While it is premature to suggest Team Anna has petered out, the absence of direct political support makes it almost impossible to regain momentum

Self-doubt has never been Team Anna’s defining characteristic. Therefore, when their most self-assured member, Arvind Kejriwal, in a bewildering burst of humility, appeals to people to show them the way forward, it is bound to generate curiosity: A peculiar case of leaders seeking guidance from the led? The obvious conclusion is that the Team’s abysmal failure to generate mass support for Mr Hazare’s three-day fast in the last week of December in Mumbai has so disoriented the leader and his cohorts that they seem to have lost confidence in their ability to take the movement forward.

Economic reforms in India are usually achieved at gunpoint. It was the horrible balance of payments crisis and the emotional effects of the mortgaging of the country’s gold reserves that facilitated the historic process of deregulation by the Narasimha Rao Government in 1991. Seven years later, it was the wave of global sanctions after the Pokhran-II blasts that propelled the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government into using reforms as a weapon to neutralise the West’s hostility to India.

They collaborated with Pakistan's murderous, rapacious Army in 1971

This Friday, December 16, Bangladesh will celebrate the 40th anniversary of its victory in the 1971 Liberation War. The fall of Dacca, as Dhaka was then known, marked the end of Pakistani tyranny and the beginning of a new era for the Bengali nation. It also marked, with Lieutenant-General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, the commander of Pakistan’s rapacious, murderous Army which killed three million Bengalis in less than a year between March 26 and December 16, surrendering to the Indian Army, a splendid victory for our Armed Forces. Mrs Indira Gandhi fought that war out of deep moral conviction; Lieutenant-General JFR Jacob won the war displaying remarkable tactical skills and battlefield chutzpah. It was an equally splendid victory for the Mukti Bahini, the rag-tag army of freedom fighters, often armed with no more than antiquated .303 rifles.