Honesty is finally not such a lonely word
The magnum opus that the Anna Hazare movement has become will definitely be part of many detailed studies at a later date but, for now, it seems that the success and the boom phase this anti-graft stir is in has been due to a heady mix of five major extra-curricular factors — one, the issue of corruption itself which has riled the Indian public for a long time; two, the high-handedness of the Government in arresting Hazare when the tide’s in his favour; three, the part played by news television channels in fuelling a wave against the arrest; four, the almost perfect PR campaign that Team Anna devised to carry on the show; and five, the power of technology that disseminated information in a package that caught up with the nation’s biggest most potent force — its youth brigade.
As a colleague’s status message pointed out the other day, this is perhaps the best ever PR campaign launched by any agency and that the myriad PR firms that service the media today should learn from the exercise. True, really. Team Anna has showed up with a very well-oiled mechanism — 12 dedicated individuals from different walks of life, have been lending support from behind the scene, sending out Press releases and keeping the media in the loop, like a good event management company. The team includes lawyers, media professionals, IT professionals and social activists.
At the venue, i.e. the Ramlila Ground, things are in order. There is another designated group which screens, decides and picks out who will get to the stage to speak, who will be in the VIP enclosure and whose letters or opinions will get to be aired from the podium. There is a desk at the ground where people need to submit their documents if they want anything to be announced. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s team goes through the requests and then the next screening is done by the Bedi-Kejriwal-Prashant trio and only then sent to Anna who approves of it. Only once the letter is approved that a person and his document get on to the stage.
If this is not administration at its best what is? Otherwise, to keep over 30,000 people interested and at the spot for almost a fortnight is not an easy task. Team Anna is being heard today only because it has the physical presence of so many people at one spot. That the Ramlila Ground has become a pilgrimage today is solely because of this wave that has been fuelled from all platforms, beginning with TV channels and going on to mounts as far removed from Anna, as Twitter and blogspot, not to mention the game zone where Hazare is the sole Anna-hilator.
When Anna got arrested, nothing much would have moved had TV not gone ballistic, that too in his favour. A 24x7 campaign deriding the Government’s action reached much more than a million homes in a jiffy and the common man, already fed up of a Government defending itself in scam after scam after scam, got charged up even further, this time on an issue close to all hearts — corruption and the fallout of it on them.
Add to that the grossest miscalculation that the Government made — it took not just Anna but the public also for granted, trying to go roughshod over popular opinion. Then came the blunderers starting all the way up from Home Minister P Chidambaram who said he didn’t know where Anna was (imagine a Home Minister of a country trying to fool the public so blatantly) to foot-in-the-mouth Manish Tiwari who came across as so drunk on and happy with corruption that he actually could not believe anyone could actually be honest! He called Anna corrupt from head to toe and an Army deserter without checking out facts. Who will remember him as anything else other than a man who bad-mouthed an icon with utter wantonness?
Government misdemeanours were many and that helped Anna’s cause immensely but over and above everything was also the tenacity of the man himself. Squeaky clean all through life, a crusader of utmost earnestness, a man with few needs, a stalwart on a mission and a marathon entity at 74 who can go without a morsel of food for 12 days and more! Modern India has got its icon at long last. But then, even icons can’t carry on for eternity and it’s here that the Government’s dirty tricks department will again be at work. Time, they say, heals everything. What they don’t say is that it also has potential to break. And the delay-and-rule policy of the Government may finally work here. Hope Anna and his team have something up their sleeve to deal with this too, for it will be nothing less than devastating heartbreak to see Anna and his campaign go down without a result with the common man going back to the “bakhshsish do bakhshish lo” entity that India today is at all levels.
The politician is crying foul on all demands being made by Anna but one wonders why it should be such a great problem to accommodate the three demands. How does a citizen’s charter subvert democracy? Why can’t a Government official be put into a timeframe work mode and penalised if he does not follow the rule? Isn’t it high time that the Government and all its departments realise that they are mere service providers and the customer (in this case the Indian public) is the king not abject subject?
And what’s wrong with bringing in State level accountability? On the face of it, it seems the right thing to do unless there are layers not visible to the naked eye. As for the argument of one man and his demands holding a democratic entity no less than Parliament itself to ransom goes, again our Parliamentarians should remember democracy draws from the dictum of being for and by the people, who, in this case, are with Anna. By not listening to him may respect procedure but it still subverts democracy in another way — the subversion of people’s point of view.
