The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Thursday 2 August 2012

THE DAY A PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT DIED

Like tens of thousands, I can say I, too, am highly disappointed with Team Anna and Anna Hazare. I happened to be a committed supporter and wrote regularly on the movement. But I was left with a bad taste by the way the movement lost its direction.  I had decided I would not write on the movement again but what precipitated out today at Jantar Mantar reminds me of what I have written in the past – the possibilities that could drive home the nemesis of the 16-month old ‘people-driven’ anti-corruption movement.

While I still have respect for Anna Hazare for what he has been in the past, his over dependence on Team Anna and the subsequent lack of vision in engineering a revolutionary anti-corruption movement has killed the hopes of the man on the street again.

When Anna Hazare hastily declared today that his team was going to form a political party and would contest elections, it wasn’t really a roar but a disoriented call out of frustration. After the high of the August fast last year, the movement consistently saw base erosion. There were writings on the wall but no Team Anna member bothered to read the warning signs. Instead, they continued to disappoint us with one-after-the-other internal team conflicts.  They continued to fall prey to more of their own schemes than to the political con. They simply made the work of politicians in derailing the Lokpal Bill a lot easier.

Anna Hazare and Team Anna launched the movement and steered it well in the build-up phase but could never convert it into the anti-corruption crusade it should have been.


And it is never about being political or apolitical. Sooner or later, a movement that blends elements of social and political reforms by targeting corruption in every social formation had to take a political turn but not before the required groundwork was done. What started as an apolitical movement in Delhi had to reach to the smaller towns and villages, acquiring political shades in process. Once a considerable clout was there, an announcement made today would certainly be seen as a big-ticket one. 


But that would require time and persistence in doing the ground work that the Team Anna never looked doing. Hisar election campaigning or Uttar Pradesh district tours - what they did was just poorly thought expressions of self-motivated aggrandizement. 

So, today, after 16 months, we had the volunteers of the outfit ‘India Against Corruption’ throwing their badges and ID cards. Remember, these volunteers had worked day-in and day-out, round the clock, to ensure the smooth run of the different phases of this anti-corruption movement. Many other important people associated with the movement were not taken into confidence. While the political class is all smiles today, the dissenting voices in the so-called Team Anna are getting stronger gradually.

This is not the way mass movements on ‘nation building issues’ are handled - donning the urban spectacle, while handling a movement that requires hinterland access, too, has come out to become the ultimate doom of the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare.

It is not about few thousands of ‘Sunday in CP’ loving Delhi crowd but it is about the millions of the Indians who are crushed daily by the corrupt political and bureaucratic machinery.


The anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare needed to realize it in the very beginning. They couldn’t. And today’s events tell they had lost the plot much earlier.

No doubt, the anti-corruption movement has fizzled out due to the clique around Anna Hazare. Now that a political outfit is announced, we need to be prepared for another round of war of words with politicians in full throttle this time.

An effective Lokpal could have heralded the departure of many of the active politicians to the days of ignominy. So they all came on-board to sabotage the movement and they have got their grand success today. The word Lokpal has again become the football with no goal-posts drawn.

For us, the Indians on the street, this bedraggled game of political skullduggery is nothing but the meaner games our politicians have been playing with us.  Yes, but the way Team Anna reduced the movement to the personal-agenda of very few is going to add to the misery of the common Indians as they have been let down by the very persons who had fired the spark in them to fight the monster of corruption.


©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/