Anna Hazare's 15 minutes are over!

Three weeks ago, as the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement hit a high note, I blogged that this will not be any version of Arab Spring in India:

India is a country with a history of exciting events, which eventually die down without doing any serious damage to the status quo.

More than anything else, Hazare was proposing something quite bizarre--setting up an all-powerful body, and assuming that this will somehow be insulated from corruption.  I remarked elsewhere that such reforms cannot be legislated and that it has to come through changes in the everyday practices of people.  I have a metric for this: the day trash will not be dumped anywhere and everywhere.


Anyway, I am not the only one who thinks that this will not be productive, and could become highly counter-productive too.  Here is another immigrant from India, writing at Reason:

Protests are like morning ablutions in India’s cacophonous democracy: routine and purgative. One can’t sneeze without running into a demonstration by some interest group fighting for some special benefit....
one agency can’t effectively deal with the volume of grievances it is likely to receive. Alternatives to the Hazare proposal suggest creating mini-Lokpals at the municipal level. But all of them suffer from a fatal flaw: They treat corruption like an enforcement rather than a policy problem. ...
Eradicating corruption will require more than simply adding yet another layer of bureaucracy, however. So long as government officials have too much to gain from dishonesty—and citizens have too much to lose from honesty—corruption will remain a fact of Indian life.

The Economist adds this:

Mostly sceptics bristle at Mr Hazare’s methods. The most revered Dalit leader, the late B.R. Ambedkar, chief draftsman of India’s constitution, has been much quoted this week for an early warning about the “grammar of anarchy”, by which he meant using Gandhi-style fasts to impose your will on a democratic government. Hunger strikes, a form of blackmail, might have been justified against the British, but not against elected leaders.
Such grumbles will not dent Mr Hazare’s progress. His camp hints at possible future campaigns on electoral changes and education reform. Rival fasters might also jump in since a hunger strike’s extended drama so clearly suits live television. Yet elected politicians can push back. They have an easy way to remind voters how they matter, by getting on and passing many long-promised bills, for example on further economic reform. Dull and undramatic: but for many voters it matters at least as much as corruption.

Meanwhile, the country's attention has already turned away from Hazare to terrorism in the capital city of New Delhi:

Less than four months after a mysterious bomb went off in the parking lot, a powerful blast ripped through the reception counter of the Delhi High Court complex in the heart of the capital on Wednesday, leaving at least 11 people dead and more than 75 injured.

Even as a red alert was sounded in the city, an email sent to various media organisations claimed responsibility for the blast on behalf of the ‘Harkat-ul-Jihadi.'

The claim, sent from harkatuljihadi2011@gmail.com, threatened similar blasts at the Supreme Court and other major High Courts if the Parliament attack case convict Afzal Guru's death sentence was not “repealed.” (sic).

 Caption at the source:

"A man injured in the bomb blast being brought to the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in New Delhi on Wednesday."