I have several questions for television blowhards in India.
Do they exist outside of the electronically transmitted world?
If they do, do they actually go home or go to work? Or do they just rush from studio to studio?
If they do indeed rush from studio to studio in a 24/7 blather cycle, do they carry fresh pairs of clothes and underwear?
Also, do they freshly manufacture outrage for every panel they appear on or recycle some of the same they felt on the previous show?
There are many more but let us begin by getting these answered.
Now to the broader point of today’s sermon… I mean post.
Anna Hazare, the 75-year-old village reformer turned anti-corruption emblem in India, has spent the better part of the past six months or so on a pedestal obligingly erected for him by the broadcast media. The pedestal is high enough to give Hazare the kind of national prominence I suspect he never thought he would gain. In recent weeks, he had begun to resemble demigods of the kind that abound across India.
The broadcast media loved and nurtured India’s John Doe into either a messiah or monster, depending on your point of view. Somewhere along the line Hazare might have taken his near mythical status as a slayer of all corruption in public life rather seriously.
That was until Tuesday when the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, passed a potentially significant Lokpal or public ombudsman bill, some of whose provisions came from Hazare and his team. The passage coinciding with a rather thin response in Mumbai to Hazare’s hunger fast number 3 made the media sit up and launch part 2 of the Hazarenama under the charitably worded “Is the Anna Hazare movement finished?”
The Hazare movement members are probably discovering that the media is an unreliable mistress that can both pleasure and torment alternatively in such rapid succession that it is hard to tell one from the other. The pedestal has been pulled from under Hazare’s feet and the resultant fall is bound to cause some image fractures. (Excuse the trite imagery).
The transition from a demigod to just another poor sod can be painful but this is the time when Hazare’s resolve will be tested. He has announced his intention to be a partisan hack in the aftermath of what he calls a “betrayal” of his cause by the ruling Congress Party. In the upcoming state assembly elections Hazare and his movement’s supporters will campaign against the Congress Party.
No matter how strenuously he denies it his is a partisan political movement motivated by its antipathies towards a particular political party. That is a perfectly legitimate activity in a democracy. But the problem is Hazare and his supporters have so far cast themselves as a lofty movement driven entirely by the moral imperative of eliminating corruption in public life. In so many words they have tried to convince India that they are not a partisan political uprising but that they represent a much deeper churning among the ordinary people of the country beyond party lines. Now it turns out they are just another political pressure group with an ambiguously defined political ideology.
The problem with dismounting a moral pedestal is that one gets exposed to all the dust and grime of ground level existence. Or in other words, the realm inhabited and mastered by crafty politicians of the kind asserting the supremacy of parliament and legislature.
In this flux what seems to remain constant for now are the television blowhards and analysts who would be required to break down every twist and turn into easily digestible sound bites. Right now the question is “Is the Anna Hazare movement finished?” Very soon it would be “Can the Anna Hazare movement be revived?” followed by “Should the Anna Hazare movement be revived?”
P.S.: The latest television ubiquity is a young Hazare acolyte called Abhinandan Sekhri whom the channels use as a sort of earnest and fresh, albeit somewhat out of depth, counterweight to the more jaded but well-oiled talking head such as Congress Party lawmaker Mani Shankar Aiyar. As someone just introduced to the forest of hyperbole Abhinandan, which literally means congratulation, is still discovering his rhythm. Since he has to appear on many panels, my sense is that he cannot decide whether to mint fresh outrage at the skullduggery called the politics-broadcast media nexus on every show or carry over the remnants from the last and refashion them. I am sure he will learn to harmonize what he really feels with the way he says he feels it on television. Congratulations are nevertheless in order.
In the mean time Aiyar, whom I consider by and large a sincere, serious man, continues to swing from a giant vine to a giant vine in the forest of hyperbole with the practiced ease of a Tarzan.
