Babagiri vs Dadagiri

It was on the 4 th of June,1989, that armored vehicles of People's Liberation army  rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen  square and brutally crushed the protests for democracy. Exactly 22 years later, the ghosts of Tiananmen came back to haunt the worlds' largest democracy. Paramilitary and police personnel scooped down on unsuspecting Sadhus, sleeping women and frightened kids at the iconic Ramlila Miadan and unleashed such brutality that had not been witnessed even during the dark days of Emergency. Though the two incidents vastly differ in magnitude, they are  similar in intent, both being  acts of unbridled oppression by unscrupulous political regimes drunk on power.

Buoyed by the stupendous success of Anna Hazare's crusade against corruption, Baba Ramdev had launched a satyagrah to pressurize the government into bringing back the billions stashed in tax havens .His detractors claim that his aim was to overshadow Anna's movement so that he may establish himself as the face of civil society. However the truth is that he has been vociferously campaigning against black money for years. After Anna's movement he just found the right time to press up the ante and go for an all out war against the government,

Under the leadership of possibly the weakest prime minister ever, the government made a mockery of the situation. The congress party and it's government struck a discordant note, with the party crying foul when four of it's most senior ministers gave a red carpet welcome to Baba in New Delhi. It seems that the four ministers overcompensated after being reprimanded by their “Madame” for mollycoddling the saffron clad Baba. Or perhaps the whole clampdown was orchestrated by their “Madame“herself who was trying to emulate her Mother in Law.

Either ways the government has played into Baba Ramdev 's hands ,who having probably clocked more hours on the screen than all the Khans of Bolywood combined, has made sure that the current fiasco beats any reality show in the TRP ratings. His antics of jumping off the dais and hiding in women’s clothes, coupled with the shocking images of police firing teargas amidst scared women and crying children running helter-skelter, have had their desired effects. The Ravanlila enacted by the police at the Ramlila Maidan has shaken the nation out of slumber, onto the streets.

Even the BJP which was still smarting from the shell shackling it had received in the last polls and was groping for issues, has seized this opportunity of championing the cause of a saffron clad Baba with both hands. Amidst all this fiasco, the aam admi can just hope that the core issues of Corruption and black money are not put on the backburner. As far as the grand old party is concerned, with characters like Sibbal and Digvijay at the helm and with a spineless PM being remote controlled by his peremptory Madame, the party is at a risk of fading into political oblivion in the next general elections.