guy.

The confusion didn’t end there. Next morning, as Anna was preparing to go to Rajghat to pay his respects at Mahatma Gandhi’s
samadhi
before proceeding to the fast venue, the Delhi police landed up at his residence in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar area and arrested him.

I was on my morning walk when the story broke. Still in a T-shirt and track pants, I rushed, like so many other 24/7 journalists, to the television studio. Little did I know then that for the next thirteen days, the Anna Hazare story would consume the entire airtime of a nation, to the exclusion of all other news.

Who ordered the arrest of Hazare? While the finger of suspicion pointed at the home ministry, Chidambaram told me later that the original decision to ‘detain’ Anna was taken by the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs in the presence of the prime minister and senior ministers. ‘We never wanted to arrest him. We only told the Delhi police to detain him because he wasn’t willing to accept our demand for a time-bound fast. It was the local magistrate who ordered his arrest,’ Chidambaram claimed. By the time the magistrate’s order was reversed (see also chapter 2), it was too late. Public opinion had turned firmly against the government.

Three days later, after intense negotiations, a triumphant Hazare emerged from Tihar jail, was lifted onto a truck and taken to the Ramlila Maidan where he had decided to continue with his fast. The motorcade from Tihar to Ramlila Maidan via Rajghat was another made-for-television moment. Thousands of delirious Hazare supporters cheered him along, showering him with petals and garlands. For the next week, Hazare would sit impassively on a special stage erected at the maidan, a life-size portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in the background. The eyes of an entire nation were riveted on one elderly man, now being projected as a modern-day Gandhi.

Meanwhile, an anxious government was forced to hold a special debate in the Lok Sabha on Hazare’s proposed Lok Pal Bill. The House, after much sound and fury, virtually agreed to all of Hazare’s conditions. On 28 August, Hazare broke his fast with a clenched fist and a ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ war cry. A social activist in the autumn of his life had been transformed into an iconic figure taking on the government of the world’s largest democracy.

That wasn’t the last act of Lok Pal-related errors committed by the UPA-II government in 2011. As the clock wound down to usher in another year, the government made another attempt to pass the
contentious bill in Parliament. After being passed in the Lok Sabha, it was brought to the Rajya Sabha. There, amidst chaotic scenes, the bill was torn up by Rajniti Prasad, an MP from Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD, even as the treasury benches looked on helplessly. Close to midnight, amidst the cacophony, Vice President Hamid Ansari, who was chairman of the Rajya Sabha, adjourned the House. The Opposition accused the government of stage-managing the show. The verdict of the analysts in the studio was unanimous—the UPA had committed political hara-kiri.

Why did the UPA get it all so horribly wrong? Why did canny experienced politicians like Mukherjee, Chidambaram, Khurshid, Sibal fail to deal with what was, after all, a fledgling movement being run by a curious mix of activists of varying backgrounds? Anna Hazare wasn’t Mahatma Gandhi; he wasn’t even Jayaprakash Narayan. His politics had been honed in a village panchayat where he had originally been an environmental activist. He could be stubborn, but he wasn’t known to be unreasonable. And he wasn’t above striking a ‘deal’ if necessary.

And yet, the nature of the UPA’s response suggested that they were handling a national leader of great stature, a fakir-like figure who had intimidated them into submission. I remember meeting the late Vilasrao Deshmukh, the former Maharashtra chief minister, a few months after the noise had died down. Deshmukh was the one finally chosen to broker peace with Hazare. He told me, ‘I wish they had entrusted me with the task from day one. I knew Anna from my Maharashtra days, I would have talked him out of the protests. But our Delhi leaders think they know everything!’

Of these Delhi leaders, Pranab Mukherjee and Chidambaram were the seniormost. Both were seasoned, intelligent politicians. If you wanted to understand how the government functioned, a visit to Pranabda’s house post-11 p.m. was mandatory. He was an encyclopaedia on the Congress party and the Constitution. If you challenged him, he would immediately give you a historical reference. And yet, as the government’s principal troubleshooter, you sensed he was tiring from the workload. ‘I am not getting younger,’ he would
sometimes tell me.

Chidambaram was younger, with a cutting wit and a sharply sardonic tongue, a supremely knowledgeable intellectual powerhouse, but also someone with a trace of arrogance that made him much more difficult to deal with. If you got on his wrong side, there was no escaping his wrath. Once, during a studio discussion, we erred in putting his name in a list of ‘tainted’ ministers. He refused to speak to me for almost two years. ‘Unless I get a public apology, I will not appear on your channel,’ he said with his trademark frostiness. I don’t think he was ready to forgive and forget even after we apologized on air.

