Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi derided the movement of social activist Anna Hazare as a danger to democracy and Parliament. On the other hand, actor Om Puri, a supporter of the movement, created a controversy by saying half the members of Parliament were illiterate village boors. But then, half the country’s youth and children — Anna Hazare included — are Class VII dropouts.
Anna — whose protest has moved many educated youngsters, virtually stirring the nation in a positive way like never before, except during cricket matches — grew up in a village. As a child, he sold flowers in Mumbai, till he got recruited as a jawan.
This is not to say Parliament should only have dropouts as members. But shouldn’t government take into account everyone’s views, including dropouts, farmers, the landless and the migrants, whose expertise is not the economic theories written in books, but theories evolved from life?
Anna has been leading movements in Maharashtra against corruption. And, thanks to his protests, many politicians had to lose their jobs.
While Harvard-returned education ministers may not think of a school for dropouts and failures, Anna did. In his village, he set up a school only for those students who just could not make it. And, he says the results in Class X were 100 per cent.
The problem is not that Parliament has too many illiterates. The problem is that both educated and uneducated MPs don’t spend enough time with the people in their constituencies to be able to empathise with their needs and demands.
Not that all those who support Anna Hazare are aware of the fight against corruption or understand the minute details of the Lok Pal Bill. But they are all frustrated. The rural folks streaming into Delhi have problems related to displacement and landlessness. They are all victims of neglect of the government, which is not able to address their grievances.
One of the issues on Team Anna’s agenda in India Against Corruption (IAC) is land reforms, even as the government is making a new law to facilitate sale of land for the industry and other purposes.
P V Rajagopal, who leads the Ekta Parishad and is part of IAC now, once brought a huge mass of rural folks from 17 states to Delhi. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh managed to get rid of the crowd in hours, as he announced formation of a committee headed by him for land reforms. Rajagopal was demanding distribution of a minimum amount of land to the landless. The committee that was announced three years ago has never met once. Thousands came with him to Delhi for Hazare’s movement, too.
Another supporter of the movement Medha Patkar, who heads a network of grass root organisations called the National Alliance of People’s Movements, has been descending with hordes of villagers in Delhi almost annually for the past many years. The issues varied from grabbing of irrigated land for irrigation projects in the Narmada valley to grabbing of land from farmers for power plants and other projects like Special Economic Zones.
Talking to even one displaced person in Chindwara whose land was taken years ago for a pittance and now handed over to a power plant, there is enough to expose the indifference the rulers and policy makers have to the real owners of resources in the country. An example is the delay in the policy for people displaced by mining projects. When mass movements became too big, the government was on the verge of offering people a share in the gains from mining projects. But now, no one thinks it is a great idea.
Activists are avoidable pests for the government and the industry. They have a say and hence, when a group finally decides to make a point the way they have done with the leadership of Anna Hazare and with an unusually proactive media ‘partnership’, the establishment has no answers except to call them a ‘danger to democracy’.
