Team Anna's sudden surrender poses some hard questions for fellow Indians

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes. -Benjamin Disraeli

I am hugely disappointed that Team Anna called off its fast. But it isn’t because I am a fanatical Anna supporter. Or because I believe that only one particular draft of Lokpal bill can solve India’s corruption. Or for that matter that I am anti-Congress or pro BJP. None of these.

It is because beneath the veil of cynicism that journalists often wear, I am an idealist. I believe heroic things can happen, notwithstanding the all round corruption in our society. Team Anna’s valiant, if at times unreasonably adamant, attempts over the past year and half had come to represent that idealist streak in me, and dare I say, in many of us. I had hoped that a people’s movement could lead to better laws in India. That our democracy was strong and mature enough to extract the best out of the Anna movement. That our “political” leaders will act towards the betterment of this country.

But that has not happened. And with the announcement of entering politics, the seemingly apolitical movement has ended. And with it the chance to witness something extraordinary and heroic. And that hurt.

As I walked away from Jantar Mantar after the announcement last evening, I was quite stumped. TV debates immediately got into the act of announcing the winner in the latest bout between Anna and the government. But my mind was racing in a different direction.

While most proclaimed that Team Anna had been finally humbled, to me the sudden capitulation of fasting campaigners reflected equally poorly on the people who propped up this movement last August. To my mind it is irrelevant to conjecture about the electoral prospects of Team Anna’s political outfit partly because its too early and partly because it would not change the past.

Strangely, what no one realized or seemed to point out in those TV debates was that the only real losers in the bigger picture were the people of India.

Ironically, they were also the only real culprits too, without discounting all the valid arguments there may be against Team Anna's inept handling of the movement.

Let me tell you why.

With Team Anna being treated now as a separate political entity, the media is justified in training its guns on them and asking some hard questions. It is natural to ask whether Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal got scared of losing their life for the sake of the movement. Because the whole point of an indefinite fast was in the spirit of “do or die”. And heartless as it may sound, the fight against corruption perhaps required such a sacrifice. Perhaps only the death of one of the key campaigners would have jolted the collective conscience of the country to take notice, again.

But frankly, this latest episode of fasting did not receive as much support from the people as Team Anna would have hoped for when they started out. And that is the main reason why the government chose to, and could afford to, ignore the fasting campaigners this time around.

I don’t think India is any less corrupt since last August. I don’t think the merits of the argument asking for a Lokpal have changed. Neither have the leaders campaigning for it nor have the people opposing it.

The only thing that has changed is the people’s “active and vocal” support for the movement.

The honest truth is that if people do not get behind such movements the governments do not even have to move a limb to snuff the life out of such campaigns. What do you think distinguishes the Anna movement from the various other protesters who routinely occupy Jantar Mantar. It is the support of the people. Or for that matter, take the case of Irom Sharmila, who has been fasting for over a decade and yet never received as much public support and media attention as Team Anna in the last 12 months.

I heard a lot of people discount the Anna movement last year. Their primary belief was that “nothing will change in India.” They felt sooner or later, people will get tired of all the fasting and go back to living their daily life.

I suspect such prophecies have turned out to be self-fulfilling. Most people did grow tired of sloganeering. After a while people wanted solutions, not just the re-iteration of the problem.

But many who support the latest decision of Anna’s perhaps would do well to ponder over how Team Anna misjudged the public sentiment when it went campaigning against the Congress. Singling out Congress during the state assembly elections, when the main opposition party -the BJP- was no less mired in corruption charges, did not really go down well with every one. In particular, minorities like Muslims grew suspicious of Team Anna.

Moreover,  it is anybody’s guess whether Team Anna has enough time to sort out this ideology, its approach with regard to all the big and small issues that India has to wrestle with each day before the 2014 general elections. Not to mention finding hundreds of candidates who could carry the idealism into the political arena.

But as the country piles on the arguments for and against Team Anna’s decision and its overall style of conducting itself, the people of India would do well to look inwards and ask what is that they truly want and how far are they willing to go for it?

It would be simplistic to believe that just one law would rid India of corruption. Neither can just a mere model code of conduct for those contesting the elections nor an elaborate performance appraisal for all the bureaucrats.

The people will have to realize that they must change themselves in their daily conduct. As a society we will have learn to value moral rectitude and personal integrity even if it comes at the cost of greater discomfort. We will have to inculcate a sense of camaraderie and stop discriminating among ourselves - forever seeking carve outs on one pretext or the other.

Until we are willing to face the truth about our self indulgent selves, movements will come and go without changing anything and re-enforcing the deep set cynicism.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.