Floundering Foes Help Indian Lawmakers

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“There are times when the quality of the people who hate you is the most generous compliment you can receive,” Manu Joseph wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “The Indian National Congress, which heads the government in Delhi, is a beneficiary of its foes.”

In early 2011, “mired in the fallout of major political scandals, the Congress party appeared doomed,” Mr. Joseph wrote. But after a wave of festive, “sometimes farcical, anti-corruption demonstrations against it heralded by rustic revolutionaries, the Congress has ended up looking better than before,” he wrote, “while the anti-corruption movement has emerged as a traffic hazard.”

The “epilogue” of the anti-corruption movement unfolded on Tuesday in Delhi, he wrote. As the saffron-clad yoga teacher Baba Ramdev, who presides over an alternative-medicine empire worth hundreds of millions of rupees demanded that the government “bri ng back” the billions of rupees of “illicit money that wealthy Indians are alleged to have stashed away in overseas tax havens,” Mr. Joseph wrote.

Mr. Ramdev's own companies are under investigation for tax evasion, a charge Mr. Ramdev has consistently denied.

What Mr. Ramdev has done is irreversibly presented the anti-corruption movement exactly the way the Congress party wants - the secular and liberal Congress versus the Hindu right wing. So, what Indians at first thought was a new struggle has become an old, tired contest between two familiar ideologies.

Anna Hazare's movement, at its peak, did threaten to draw away the constituency of the Congress party. But after Mr. Hazare became the face of the anti-corruption movement in April last year, he floundered. In December, when he attempted yet another fast, this time in Mumbai, and asked Indians to “fill the jails” in protest against political corruption, he discovered that his clout had waned. People still liked him and his cause, but they were getting bored with him.

A few weeks ago, when he arrived in Delhi for what he claimed was an “indefinite fast,” he found that the public and news media support for him had diminished further. He called off his fast midway, saying that fasts were “a waste of time.”

Read the full article.