You can’t grab protest realty. That is UPA’s holier-than-thou rejoinder to Team Hazare’s request for permission for a month-long protest in support of the Jan Lokpal bill at Jantar Mantar. Delhi Police, in its letter to the protesters, said that no single organisation can be allowed to usurp and lay exclusive claim to the top protest hub.

Now, there may be as many issues needing demonstrations as there are Indians, but nothing seems more pressing than the aam aadmi’s frustration with corruption. When the squeeze is so total, it is only rational that the need for space for outcry has to be commensurate. So, is it unfair of Team Anna to have asked for Jantar Mantar for a month?

As a government representative on the joint drafting committee, Kapil Sibal had, more than once, called Team Hazare “unelected executives”. One can only hope that the referendum in which 85 percent of almost 1.5 lakh people of his Lok Sabha constituency, Chandni Chowk, overwhelmingly ‘voted’ in favour of the Jan Lokpal broadened his idea of democracy to something beyond electoral victories. “Unelected executives”, by the way, was a phrase commonly passed on to scribes by Congress spokespersons at press briefings on Lokpal when the joint drafting committee was at work.

The government’s democratisation spin smacks of intolerance for a dissenting note, in this case, for a stronger Lokpal bill than its own draft. The government fears the crowd of disaffected citizens will get thicker and louder than the one that assembled in April. But UPA’s salvation does not lie in banning the protest. In fact, the move betrays a crisis of confidence within the government. If the government thought its Lokpal draft was the sabre-tooth needed to check corruption, it would have let hecklers do their bit and leave. It, however, is consciously shutting out citizens’ cry for effective measures against corruption. 

Here is a popularly elected government, happily democratic in ensuring equitable access to a whining podium for all, but stolidly autocratic about what it will listen to.

The ban will do little to daunt the protesters.  In fact, some burnt copies of the government’s draft even as it was being tabled in parliament.  As for Anna Hazare and his supporters, they have many venues to choose from even if Jantar Mantar is closed to them.

What is worrying is that the government feels neither the need nor the inclination to respond to the protesters with the wile of politics, or even with a debate. Instead, it is trying to muscle them into silence using state instruments. What can be farther from whatever notions of democracy the commons hold?