The great Billy Joel hummed poignantly all those years ago: “Honesty is such a lonely word”. At least for now, in India, it seems to have got some life and company.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, August 28, 2011
As a colleague’s status message pointed out the other day, this is perhaps the best ever PR campaign launched by any agency and that the myriad PR firms that service the media today should learn from the exercise. True, really. Team Anna has showed up with a very well-oiled mechanism — 12 dedicated individuals from different walks of life, have been lending support from behind the scene, sending out Press releases and keeping the media in the loop, like a good event management company. The team includes lawyers, media professionals, IT professionals and social activists.
At the venue, i.e. the Ramlila Ground, things are in order. There is another designated group which screens, decides and picks out who will get to the stage to speak, who will be in the VIP enclosure and whose letters or opinions will get to be aired from the podium. There is a desk at the ground where people need to submit their documents if they want anything to be announced. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s team goes through the requests and then the next screening is done by the Bedi-Kejriwal-Prashant trio and only then sent to Anna who approves of it. Only once the letter is approved that a person and his document get on to the stage.
If this is not administration at its best what is? Otherwise, to keep over 30,000 people interested and at the spot for almost a fortnight is not an easy task. Team Anna is being heard today only because it has the physical presence of so many people at one spot. That the Ramlila Ground has become a pilgrimage today is solely because of this wave that has been fuelled from all platforms, beginning with TV channels and going on to mounts as far removed from Anna, as Twitter and blogspot, not to mention the game zone where Hazare is the sole Anna-hilator.
When Anna got arrested, nothing much would have moved had TV not gone ballistic, that too in his favour. A 24x7 campaign deriding the Government’s action reached much more than a million homes in a jiffy and the common man, already fed up of a Government defending itself in scam after scam after scam, got charged up even further, this time on an issue close to all hearts — corruption and the fallout of it on them.
Add to that the grossest miscalculation that the Government made — it took not just Anna but the public also for granted, trying to go roughshod over popular opinion. Then came the blunderers starting all the way up from Home Minister P Chidambaram who said he didn’t know where Anna was (imagine a Home Minister of a country trying to fool the public so blatantly) to foot-in-the-mouth Manish Tiwari who came across as so drunk on and happy with corruption that he actually could not believe anyone could actually be honest! He called Anna corrupt from head to toe and an Army deserter without checking out facts. Who will remember him as anything else other than a man who bad-mouthed an icon with utter wantonness?
Government misdemeanours were many and that helped Anna’s cause immensely but over and above everything was also the tenacity of the man himself. Squeaky clean all through life, a crusader of utmost earnestness, a man with few needs, a stalwart on a mission and a marathon entity at 74 who can go without a morsel of food for 12 days and more! Modern India has got its icon at long last. But then, even icons can’t carry on for eternity and it’s here that the Government’s dirty tricks department will again be at work. Time, they say, heals everything. What they don’t say is that it also has potential to break. And the delay-and-rule policy of the Government may finally work here. Hope Anna and his team have something up their sleeve to deal with this too, for it will be nothing less than devastating heartbreak to see Anna and his campaign go down without a result with the common man going back to the “bakhshsish do bakhshish lo” entity that India today is at all levels.
The politician is crying foul on all demands being made by Anna but one wonders why it should be such a great problem to accommodate the three demands. How does a citizen’s charter subvert democracy? Why can’t a Government official be put into a timeframe work mode and penalised if he does not follow the rule? Isn’t it high time that the Government and all its departments realise that they are mere service providers and the customer (in this case the Indian public) is the king not abject subject?
And what’s wrong with bringing in State level accountability? On the face of it, it seems the right thing to do unless there are layers not visible to the naked eye. As for the argument of one man and his demands holding a democratic entity no less than Parliament itself to ransom goes, again our Parliamentarians should remember democracy draws from the dictum of being for and by the people, who, in this case, are with Anna. By not listening to him may respect procedure but it still subverts democracy in another way — the subversion of people’s point of view.
The great Billy Joel hummed poignantly all those years ago: “Honesty is such a lonely word”. At least for now, in India, it seems to have got some life and company.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, August 28, 2011
Comments
Post a Comment