Comment
In dangerous times
ONE may not agree with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s alarmist view that the events of the recent past amount to a ‘rehearsal of the Emergency’, but there is no denying the fact that we are living in truly dangerous times. Nature abhors vacuum and fills it with whatever is readily available. At the moment, one can sense a political vacuum at the top of the power structure and this does not bode well for the future of our polity.
In politics, perception matters a great deal. The UPA government’s inept handling of Anna Hazare and his anti-corruption movement now and of Baba Ramdev and his followers earlier in June has given rise to a perception among the people that the beleaguered government is not willing to listen to critical voices or allow even peaceful, non-violent protests. This authoritarian attitude of the government is symptomatic of a lack of self-confidence in the present political leadership that finds itself incapable of meeting normal challenges through normal methods.
In any case, we are not living in normal times. The country has a prime minister who is not a political leader and who derives his power from the leader of his party. He is not even a directly elected representative of the people and does not lead the House of the People (Lok Sabha). He is yet to win a Lok Sabha election. The very fact that he has led the country for the past seven years is itself a travesty of the constitutional scheme in which Lok Sabha enjoys a certain primacy. Ideally, Manmohan Singh should have contested a Lok Sabha seat after becoming prime minister of the country by virtue of being a Rajya Sabha member. That he has chosen not to do so is in itself an admission that he is not confident of winning a direct election. In short, the country is being led by a person who, despite being highly regarded for his personal honesty, integrity, scholarship and economic vision, is not a political leader. It’s hardly surprising that he finds himself incapable of resolving a political problem that corruption in his government and the resulting anti-corruption movements have posed.
At the moment, there seems to be a political void at the top. Congress President Sonia Gandhi is abroad, convalescing after a surgery for an undisclosed ailment. Nobody knows for sure when she is scheduled to return. She is not around to advise or instruct the prime minister and his ministerial colleagues to follow a particular course of action. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is one of the most seasoned politicians, but his expertise lies in the domain of governance and negotiating with other political parties. He has, in his entire career, never dealt with a political crisis. Similar is the case of other important ministers like P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal. This lack of experience shows in the unimaginative manner in which the government is handling the current political situation, in turn creating a crisis of confidence. The government is fast losing its moral and political authority in the eyes of the people who are no longer satisfied with the fact that the prime minister himself is a man of unquestioned honesty and integrity. Did it, they ask, do any good to the country when so many of his ministers were indulging in financial scams and he could not assert his authority over them? The Congress party has not covered itself with glory either, as its own Member of Parliament, Suresh Kalmadi is behind bars because of his alleged wrongdoing in the organization of the Commonwealth games.
The current situation is reminiscent of the pre-Emergency days. Indira Gandhi was at the peak of her popularity after the 1971 Bangladesh war that saw the historic surrender of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers before the Indian Army and the dismemberment of Pakistan. However, her famous remark about corruption being a global phenomenon convinced people that she was not serious about rooting out this cancer. The working class was alienated as a result of the brutal suppression of the historic railway strike. The Nav Nirman movement in Gujarat prepared the ground for an all-India movement and a leader of Jayaprakash Narayan’s moral stature came forward to lead it. Indira Gandhi began losing her political as well as moral authority. The process came to its full fruition when the Allahabad High Court set aside her election to Lok Sabha from Rae Bareli constituency. Instead of resigning as prime minister, she chose to impose an internal Emergency.
Today, the UPA government is faced with a situation where its moral authority is being questioned by the common man who is scandalized that those who indulge in corruption and those who oppose corruption are being thrown in the same prison. He is not impressed by the incessant talk of the over eight per cent growth rate. In fact, every time Manmohan Singh mentions it – and he does not miss a chance to do so – the common man feels that he is being mocked because this much-applauded growth rate has only resulted in his living standards failing to improve if not become worse. Even as he is groaning under the weight of rising prices, he is asked to pay a bribe for every little thing that he wants to get done in any government office.
The opposition too has failed to perform its role. The space vacated by it has been filled by a Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare and their supporters who do not seem to have any roadmap, except staging candlelight marches and dharnas. The government seems to be clearly unnerved by the way events have unfolded so far. There is a lack of leadership on both sides. This is not a very conducive situation for a democratic polity.
Unfortunatly, the Anna Hazare team’s version of the Lokpal institution is being presented as a panacea for all the evils in a situation where there are serious misgivings about so much power being sought to be vested in one individual or institution. Equally worrying is the anti-political stance of the dominant anti-corruption movement with the RSS and other such organizations actively supporting the movement – just as they did with the JP movement in 1974 – one wonders if the forces that are rushing in to fill the political vacuum are not anti-democratic in their character. Herein lies the real danger.
Kuldeep Kumar
The return of the political
‘Media, media on the wall,
Whose is the fairest movement of all?
Anna! Anna! Anna!’
