Enter the Baba Ramdev puppet show
By V Krishna Ananth
The frenetic pace at which some Union ministers have gone about dealing with Baba Ramdev may seem to suggest that the UPA government means business when it comes to being responsive. A less charitable explanation to this would be that the UPA-II is aware of large support base that the saffron clad baba commands and that his fast would snowball into a crisis.
But then, the manner things have unfolded have left a trail that should lead anyone with average intelligence to surmise that the script for this was written in the corridors of the political establishment; and the end game is to derail the process of drafting the Lokpal Bill.
Take the timing for instance. After the initial rounds of discussion, the 10-member committee to draft the Lokpal Bill has landed in a state where the government side is unwilling to anything but a Lokpal that is toothless. The government side seemed to have succeeded in causing frustration among the five-member team led by Anna Hazare and driven the nation into a sense of desperation: The word has gone around that things will not change. And this was when Baba Ramdev arrived on the scene announcing his decision to fast and presenting a list of demands, some of them absurd. The script seemed to have been laid out: senior ministers went to the New Delhi airport to honour him!
The baba's fast could have been held at Vigyan Bhawan, where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad held a conference of saffron-clad sants way back on April 7 and 8, 1984. That would have established the role of the Congress-led Union government without doubt. It appears that the managers in the Congress establishment have learnt some lessons in the art of covering up the trail! The baba and his "disciples'' could not have turned the Ramlila Grounds into what they have done without help from the Delhi administration and permission from the concerned departments including the police that comes under Union home minister. The parallels are too striking to be ignored; and it is also a case where the chunks of the script are copied and pasted from the disastrous 1980s to the present.
Recall the story of one Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale . A small-time religious preacher and a sect leader in Amritsar was picked up by Zail Singh , then a leader of the Congress party in Punjab acting as Sanjay Gandhi's pointman, with the sole aim of pushing the Shiromani Akali Dal out of business. That Bhindranwale was a Congress prop was evident from the fact that he went about orchestrating violence and was even the first accused in the killing of Lala Jagat Narain, a newspaper baron who had opposed the call for Khalistan, was allowed to roam about Amritsar and other parts of Punjab and the Congress government simply looked the other way. Lala Jagat Narain was shot dead in April 1981. Sanjay Gandhi was dead by then. But the monster he had helped create had grown into a dreaded terrorist and turned the Akali Dal into a pale shadow of its own past self.
The frenetic pace at which some Union ministers have gone about dealing with Baba Ramdev may seem to suggest that the UPA government means business when it comes to being responsive. A less charitable explanation to this would be that the UPA-II is aware of large support base that the saffron clad baba commands and that his fast would snowball into a crisis.
But then, the manner things have unfolded have left a trail that should lead anyone with average intelligence to surmise that the script for this was written in the corridors of the political establishment; and the end game is to derail the process of drafting the Lokpal Bill.
Take the timing for instance. After the initial rounds of discussion, the 10-member committee to draft the Lokpal Bill has landed in a state where the government side is unwilling to anything but a Lokpal that is toothless. The government side seemed to have succeeded in causing frustration among the five-member team led by Anna Hazare and driven the nation into a sense of desperation: The word has gone around that things will not change. And this was when Baba Ramdev arrived on the scene announcing his decision to fast and presenting a list of demands, some of them absurd. The script seemed to have been laid out: senior ministers went to the New Delhi airport to honour him!
The baba's fast could have been held at Vigyan Bhawan, where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad held a conference of saffron-clad sants way back on April 7 and 8, 1984. That would have established the role of the Congress-led Union government without doubt. It appears that the managers in the Congress establishment have learnt some lessons in the art of covering up the trail! The baba and his "disciples'' could not have turned the Ramlila Grounds into what they have done without help from the Delhi administration and permission from the concerned departments including the police that comes under Union home minister. The parallels are too striking to be ignored; and it is also a case where the chunks of the script are copied and pasted from the disastrous 1980s to the present.
Recall the story of one Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale . A small-time religious preacher and a sect leader in Amritsar was picked up by Zail Singh , then a leader of the Congress party in Punjab acting as Sanjay Gandhi's pointman, with the sole aim of pushing the Shiromani Akali Dal out of business. That Bhindranwale was a Congress prop was evident from the fact that he went about orchestrating violence and was even the first accused in the killing of Lala Jagat Narain, a newspaper baron who had opposed the call for Khalistan, was allowed to roam about Amritsar and other parts of Punjab and the Congress government simply looked the other way. Lala Jagat Narain was shot dead in April 1981. Sanjay Gandhi was dead by then. But the monster he had helped create had grown into a dreaded terrorist and turned the Akali Dal into a pale shadow of its own past self.
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