Team Anna has used new media channels with more efficiency than any political party has ever done
The Anna Hazare show is India’s JFK moment. There’s not much that is common to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Kisan Baburao Hazare. But JFK was the first politician to realise that voters in key US states were more influenced by an effective small-screen presence than by impressive public speeches. In the 1960 presidential campaign, JFK destroyed Nixon in studio debates. Nixon had never optimised his delivery for TV audiences. JFK had.
KBH is the figurehead of the first Indian political movement to effectively exploit new media. There’s an object lesson for anybody mapping a route to future political power. As another US president of more recent vintage might have said, “It’s the demographics, stupid.”
India’s population is overwhelmingly under-30 and very comfortable with new media, especially vernacular. There are over 850 million cell phone subscribers (many of whom receive video feed) and 150 million TV-enabled households.
Team Anna has used those channels with more efficiency than any political party has ever done. The speeches, the messages and the statements have all been crafted for tele-delivery. The TV channels have been worked for continuous airtime, emails and text messages have flooded inboxes, YouTube videos and Twitter hashtags have gone viral, and Facebook pages have been “liked” by millions.
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Another manoeuvre brings to mind an interesting “annalogy”. By naming itself Civil Society, Team Anna has cleverly appropriated a space that could legitimately be claimed by many others, who don’t agree with either its aims or methods. Lenin did much the same when he named his party the Bolshevist (Majority Party), even though it was a minority party.
The campaign has redirected legitimate anger to accomplish goals that would not make sense to the supporters. Some Anna-logs are merely opportunists. They have realised that it is possible to break traffic rules with impunity in the current climate, if you carry a flag. A flag costs much less than the going rate of a bribe/challan for riding without a helmet, or jumping a traffic light.
But the majority of the Anna-logs lighting candles at India Gate and thronging Ramlila 24x7 are there because they have been, and continue to be, victims of low-level corruption. They are small traders, day labourers and middle-class salaried people. Every day, they pay bribes to minor government functionaries, merely to be allowed to earn a living.
They believe this campaign will free them from this misery. It won’t. The Jan Lok Pal Bill will do zilch to remove low-level corruption. It aims to make scams at the Kalmadi-Raja level less egregious.
The actual outcomes from setting up yet another authority with over-reaching powers could be a lot worse than the thousands of crores misappropriated by such worthies. But that’s a matter of debate. For sure, none of the competing Lok Pal Bills will reduce low-level corruption.
The government has handled things very badly, another pointer to the fact that the political establishment is well behind the curve in understanding the demographics of modern India. Perhaps Manmohan Singh could start a competitive counter-fast and threaten to continue fasting until Anna stops fasting? That would add another layer of absurdity to an already absurd soap opera. But who knows? It might work.
Finally, the crowds don’t care that KBH is undemocratic in his methods and that he has idiosyncratic ideals. They don’t care that he has publicly flogged people whose lifestyles offend him. His refusal to allow Panchayat elections in his fiefdom is not a sticking point. What matters to the Anna-log is that he doesn’t take money.
Honesty is a virtue. But it shouldn’t trump a dozen other virtues. It is a sad commentary on the state of public life that it does. In 2014, the political alliance that understands this better and communicates that understanding better via new media will hold the edge.