Grafitti in Hazare space, Anna Domini I
ONE of the ironies of history is that it should not be treated historically. The past is a poor guide if taken literally, because the continuities may be of a more cunning kind. The Hazare movement has commonly been dubbed a middle class movement. Though the word middle class evokes many reactions, but among intellectuals the most predictable is contempt. For the left ideologues, the middle class is a self-obsessive, selfish group without a real political imagination which could be emancipatory. Among many social activists, the middle class is seen as the wet blanket of revolutions, its protests read as token protests.
My sense of the Hazare movement is that something new is being invented, which does not summon the old dramatis personae but makes the old ideologies look redundant. There is a new political economy which emerged with liberalization and globalization that in turn demands a new style of politics. The Hazare battle has to be seen as a part of this experimental process, a blend of muddling through and some innovation. How does one track the career of such a movement?
Maybe, one can begin symbolically with the man himself. He is a tangible presence, solid, simple, conveying the substantive nature of the swadeshi personality, a havaldar, a bachelor, a social worker, an advocate of drip irrigation, an ideal community development worker with nationalist credentials that the earlier generaion was so enthusiastic about. He is a mnemonic, seeped in the ideals of his time. There is a clarity to his visage and vision. Despite the stolidity, it evokes nostalgia, a past of ideals and a veteran goodness. When a man like Hazare protests, you listen with respect because he commands respect. When the Congress insulted him as a blackmailer, as corrupt, as unparliamentary, one felt as if the very sense of civility the society assumed was being undermined. It was like insulting a family ancestor. More than just disrespect, it was like defiling an icon or spitting on a collection of old family photographs.
Between Representation and Representativeness: There is a symbolic drama here that we must understand. Anna Hazare, in being insulted and incarcerated, becomes every man who is insulted by the state in trying to be citizen. In being insulted every man becomes Anna Hazare. From being helpless, a limp story of powerlessness, he becomes empowered. He is Anna Hazare. The victim becomes the protestor. The slogan ‘I am Anna Hazare’ is that alchemical term where any man becomes everyman in the ritual of politics.
This is a different idea of representation. You are not elected as in a parliamentary process. When you do, you represent a people. You stand in for them. You are their trustee. But representation is more symbolic, more universal. The Congress has confused the two. It believes that just because it was elected, it speaks on behalf of the people. It confused a contract and a sacrament. When a legislator claims, ‘I represent the people,’ it reflects an empirical act of law. When a leader says, ‘I am representative of the people,’ he evokes a symbolic domain encompassing life in a different way. These are two different worlds and two different rule games. As Hazare put it, Parliament is not the people; it occasionally represents them. An election once in five years does not exhaust democracy. Parliament is a part while democracy is a whole. By confusing part and whole, the Congress blundered politically.
The State as Behemoth: It misunderstood something else, failing to realize that every time a state insults a citizen, it grows even more monstrous in their eyes. Corruption insults a citizen as it deprives him of his dignity and then asks him to pay for what is his right. When you are both cheated and insulted, the sense of being a citizen diminishes. When to that sense of injury you add insult, the way Kapil Sibal and Manish Tiwari did, something snaps. It is this lesson that the Congress failed to understand. To convert an old adage of Lincoln, you can insult some of the people some of the time but you cannot insult all of the people, all of the time. When that happens, the people, from being an empty defeated category, an anonymous space, become embodied agency. There is a scene in Robert Bolt’s Dr. Zhivago which illustrates this. A man is attempting to enter a log house when the guard stops him, saying, ‘This house belongs to the people.’ The man pushes the guard aside, saying, ‘I am the people.’ It is this combination of power and powerlessness, this fable of opposites that was played out in the last few weeks.
One should not dismiss the Congress story too quickly. Its theory of representation and the Parliament is valid in its own context. It is based on four tenets. First, Parliament is supreme and responsible for the legislative act. Second, a party elected to Parliament is representative of the people for the electoral term. Third, no pressure group should force or blackmail a party into pushing a legislative act. Fourth, no NGO or movement is representative of an entire people. It needs to win its argument at the hustings. Electoral victory is a legitimation and any attempt to destabilize the process is seen as a threat to democracy. The most frequently cited critique by this group is that Hazare, through his fast, is blackmailing Parliament. He is seen as a Rumpelstiltskin throwing tantrums, convinced that his Jan Lokpal bill can turn India into gold. The Jan Lokpal bill is seen as deficient by critics and treated as a failed double of the Lokpal bill.
But the definition of representation is much too narrowly drawn. It has a taken for granted element. The legislator feels he is the voice of the people for five years. But representation as form needs responsiveness to vibrate it. People’s voice is not something you stereotype or take for granted. Representation needs both responsiveness and responsibility. The representative is a trustee of people’s word and voice. Unfortunately, representative democracy has become electorally empty and far too episodic to be meaningful. Hazare put it succinctly when he stated that ‘we have rule by Parliament not democracy.’ Democracy needs to be more substantive than a five year ritual of affirmation. One of Hazare’s representatives, a thoughtful young man, put it more reflectively. He said, ‘There is something about our democracy that has become shallow.’
