The epic fraud that was 'India Against Corruption'

Ten years ago this month, a little-known activist from Maharashtra began a fast unto death in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. In a remarkably short time, Kisan Baburao Hazare’s demonstration turned into a “movement” — or at least that was what an enthusiastically supportive media would have had us believe.

A decade on, please admit it, India: You were duped. “India Against Corruption” was nothing of the sort. It was a vehicle for personal ambitions, of Arvind Kejriwal in particular; it was an arena for middle-class play-acting at protest; it was an operation to discredit the government and reposition the Bharatiya Janata Party, riddled with corruption scandals of its own, as pure.

This was plainly evident at the time. The perpetually cynical did not care: Anything that disrupted the government was OK by them. The hopelessly naïve simply shut their eyes. As Prashant Bhushan, then one of the leading lights of the supposed movement, told The Week recently: “I was not looking so closely at who was supporting and how … In retrospect, I could see that the RSS and the BJP were in a very systematic, organised, well-thought-out manner supporting the movement to bring down the Congress … Kejriwal would have been aware because very consciously he took the support of Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who turned out to be affiliated with the BJP.”

The media bears a great deal of the blame. It covered these protests endlessly, exhaustively, and incredibly supportively. My notes for the year reveal that on one occasion Mr Hazare gave 17 “exclusive” interviews in under 12 hours. For the media in UPA-II had only one drug: A story, any story, that could be given an insurgent, Rang De Basanti, middle class-vs-politician angle. It wanted populist outrage, and stoked it with all its might.

So much in 2011 was darkly amusing. On NDTV’s “Indian of the Year 2011”, Barkha Dutt asked Arvind Kejriwal whether he managed to carve a special path into Indians’ hearts, and if so how. Mr Kejriwal, to demonstrate that he was his Own Man and no creation of this compromised media, grandly motioned her to silence and declared he was not there to answer questions, but to make his own points. He then explained to the audience that he had managed a special connection with Indians, who were the real awardees. The media props up fraud; fraud claims he is independent of the media; the media breathlessly broadcasts fraud, doing precisely what the media has asked him to do.

Mr Kejriwal was right in a way, though. The real awardees were the people watching, all of whom seemed determined to ignore the evidence of their own eyes that they were being mocked and deceived. Even when the media went to extraordinary lengths to try and ensure that the real winner from the fasts was, in fact, Narendra Modi. On one occasion, a panellist on Times Now’s NewsHour actually tried asking Mr Kejriwal about Mr Modi, only to have the anchor — someone named Arnab Goswami, haven’t heard of him since, I’m sure his reputation for adversarial independence is still unstained — intervene to cut off the question and declare “this is about corruption”, not Mr Modi. Mr Bhushan again: “This government is far, far worse than the Congress government, both in terms of corruption as well as in terms of its fascist nature and destruction of democratic institutions and norms. Maybe, in hindsight, we ought to have foreseen this.” You think?

In 2021, India has got populism — but a real kind, not the fake astroturf nonsense that was India Against Corruption. We have a system in which every check and balance that we made so much of in the UPA years — the courts, the CBI, the CAG — has been defanged and rendered an extension of the ruling establishment. We have a media that has been intimidated into silence and assent. We have cronyism, violence, intimidation. But the Hazare-lovers of 2011 are fine with it. That “movement” wasn’t about corruption at all.

Don’t feel sorry for any of them — the judges, the leftist activists, the heroic regulators, the media. They are the same people who actually asked for, indeed demanded, the triumph of populism. The outspoken “independent” heroes of a decade ago —people like Vinod Rai, the auditor who couldn’t count, remember him? — have quietly vanished into sinecures provided by the next government. Who talks about “notional loss” now? Those who held forth with supreme confidence about unknown and unproven corruption in 2011 are deathly silent in 2021, when the French media reports more questions about the Rafale deal. But then these are the same people who solemnly told the country during the UPA that having a prime minister less powerful than a party president was the worst thing that could ever happen to a liberal democracy. As we slide ever closer to illiberal autocracy, the sinister, gleeful MCs of our Weimar period in UPA-2 should not be forgotten. India Against Corruption was a fraud on India. But it served one great purpose. It revealed those who supported it vociferously were either dupes, or enablers, or bigots.