For a year in which India completes 20 years of economic reforms, a civil society movement against corruption somehow seems a fitting denouement. The state has not retreated as much as the reforms process envisaged, and civil society groups are unwilling to be cubbyholed into tiny enclaves where the state is prepared to allow them space. The movement has thrown up new names, Anna Hazare notwithstanding, and more pertinently, a jholawala breed of politician best exemplified by Sandeep Dikshit, who spoke to civil society groups as one of their own, fashioning new rules of engagement.
Just how Dikshit cut away from the pack of babalogs who pass off as the young leadership of the Congress party and fashioned a different brand of his own is fit case study for B-schools. Other young MPs, most of whom have management degrees from abroad, could not understand what Dikshit did: just what seemed to be the connect between Hazare and middle class India, and just who was controlling the movement, because quite clearly Hazare wasn?t.
Dikshit, an alumnus of St Stephen?s College and a post graduate from the Institute of Rural Management at Anand in Gujarat, has lived in the hinterlands as a working professional, heading the social development group Sanket in various states of north and western India. Unlike his other cohorts in politics, it was not a foreign university, or even just an upmarket desi one which gave him a break from being the son of a politician. Throughout the sojourn of his mother, Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, in the political wilderness during the Narasimha Rao-Sitaram Kesri years of the Congress, Sandeep Dikshit wandered middle India, with?you guessed it?a jhola and a khadi kurta, in the company of Pawan Khera (now officer on special duty to his mother), his wife Mona, and Manish Sisodia who is a part of Team Anna.
Staff at the NGO Sewa in Udaipur, Rajasthan, still remember the trio of Dikshit, Khera and Mona Dikshit during their stint with Sewa.
In 2004, Dikshit moved from Bhopal to Delhi, and took the plunge into electoral politics. In the beginning, he was dismissed as just another babalog, planted on a safe seat by mummy, and waiting in the wings to take on whatever mantle was there to spare.
His stint in the 14th Lok Sabha was marked by the usual back-bencher work, to stand up when asked and speak as little as possible. Except, when he did speak, as in the case of the Forest Rights Bill, in favour of tribals getting rights on forest land, he was taken notice of.
In 2007, he spoke out against the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi Tejender Khanna?s demand that all Delhiites carry identification papers on them. Quite in the manner of the civil society activists of the Jan Lokpal movement, he dared the Delhi police to arrest him for walking around without identification papers. His constituency of East Delhi, made up of migrant labour from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, brought him back to the 15th Lok Sabha. And the party made him one of the whips in the House.
Dikshit, who cycles to Parliament, more for the exercise, he says, rather than concern for the environment, has tread a different path so far. So when he spoke out against the arrest of Anna Hazare on August 16, there was a method behind the defiance of the party line.
He used his contacts with individuals in the movement to arrange a meeting between members of Team Anna and law minister Salman Khursheed. Pretty soon, he and Pawan Khera were an integral part of the negotiations. Party bigwigs were taken aback, but so were the young MPs who waited till Rahul Gandhi had set his line on the matter in Parliament on Friday before unleashing themselves in television debates. A little late in the day.
The young MPs of the 14th and 15th Lok Sabha may have started life in electoral politics together, and some may have stolen a march over others in securing ministerial berths, but in setting a unique selling proposition (USP), the MP from East Delhi is way ahead.
A senior minister in the present government had once described the process of Cabinet formation with a picturesque turn of phrase: Har Cabinet main, do sucche aur do lucche hone hi chahiye! This roughly translates into meaning that every team should have its share of scoundrels and saints. When it comes to the jholawala causes, Sandeep Dikshit seems to have staked the first claim.
nistula.hebbar@expressindia.com