It was no secret that Mukherjee and Chidambaram did not get along with each other. ‘Leaked’ reports would often surface that hinted at the two ministers sniping at each other. It didn’t help the UPA-II government that the prime minister’s two most able lieutenants didn’t see eye to eye.

For Manmohan Singh, it was palace intrigue he could have done without in a moment of crisis. The Anna movement hit the credibility of his government by virtually questioning its legitimacy. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for a government under siege. In 2010, the UPA was hobbled by a series of big-ticket corruption allegations. The Delhi Commonwealth Games saw the organizing committee chairperson and Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi being charged with fraud. He was arrested in April 2011, just as the Anna movement first exploded. I had known Kalmadi from my days as a reporter in Mumbai in the early 1990s. He would send us invites for his annual Ganesh celebrations in Pune. ‘Come and enjoy, we will look after everything,’ he would tell the media. I did partake of his hospitality once and then went on to write a slightly critical story. He was fuming. ‘What is this, Rajdeep? We organize the food and drink, and then you turn against us!’

He clearly relished living king-size. The Commonwealth Games for him was not about making money (he had made enough)—it was primarily about power and stature. He was taken up with the idea of rubbing shoulders with British royalty, of being seen as the
czar of Indian sport. He liked distributing largesse to friends. ‘I want everyone to have a good time,’ he said with a laugh. It was this ‘
sab chalta hai
’ brazen attitude that would lead to his downfall.

The bearded Kalmadi with his wicked-looking smile was pitched as the villain of the Commonwealth Games. I remember him asking me once why he was being singled out. ‘My CWG budget is much less than the Delhi government, but still you only focus on me. What about Sheila Dikshit?’ he asked. My answer was simple. ‘Sir, life is about perception. When people see Sheilaji, they are reminded of their
dadima
. When they see you on television, they are convinced you must be a crook!’ I am not sure my answer amused him.

Kalmadi wasn’t the only Maharashtra politician in trouble. In November 2010, Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan was made to resign over allegations that he had misused his power while allotting flats to the Adarsh cooperative society in Mumbai. That very month, the Union telecom minister A. Raja resigned over a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on 2G spectrum allocation.

Chavan, in fact, was made to resign even before an FIR could be filed in the case. When I met him just before he resigned, he had a forlorn look. ‘I am not being given a chance to defend myself. The Adarsh flats were never meant for Kargil widows,’ was his grouse. The truth is, even if he could make out a case, no one was ready to believe him. He was stuck with the label of a chief minister who had builders with questionable reputations hanging around his office all the time.

Frenzied headlines accompanied each scam, pushing the government even further on the defensive. ‘We had become hyper-sensitive to public opinion and what was playing out in the media, especially prime-time television. Some of it was deliberately sensationalized, but we just didn’t know how to counter it,’ confessed a senior minister. In the public perception, the Centre was an inept, corrupt ancien régime, almost as unpopular as the British raj. The Anna movement latched on to this growing public outrage with great dexterity. TV images of swelling crowds only accentuated a
crisis of confidence from which the UPA would never quite recover.

Significantly, Sonia Gandhi wasn’t in the country when the Anna Hazare movement captured the national imagination in August 2011. The leadership vacuum created by her absence was never felt more strongly. Rahul Gandhi, meant to be the de facto leader of the Congress in her absence, was mostly absent as well. At a time when he was needed the most, to rally his forces, seize the political initiative, perhaps even defuse the Anna bomb by reaching out to the elderly campaigner, Rahul abdicated from his responsibilities.

And the prime minister, who should have taken charge, remained largely silent. Dr Singh had never been a great communicator. But in a crisis hour, the prolonged, almost stupefied silence of the man who was officially the chief executive of the Indian state was a recipe for disaster. ‘Dr Singh had outsourced the entire Anna issue to the Congress party and key ministers—he just didn’t want to get involved,’ is how one minister put it to me later. It was almost as if the bureaucrat in Dr Singh had consumed his political being. Anna was a ticking-bomb file that he just didn’t want to touch for fear that it would singe him. His leadership failure as prime minister in those turbulent days would significantly contribute to the eventual demise of the UPA-II government.