Anna Hazare flop show in Mumbai
Never take people of India for granted, they punished Team Anna….people of Maharashtra clearly showed that the people have no time for the likes of BJP and SS, who may be appear to be less corrupt, but far more communal. For millions the choice was between communal or a corrupt party, it is always the latter.
I stopped fasting because the day I fast I fart a lot, I also bark because I am angry when I am hungry…!!! My wife has given me a strict instruction No Religious fasting, No weekly fasting, No Medical fasting, No Navratri, No Ramazan, No Paryushana, No Janmanstami, No Ramnavmi, etc… my wife believes that fasting is religious but farting is unreligious; thank god Anna is unmarried…!!!
Why Anna’s fasting is different than mine? He is not married so he is not worried, one thing I don’t understand who decide when Anna will fast? At which city he will fast? How many days to fast? Why to do marketing of his fasting? I am confused that why he needs to rent out MMRDA with the size of 20,000 sq.mt meters for rally, 10,000 sq.mt parking (total area is 48,000 sq.mt) this will accommodate around 40,000 people at the time? Distributing pamphlets at railway stations and roads, a free bus service from Bandra and Kurla railway stations to BKC, volunteers were deployed at the railways stations plead commuters to attend rally and directing them to free buses – over and above…!!!
It was like big reality show a separate stage for media, his stage with 12 feet height, consisting of 1 rest room with a cot, bed sheet and mattresses, and washroom, a live musical program, The team of Doctors from Jaslok, Asian heart and Bombay Hospital and 8-10 ambulances standby – also 3000 police for day and night security and the live screen telecasting the Parliaments proceedings…!!! What a fast, very fast, super fast!!! Is this a fasting, feasting or farting? Why can he simply build a small tent in the close proximity of parliament to protest? Why the big fuss? Did Mahatma Gandhi market his fasting?
Members of Team Anna like Kiran Bedi acting like a Chulbul Pandey of Dabaang and Arvind Kejriwal the Rancho of 3 Idiots, both were desperate to promote themselves and were targeting the congress the ruling party, common man saw that congress led government actually making effort to get the bill through and now, paradoxically, team Anna was against it, that was the perhaps biggest mistake of all and cause of the flop show.
It was surprising that BJB voted against Lokpal Bill, Anna abruptly left the stage and when media persisted in asking him why he wasn’t targeting the BJP, which had voted against the bill to give the Lokpal constitutional status? No one has the answer. That shows there motives and hidden agenda on upcoming elections!!!
I told my wife that I will fast for 3 days, she warned me “if you fast for 3 days then I am not going to stay with you? After sometime she questioned me “by the way, why you want to fast?” I replied “I want to support Anna” she laughed and said “team Anna winded up their baggage one day before and gone home, it was a flop show” she checked with me “three groups are fighting in Team Anna, North-Indian; Maharashtrian or Ralegan Siddhi to whom you will support?
That reminded me the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi who believed in the purity of means to achieve noble ends. Anna showcased that as long as the ends were noble, the means did not matter. This Mahatma Gandhi would never agree with.
Just by wearing Gandhi topi you cannot become Mahatma Gandhi…!!!
This post dated: 29th December 2011
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Anna Hazare flop show in Mumbai « goodbadnews | Anna Hazare said this on December 29, 2011 at 9:43 pm |
India has political vacuum now since a while. All options, right-to-left, and communist-to-capitalist has been tried to solve corruption, poverty etc and they all failed. Unlike 1970s and 1980s, no party with different strategy is untested which makes people desperate to support anyone they found right. Ramdev & Anna were beneficiary of this vacuum. They never had sound plan to curb corruption, and they frequently failed to satisfactorily answer very common questions related to the strategies they promoted. But unfortunately, their strategies are already tried and failed multiple times in multiple countries, and so intellectuals has no interest in continuing discussing them. That’s why Anna failed.
Had Anna offered something that is never tried anywhere (or at least not tried in recent centuries), people would have looked to it with hope, intellectual class would have spend millions of hours to discuss it keeping peoples interest alive, and crowd around him would have been larger. However, to make the proposal through, Anna needed to be a strong debater and able to answer tough questions satisfactorily in after offering brand new solution.
