On the night before Anna Hazare’s planned fast the UPA’s key managers — Union home minister P Chidambaram, HRD minister Kapil Sibal, I&B minister Ambika Soni, law minister Salman Khurshid and parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Bansal got into a huddle to finalise their strategy to tackle the proposed fast.
Haunted by the 100-hour agitation in April when Hazare had forced the government to back down, the UPA’s political managers insisted that arresting him would be a better idea this time.
“Last time we had to back down because of the upcoming state elections,” a minister in the UPA told DNA. “This time, our senior leaders were confident that the damage could be limited by arresting him.”
The government wanted to use the law as a tactic to rein in Team Anna. They felt Team Anna would tone down their rhetoric when the government cites the law.
Chidambaram, Sibal and Soni — all adept in handling the media — spoke to journalists for almost an hour; but it failed to change the popular perception that the government had lost the plot by arresting Hazare.
The government seems to be caught in a bind as the Lokpal Bill is stuck with Parliament’s standing committee and Team Anna has taken to the streets demanding a revision of the bill.
Though the UPA ministers argued about the “supremacy of Parliament”, few bought it. The ministers tried to justify the police crackdown by terming it a mere law and order problem. But the government seemed to be under siege as hundreds of people took to the streets in Delhi and 1,400 were detained in the Chhatrasal stadium.
Sibal made a last-ditch attempt by participating in a seminar organised by a little-known “Jai Shree Education Foundation” on the bill. But as soon as Sibal got up to speak, a group of students from Jawaharlal Nehru University, owing allegiance to the left-of-centre All India Student’s Association, started shouting slogans in favour of Hazare.
Congress supporters from Sibal’s constituency got into fisticuffs with the protesting students. With news cameras rolling, the event just added to the UPAs woes.
Chidambaram, whose ministry oversees the Delhi Police, tried his best to shift the blame on the police commissioner. “It is a painful duty we are performing,” he said, trying hard to explain that the government was not against the protest per se.
Strangely, Pranab Mukherjee and AK Antony — two senior-most minister in the UPA — with loads of experience in dealing with political crises kept a low profile throughout the day. They did participate in the morning meeting of the cabinet committee on parliamentary affairs though.
The Congress may be technically correct in its position — using the police, issuing prohibitory orders, taking Hazare in preventive custody — but it lost the battle on the streets. The UPA’s key managers failed to recognise this as a political crisis; instead, they tried to deal with the matter as civil unrest.
