Priyanka Gandhi arrives in Parliament on Friday to hear her brother speak. (AFP)

New Delhi, Aug. 26: Between television and the real thing lies a deceptive parallax. That insistent image — a portly frame shifting, screaming at the bottom of a cinemascope Gandhi, almost an appendage to the plastered muse of his mesmeric ventriloquism — is barely even accessible to the naked eye at close range.

It’s a far stage at Ramlila Maidan, much of what you get to see is its coarse masonry and a distracting mesh of competitive cablework, that which affords you a much better look on television screens far away.

But there is still, all around, a churning mill of people drawn to and palpably sensed of a messianic, if also invisible, presence in their midst. “Annaaaa tum sangharsh karoo…. Annaaaa tum aaage badho!!!!!”

Anna is snoozing on stage, a repose between bellicose bursts whose undimmed pitch and fervour after 11 days of fasting has baffled even his expert medical attendants. He lies under the blast of two turbo air-coolers — not air-conditioners which Hazare has made a pet hate symbol of since he mounted this stage — tucked into the side of the podium.

The eye is momentarily calm. A frenzy eddies in front — the gaudy rapture of the I-am-Anna medley thronged at the barricades that both inspires and feeds on this unseemly caricature of Gandhi’s mien and method.

A loose-cannon rant by actor Om Puri in vigorous exercise of unparliamentary privilege — these bloody politicians, remember people, they are luteras, thugs who cheat you with cheap liquor and petty cash. A banshee stand-up act by the nation’s first woman IPS officer, now retired to glorying in her uncivil liberties. This evening she grabbed a chequered kaffiyeh off a fellow-traveller, made a low hood of it and did a crook-backed mimicry of the political class that stained dignity, including her own, and desperately courted libel.

The impromptu pantomime left onlookers galled to begin with but they roared in approval anyhow, and dignified it with waves of the Tricolour. The flag and its attendant chant — “Bande Mataram!”, “Bharat Mata Ki!!!” — have become combustible licence for a horde drunk on its assumptions of high virtue.

On the sidelines of the unabashed denigration drama unfolds a hectic tableau of commerce, unmindful and uncognizant of the import of where Hazare’s stage is dragging public discourse, not far from the gutters that have been abused to spewing pestilence from nearly a fortnight’s messy vigil.

A scrum of eateries mushroomed alongside all manner of trades unpacked to make a fast and easy buck — madaris, snake-charmers, jugglers, Gandhi caps made of faux paper, Tricolours rolled out in the dust and going for a bargain. Never mind the hustlers and hucksters, forever out in the Indian mela to grab at what they can — a leather wallet, a piece of startled human flesh.

Backstage, Hazare’s brigadiers — Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Prashant Bhushan — are busy spinning, Rumpelstiltskin-like, a fevered straw poll on corruption into boxing gold, a knockout punch to the system that has afforded them their manner of protest. The marquees pitched at the back buzz with a war-camp intensity.

A corporate-style private security detail regulating entry and exit. The oddity of Gandhi-caps scurrying on walkie-talkies. Wired-up force multipliers in orchestral tizzy — Facebook, Twitter, cellphone, camcorder, mail. Press a few buttons right and the voice of thousands can begin to echo like the cry of millions, get the right angles and a street column begins to arch over the collective will of Parliament — do as we say, within the time we set, or else… mobocracy’s self-righteous dare to parliamentary democracy.

The closest the fast-disintegrating tactics of Hazare’s team come to are the intransigent Hurriyat factions of Kashmir. The same assumption of exclusive rights over “people’s will” without the courage to test it the only way it can be in a democracy —through elections. The same disdain of the elected and the same manner of dictation to it. The same uncompromising streak. The same talent for rabble-rousing and civic disorder. The same virulence of virtue.

In the summer of 2008, Hurriyat factions took the Valley by the scruff for two turbulent weeks. Every day was a tumult headed for the precipice. Every day was the eve of all manner of aazaadis — “Hurriyat waali aazaadi, Lashkar waali aazaadi, Hizbul waali aazaadi!!” Bring on the guns, bring on the terrorists!

Most critical of all, the Hazare bandwagon is in embrace of a similar cry of secession. Only, this one raises far more profound and fundamental prospects in the manner they have questioned the legitimacy not merely of the incumbent government but also of Parliament, and of the political class as a whole.

The Kashmiri Hurriyat speaks of secession from India. Hazare’s core team, are attempting to secede from the very system that has made India the most celebrated, and stable, post imperial democracy.

The clamour — still raging tonight — for a critical law to be smelted on that Ramlila stage and then be adopted, sans correction or amendment, carries the firm seed of an idea that will undo what has been painstakingly preserved of what the makers of the Constitution wanted India to be. Here’s a Hurriyat than can snatch India away from itself.