But, now that the BJP has jumped into the fray on the yoga guru’s side, the Congress can breathe easy. Since the issue has become unambiguously political, the Congress’s long experience of fending off corruption charges will come in handy. Two events have helped it. One was the unexpected appearance of Sadhvi Rithambara on Baba Ramdev’s platform after a fairly long absence from the public scene. It at once divided the civil society activists with Prashant Bhushan lambasting the association of “communal” elements with the movement while the Karnataka Lokayukta and Prashant Bhushan’s colleague on the drafting panel for the Lokpal bill, Santosh Hegde, seeing nothing wrong in the Sadhvi’s appearance.

Since the RSS had earlier made known its intention to ask its volunteers to participate in Baba Ramdev’s campaign, the reason for the Sadhvi’s re-emergence can be discerned. For the RSS, the corruption issue provides an excellent opportunity to come out of the shadows of the terror charges which some of its sympathizers face. But, it isn’t only the RSS which wants to climb on to Baba Ramdev’s bandwagon to make its presence felt on the social and political scene. The BJP, too, wants to follow the same route.

Till now, the so-called civil society had been wary of associating with these elements since it might detract from its untainted Gandhian image. So, Anna Hazare had quickly withdrawn his earlier statement in praise of Narendra Modi. But, now that the saffron links have been well and truly established, the Anna Hazare camp will find it difficult to put up a united front. On his part, Baba Ramdev has come out with his political agenda without any dithering by referring, inter alia, to Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin – an issue of lasting importance to the Hindutva brigade.

For the BJP, however, how much the saffronization of the anti-graft movement will help its cause is unclear. True, it can bank on Baba Ramdev’s support base and Anna Hazare’s popular appeal to win a few converts. But the party will be aware that some of the yoga guru’s outlandish ideas – against Western-style constitutionalism, favouring the primacy of Hindi, denigrating cricket - will detract from its efforts to reinvent itself as a moderate party of the present age. It will back once again to the heady days of the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation, which, the BJP now knows, was a mixed blessing.

There is no doubt, of course, that the party will be able in the short term to put considerable pressure on the Congress with a high-decibel agitprop programme - demanding a special session of Parliament, urging President Pratibha Patil to play a proactive role, returning to the old theme of calling Manmohan Singh a weak prime minister although it is doubtful whether L.K. Advani will reiterate his earlier comparison of what happened in the Ramlila grounds on the night of December 4-5 with Jallianwala Bagh.

But the constant targeting of its principal adversary will entail a toning down of the Sushma Swaraj-Arun Jaitley confrontation for a while although there is little doubt that the flurry of activity will rekindle Advani’s prime ministerial ambitions. That even B.S. Yeddyurappa has been infected by the optimistic mood is evident from his promise to set things right in Karnataka because he knows that his “immoral” ways, to quote Nitin Gadkari, are an embarrassment for the BJP’s anti-corruption platform.

The Congress, as always, has shown poor political judgment. If Baba Ramdev is indeed the fraud that Digvijay Singh says he is, then the party and the government shouldn’t have had anything to do with him at all. But if the two wanted to set him up an alternative to the Anna Hazare camp, they should have acted with greater finesse. Either way, they have come a cropper. Now, the government may go about trying to undermine the Baba’s yogic empire, a task which it is expected to do much better than what the Atal Behari Vajpayee government did vis-à-vis Tehelka after its expose of the scandals involving Bangaru Laxman and George Fernandes.

The Lokpal bill will probably be another casualty. As it is, the last meeting of the joint committee comprising government and civil society representatives was described as “disastrous”. Now, the committee itself may fall apart. (IPA Service)