Return of Anna

Anna Hazare is a rare human being. Such men and women got us our freedom from the British who knew that they have to leave sooner or later. British rule was for the benefit of Britain and not of India. The design and purpose of rule was to exploit the country’s resources. The institutions they built had one single purpose, which was to serve the mother country. This they did with active connivance of us Indians. Indians never in their history thought as one nation. There was no unifying force or a common cause which united us against the three hundred years of British rule. For majority of Indians it was just another ruler out to exploit them. That some good came out of the British rule is not to be denied. We got the railways, unified system of currency, Banking, an administrative machinery, survey of the country and records, a system of revenue and judicial administration, thanks to the British. All this was done in reality to benefit not Indians but the British. History is replete with examples of how methodical and ruthless this exploitation really was. But they were helped by our own people. The person who was financing the East India Company in its early years in Bengal was Marwari called Omi Chand [considered to be the richest person in the known world those days]. If one reads the well researched book, ‘Sea of poppies’ [author: Amitab Ghosh] one will come across innumerable examples to support this fact of Indians helping the British. Why did they do it so willingly? The answer is that they have done it since time immemorial. British were for them no different from others who invaded this country.

What this has got to do with Anna Hazare? What he is trying to do is what Gandhi did in the first half of last century. Make us think as one nation and object to exploitation. Corruption is one form of exploitation. Gandhi used communal harmony and nonviolent civil disobedience as unifying forces. Anna is using corruption. Is he going to succeed? Is it going to be a mass movement and change the politician and the beurocrat?

I very much wish this will happen. But my gut feeling is that it will not succeed. This is because corruption has come to be accepted by most that matter. These form the top ten percent of Indians. The rest are so emasculated that they are incapable of rising against the rulers just like it happened when the British were ruling us.
Still it is good thing that we have left in this country a few persons who have the gumption to fight, even if it is a losing cause.