My approximation of Anna Hazare
India’s much heralded anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare, who is in the midst of a particularly long and baffling vow of silence, is discovering the limits of rectitude. As recriminations, politicking and charges of wrongdoing by some of his core team members fly around, he is probably stunned into silence.
I suspect he saw the very prospects of his movement, once compared to the Arab Spring by the pathetically hyperbolic Indian broadcast media, unraveling and decided that he is better off extending his “Maun Vrat” or vow of silence. What can he possibly say anyway as the master strategist of the movement, Arvind Kejrival, has been asked by the country’s Income Tax Department to pay nearly a million rupees right away, and its leading light Kiran Bedi, is forced to explain everyday why she charged her various hosts business class fares but actually traveled economy? (Long question but couldn’t help it).
The other members of the core team, retired judge Santosh Hegde and environmental rights activist Medha Patkar cannot run away fast enough from the movement they once espoused with gusto. They have decided not to attend a crucial meeting of the core committee in Ghaziabad new Delhi tomorrow. Earlier, two other members, Magsaysay Award winning water activist and Gandhian leader P V Rajagopal left the movement because they disapproved of Kejriwal’s political campaigning in a parliamentary by-election.
Members of the main ruling Congress Party are trying hard not to go high-fiving with schadenfreude because their nemesis is finding out what it takes to keep a disparate group of highly ambitious and high-strung individuals together. One obvious lesson from the rifts in the movement is that all movements in the end are subservient to individual ambitions and flaws. Movements, which do not have the cohesion and overall single-mindedness of a political party, also face the danger of being torn apart by conflicting agendas of its members. Perhaps in his private moments Anna Hazare is telling himself, "Oh, I was better off flogging village drunkards."
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In other news, a 120-year-old man in Assam, India, has just married a 60-year-old woman. The first thought that came to my mind was that she was not even born when he turned 60. The second thought that followed was more a question: Did he see her as one-year-old infant and say ‘She is the one I will marry’?
IANS’s Sujit Chakraborty reports from Silchar that some 500 guests attended the wedding of Hazi Abdul Noor and Samoi Bibi. The ceremony took place in Satghori village in Karimganj district. To put the marriage in perspective, Noor’s eldest daughter is 79.
All men and women who commit to marry at any age deserve applause. The one who does so at 120 deserves some sort of a global recognition.
