Congress diatribe against Anna Hazare

The ruling Congress party seems to have lost its dignity and mental balance in deciding to mount a rabid diatribe against Anna Hazare personally, calling him corrupt, less than two days before his scheduled fast against corruption and for a strong Lokpal bill. Using its most foul-mouthed, crude,  spokesman to attack Hazare in a language a civilised person will not use even for a street urchin, the Congress party gave the impression of desperation and panic in the face of the rising tide of nation-wide support to the anti-corruption movement of the 74-year-old Gandhian. The Congress foot soldier Manish Tewari tried to flog a dead horse of Justice Sawant's report, allegedly accusing Anna Hazare of various acts of corruption. Tewari clearly devoid of any prick of conscience, used the phrase "A Company" for Hazare and his associates, on the lines of the mafia don Dawood Ibrahim's "D Company".  What one can say about such lunacy and total bankruptcy of ethics and sensitivity! Forgetting traditional Indian ethos of respect for elders, Tewari was deriding  the person who was his father's age and whom his Prime Minister had earlier invited to join the Joint Drafting Committee alongwith his four colleagues for preparing a common draft of the proposed Lokpal bill. The PM had accepted the demand of Hazare under tremendous public pressure despite his initial opposition to the latter's indefinite fast.

Yet, within a few weeks, when the popular agitation receded due to the government's flexible stand, the ruling party reverted to its duplicitous stance and started questioning the legitimacy of the Hazare movement and its demand for a srtong Lokpal. They even attacked the group for being undemocratic and even fascist. The die seems to been cast and the earlier chasm between the two sides was back. First, the police refused the Hazare side permission to assemble at Jantar Mantar to start his fast from August 16 that he had threatened if the Jan Lokpal bill was rejected or its pro-people provisions were not incorporated in the govt bill. Later, the Anna team agreed to shift to any venue in central Delhi. A park named after Jaya Prakash Narayan was offered which they accepted. Then, started another of game of weakening the agitation with all sorts of undemocratic and unconstitutional  conditions like the fast could be only for three days, the attendance cannot exceed 5000, etc. When Anna rejected these conditions instantly and wrote to the PM against the govt's "dictatorial" and emergency-type stand, Dr Manmohan Singh washed his hands of the issue and told Hazare to approach the Delhi police directly as if the police was autonomous. Singh himself forgot what he had said on the Ramdev episode in which the police had used cruel methods to evict the peaceful protestors from the Ramlila grounds:"There was no option" but  the police action!

However, without waiting for the problem to get sorted out amicably, the senseless ruling party unleashed a ferocious assault on its opponent-Anna Hazare. It also forgot that its State govt. of Maharashtra had formed an investigating committee under Mr Sukthanker to examine the Justice Sawant report and it had given Hazare a clean chit. Thus, is it not a fraud on the Indian people to use a rejected report to malign Anna Hazare who is proving a thorn? Does it behove a grand old party of stalwarts like Gandhiji, Sardar Patel, Pandit Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Lal Bahadur Shastri and others? Does it not suggest a terrible degeneration?