Fighting corruption sincerely will help. Try it!

My countrymen never cease to surprise me. I am referring to the one day fast by Anna Hazare at Delhi¡¯s protest venue Jantar Mantar, yesterday. I was convinced that most are by now overcome with fatigue and there would only be a token presence of, at best, a few hundred and no more. But the sea of humanity at the small venue was, well, awesome! And with the string of senior leaders from various parties making their way to lend support to the movement, the government, besieged by all that it perhaps wished it wasn¡¯t, would be worried.

What lies in store when the biggie happens towards the end of the month at Ramlila Maidan! Even the thought would be giving them the jitters. I am surprised how the movement that several commentators have often written off, arguing that people now see no future in and that it is losing steam, has proven everyone wrong, repeatedly.

At one level, the government itself is responsible for this and even at the risk of repeating myself, I think it is due to its hopeless dirty-tricks department and the ham handed manner in which it goes about doing its work. Of course, that new scams keep tumbling out of the closet with an amazing regularity don¡¯t help its cause either. To rub salt into the wounds has been the totally needless and crass manner in which it tried recently to reign in the social media. First, by calling the four biggies into a closed room and dictating to them some extra measures that they must follow, even if it goes beyond what the law demands, and then, once the information is leaked, going brazen about it. If anyone in the government thought that in this age and time, when social media is here to stay and cannot be controlled, to behave like the regimes of the yore is being, to put it mildly, stupid.

And mind you, I am not debating here whether there should be some control over what goes on the social media. I personally think there is a lot of muck on social media that shouldn¡¯t be there and I would be happy to not see such stuff out there, but the way out is not what the government had proposed ¨C screen each and every bit of content that is put up. If that were to be mandated, the amount of content that is uploaded each day on the social media would require almost everybody involved with the net to do nothing more than screen all the time.

When you seek the impossible, you should be prepared for the reactions too, which the government got and learnt its lesson, hopefully. Yes, social media is a double edged sword that has, on the balance, more positives than negatives. It is sad that the government, filled with those who think they know the world, have no grasp of the situation and are constantly left red faced when a nimble team Anna and its supporters make their moves, utilising the media to the hilt.

Back to the dirty tricks department¡¯s work, one cannot but marvel at the frequency with which they muddy everything that otherwise seems crystal clear. The number of times that the government concedes a point made by the protestors and then does an about turn is not funny. When the entire parliament expressed the ¡®sense of the house¡¯ to Anna Hazare and requested that he end his fast at Ramlila Maidan in August last, the sense meant taking into account the demands made by the team. For the government to then disregard each and every demand and brazen its way through with only what it wanted was unwarranted.

Most people, exasperated with the scandals that have tumbled out one after the other, felt even more cheated. It is this that has stopped the movement from losing steam. If anything, it has given it more power. I am once again saying that some of the demands made by the team may seem impractical, but one must aim for the stars to get to the sky. For the government to tell the team that they must be satisfied with whatever currently exists, but packaged differently, does not work. And when they try and handle it in a manner which is ham handed, it scores a self goal. And over a period, it is scoring self goals that the dirty tricks department has become adept at. And it is this attitude that is resulting in everything getting hurt, our global reputation included where we are being ridiculed as a corrupt society even as the movement itself is being hailed as being path-breaking. How difficult can it be to have a discussion with all concerned that is not actually honest in intention, but seems honest to the observers as well.

Perception management is critical. The government, through its actions in the past, has lost tremendous credibility on this count. It would do well to jettison some of those involved in the talks in the past and start again. As I said, there are reasonable voices in the movement and a genuine attempt by the government, sans the dirty tricks, would be welcomed, by the movement leaders and by the people at large. Try it!