However much you may criticise the government’s actions in disrupting “Baba” Ramdev’s meeting in the Capital, the controversial step should result in lowering the decibel level of the yoga guru’s relentlessly noisy campaign, ostensibly aimed at attacking corruption. Mr Ramdev is stuck in remote Haridwar, the Uttar Pradesh government has refused to let him enter the state, and Congress-ruled Haryana is certain to do likewise if asked. Delhi, therefore, is out of reach, and the garrulous guru is all dressed up in women’s clothes but has nowhere to go. However much the Bharatiya Janata Party may try to make capital out of the episode, through absurd comparisons with Jallianwala Bagh and the Emergency of 1975, the temperature in Delhi is likely to drop. If all that has happened is that eight rounds of tear-gas shells were fired, and some three dozen people were injured in a lathi-charge, with less than a handful in hospital, the government should consider itself lucky because this was an operation that could have gone badly wrong.
Whether the government should, therefore, congratulate itself is a different matter altogether, given that it has faced uniform criticism from all political quarters and from civil society — and, therefore, stands in splendid isolation. Indeed, there seems to be a schism with the Congress leadership too. Admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that the original mistake was to not act on the basis of reading Mr Ramdev’s true intentions and of those backing him, namely elements of the Sangh Parivar. The permission sought for the gathering at the Ramlila grounds was for a yoga camp for 5,000 people. Since Mr Ramdev’s “fast unto death” had already been announced, and he had promised much larger numbers than Anna Hazare had attracted, the yoga camp was a transparent fudge; permission for the gathering should have been refused on that count alone and he should have been sent packing when he landed in Delhi. Instead, the dispatching of four ministers to receive him at the airport sent the wrong signals, about an unnerved government. The subsequent negotiations should have been informed by the knowledge that Mr Ramdev would never call off the tamasha that he had taken pains to organise. Given that the true intent was to mount a political challenge to the government, and the crowd big enough to cause worries about possible violence or a simple accident, something had to be done; the fact that Saturday night’s action has not caused serious bloodshed is a matter of relief.
Both Mr Ramdev and the government are losers. The latter is on the back foot when it comes to charges of corruption and crony capitalism, and of tardiness in tracking down money stashed away abroad. Now it has been shown to be confused and even rudderless in its handling of a political challenge. Critics will argue, with some reason, that the police action was an assault on a peaceful gathering, and therefore a bad precedent to have set. If the government is lucky in any way, it is because the principal opposition is unable to exploit the political opportunities being handed to it, one after another.