Unfortunately, Anna lacks strong debating power and his solution Jan Lokpal is chewed one lacking freshness. In April and then in August, there was a lot of suspense about future of Jan Lokpal, which may have contributed to getting crowds. Now future is almost known. No wonder he failed.
I don’t agree that Team Anna was a failure. It was the UPA that brought in a clause of the same old and useless (proved till now) system of “quota” when it came to selecting the “Lokpal Team”.
It was a totally “politically motivated” act by the ruling UPA government just to gain “attention” from the “minorities” for their upcoming elections in the “heartland olitics” of Uttar Pradesh.
The “quota” system has in no-way brought up the “socio-economic” status of the minorities. It is the same as before the implementation of the quota system. Further, bringing in a quota system into the “Jan-Lokpal” bill is against the “FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT to EQUALITY” of an individual. Team Anna has rightfully rejected the Bill proposed by the UPA.
As far as the things like arranging free buses, volunteering, etc. I don’t support with the “thinking” that it was a “reality show” or a “Publicity Stunt” but I see it as a great initiative to gather people to ensure that they don’t face problems like ‘not getting an auto/ errant auto drivers’, ‘late buses’, ‘traffic jams’ and other commuting problems which are all a result of “CORRUPTION”…!!!!..
People like me can go by a “Chaffeur driven-car” and can fret upon by calling it a “Reality Show” but the arrangement of buses was for the ultimate beneficiaries and people who cant afford to go by car but have to fight against a system which has turned hostile to them. They are just too tired of this CORRUPTION mess. !!
Harsh,
I understand Anna is better than ruling ally, and that’s why people initially supported Anna.
Now since people didn’t show up, Team Anna need to introspect their strategy, identify mistakes and make sure they don’t repeat them. Blaming others won’t work. I noticed the following mistakes which I emailed to different team Anna members twice and I have not received any response yet.
1. They try to stay in news most of the time for wrong reasons. Like Congratulation to Sehwag after double century, “Anna is India and India is Anna”, “Anna is above Parliament”, “Slap to power, ek hi mara kya” etc. Team Anna don’t need to express an opinion about everything, just stay focused and keep discussing JLP, else people like myself will assume that Team Anna’s work is more for publicity and less for real removal of corruption.
2. Don’t stop smaller level anti-corruption activities. I would have looked to Anna with great admire had he been in news 10 times for filing corruption complains against officials between August and December this year. That’s how Anna got people’s attention and now it seems that Anna has changed policy.
3. Do not arrange too many gatherings for same reasons. People get tired of a lot of activities.
4. Try to expand base. Do not focus only on Delhi or Mumbai. Have a gathering every week or so in different regions of the country. This will give more people opportunity to get involved without getting tired.
5. Listen to the people. There are a lot of logical questions being asked by people. Have answered ready and publish it when appropriate. Some questions like this got no clear answer by Team Anna members: “We have so called independent election commission and justice system, both are failed and corrupt. Why do you believe Jan Lokapal will not be same way?”
6. Find charismatic speakers. Anna himself don’t sound an excellent orator. Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal often drag speeches in truthful but needless details which most of the audience don’t understand.
7. Spend more time on explaining how Jan Lokpal will help cure corruption. Team Anna seems more interested in bashing ruling coalition and less interested in discussing solutions.
Anna Hazare’s messianic stature owes less to media hype nd more to muddled government responses and the public’s sense of dissaffection with corruption -
Those who live by the media are often slain by it. At the 2011 CNN-IBN Indian of the Year awards, Anna Hazare candidly admitted that it was the media which was responsible for his rise from a regional figure in Maharashtra into a national icon. “If your cameras had not followed me everywhere, who would know me?” was the activist’s honest response.
Today, the same media reports on Hazare’s flop show in Mumbai, on how an anti-corruption stir has become an anti-Congress agitation and how Hazare’s fasts amount to coercive blackmail. Last week, Mani Shankar Aiyar, the ruling class’s last iconoclast, referred to Anna as a “Frankenstein monster”, mirroring the views of several politicians who are convinced that Hazare is a media creation threatening parliamentary democracy. But was the media hype really responsible for Hazare’s larger-than-life image?
There is little doubt that over the last nine months, Hazare’s advisers used the media quite brilliantly. Prime time press conferences, made for TV spectacles, social networking campaigns: Hazare did benefit from saturated media coverage. Yes, some of it was high-pitched, and yes, some journalists did become Hazare’s cheerleaders. But to see Hazare as purely a media phenomenon would be a misreading of the mood on the street. Crowds were attracted to Hazare not because the TV cameras were there, but because he appeared the antithesis of a morally bankrupt political leadership beset with a series of scams.
Rewind to April when Hazare first descended on the national capital. Just before the first fast in Jantar Mantar, Hazare addressed a press conference at the Press Club. The attendance was thin, and Anna remained at best an object of curiosity for the national media. Yet, even before the fast could really take off, Union minister Sharad Pawar resigned from the group of ministers on the lokpal, thereby almost vindicating Hazare’s claim that a “corrupt” Pawar could not be on an anti-corruption law panel. Two days later, Hazare’s cause was further bolstered when the government issued a formal notification in the official gazette, setting up a joint drafting committee that would discuss and draft a strong Lokpal Bill. The members of the committee would be a 50-50 divide of government ministers and a unique concept called ‘Team Anna’.
Till April 9, Hazare was just another voice in the ongoing debate over an anti-corruption law. The singular act of agreeing to formally negotiate with his appointees on the lokpal automatically legitimised him and his ‘team’ as the sole spokespersons for ‘civil society’. Suddenly, respected figures like Aruna Roy, Jaiprakash Narayan (of Loksatta) and a number of anti-corruption activists who had also worked hard on the lokpal legislation were confined to the margins. Did the media ask the government to make Team Anna the exclusive interlocutors of civil society, or was this a reflection of a government mindset eager to appease all shades of NGOs and their fellow-travellers? To compound the political error, all nominees on the government side were Congress ministers, effectively making the negotiations a Congress versus Team Anna exercise rather than a wider, more inclusive process.
If April 9 was a bad mistake, what followed on June 5 was another blunder. The Delhi police’s midnight crackdown to end Baba Ramdev’s fast against black money came barely 72 hours after four senior ministers had rushed to the airport to receive the yoga guru. Treating Ramdev almost like a visiting head of State one moment, then as a criminal the very next, was a flip-flop of the worst kind that further discredited the government.
The third, and perhaps the most serious, error came on August 16 when the Delhi police arrested Hazare as he prepared for a second fast. By first denying him access to the fast venue, and then sending him to judicial custody, the government ensured Hazare’s transformation from anti-corruption crusader to martyred messiah. During Hazare’s fast in April, a huge Bharat Mata poster had formed the backdrop, with Baba Ramdev sharing stage space and Art of Living guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s supporters providing vocal support. By August, when Hazare fasted at Ramlila Maidan, the Bharat Mata poster had been replaced by a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, Ramdev had disappeared, and even Sri Sri was a peripheral presence.
Moreover, the arrest provided the trigger for thousands to take to the streets: this was no longer about a lokpal or an anti-corruption law which most Indians knew little about, but an expression of general disaffection with a system that was seen to be arrogant and corrupt. Hazare, as the self-sacrificing ‘fakir’ like figure was the perfect mascot for the angry, anonymous Indian. The ‘I am Anna’ caps and T-shirts on sale marked the complete ‘personalisation’ of the movement: the journey from an environmentalist at Ralegan Siddhi to folk hero at Ram Lila was done. Hazare’s triumph appeared complete when Parliament, in a desperate bid to end his fast, passed a hurried ‘sense of the House’ resolution on the Lokpal Bill. So again the question: did the media push the government to arrest Hazare, or was this also the irrational act of an establishment in panic mode?
In the end, both the State and Team Anna mistook the medium for the message. Team Anna saw the frenzied coverage as its main weapon, forgetting that democratic politics is not a repetitive television serial, but a tortuous process of negotiation and conciliation. The State, on the other hand, failed to recognise that cacophony will be part of a media environment in which there are more than 350 news channels and several hundred OB vans across India. The media will be a loudspeaker of grievances, not just of Team Anna, but of many other protest movements in the future. Strong leaders will not be swayed by the noise, a wise civil society will seek legitimacy beyond the camera lens.