Democratizing Democracy: The movement is clear that it is about democracy, but it is also candid that some of the old rituals of democracy appear hollow. A movement, which to start with was anti-political or at least anti-politician, has now emerged to democratize democracy. The nature of the process needs to be elaborated. Democracy, as one listens at these new happenings, is imagined as a triangle. The first side represents electoralism, the second, rule of law and the third, governance. It is this triangular depth that a new generation seems to be moving towards in expressing a skepticism of the regime on issues drawing on all three sides of this equilateral triangle.
One must acknowledge that its suspicion of politicians was deceptive. One needed time to separate its theory of politics from its antipathy to politicians. What exaggerated the problem was the behaviour of the Congress. No party has been so arrogant when in power and more accommodative when it senses its own weakness.
To the 2G and 3G spectrum, we can add the spectrum of arrogance which is embarrassing to watch. One must confess that the Congress has not been lucky with its TV gladiators or with its key spokesman. They evoke the puff ball arrogance of those in power. People were dying to poke it with a pin so that it bursts into smithereens.
The Arrogance of Power: The Congress regime demonstrates all the insensitivity of custodians defending an old paradigm. The regime which invented conspicuous poverty in response to cries of justice now produces conspicuous arrogance in reaction to the peoples’ plea for a conversation.
Conspicuous arrogance demands a serious ethnography. As a spectacle, it can have a devastating political impact. It can begin inoffensively and innocuously as with Manmohan Singh’s silence. The prime minister’s silence does allow for some openness, but as his silence gives way to predictable clichés and claims that Hazare is anti-Parliament, one senses his indifference to the turmoil outside. He seems to construct a conversational table around Parliament, contending that protest is noise because it has not been tabled as legislation. Chidambaram raises the ante by adding a touch of piety. He asks, where else will a Parliament be so patient with a people. The inversion sends warning signals that he shrugs off. Chidambaram is reminiscent of a McNamara during the Vietnam war, convinced that his team can do no wrong.
The arrogance of expertise becomes more marked with Kapil Sibal, his style combining the dockside bully and the lawyer as inquisitor. For Sibal, Hazare is to be treated dismissively as bad law. He seems simplistic, a Rip Van Winkle emerging into a complex world. Sibal exemplifies an authoritarian, angry expert dismissing the voice of the lay man. At home in law, familiar with legislation, he contends that Hazare got a fair hearing but since his bill is poor stuff, it deserves to be discarded. Salman Khurshid as the new law minister plays second fiddle to this team of lawyers, content that there is a competent collection of briefs. Law gets mistaken for politics. One suddenly feels that while the Congress may originally have been a creation of lawyers, it today might be undone by its epigone treating a major political drama as if it were a legal crossword puzzle.
By this time, Congress had reached a tipping point. The seasoned politicians of the cabinet yield to a Manish Tiwari who jumps the gun and with a profound lack of imagination calls Hazare corrupt. The audience watching the show starts wondering about the adeptness of politicians. First the Congress claims that Hazare is not representative of the people. Then it accuses him of being anti Parliament. It adds insult by charging him with blackmail and further dubs him as corrupt. It is a classic example of the pot convinced that the kettle must be black.
When Hazare appears a purer vessel, the damage control that follows adds to the trouble. Enter Ambika Soni. She rambles about her own political past, lists out her career of arrests, and then foolishly insists that Kiran Bedi as a former cop should have known what was coming. The audience begins to feel that it is encountering a slightly erratic debating club. A party soiled by scandals not only calls a swadeshi activist and a seasoned Gandhian corrupt, it arrests him even before he violates the law. Long before Hazare walked to Rajghat and J. P. Park, he was arrested.
Ambika Soni’s vacuous attempts at describing her colourless past are spiced up by Renuka Chowdhury’s additional observations. The latter’s exuberance is never in doubt. When crossed, she threatens to walk out of TV shows. Chowdhury produces a fragment to match Tiwari’s faux pas. She petulantly explains that India was under a Red Alert, that the Mumbai blast was still fresh in the nation’s mind. To threaten a protest on 16 August was to create a security problem. She insists that Hazare should have waited. Now our Gandhian is shoved aside as a security threat.
Each of the Congress apologists puts up a display that edges the crowd toward desperation. Every act on TV makes citizens wonder if this is what representation is about. The Congress might legally represent a people, but it still appears insensitive to them and even contemptuous of their pleas. The preventive arrest of Hazare was the last straw as the check dam of restraint crumbled and people flowed into the streets. Hazare in jail made the Congress look inept, silly, tyrannical and scriptless. Pranab Mukherjee in Parliament belatedly realized that it is easier to modify a budget than placate an angry people.
Even within the history of self-inflicted injuries, the Congress performance was classic. As the arrogance of power confronted the power of the powerless, the area around Tihar jail became an angry sea of protest. Even as people agitated impatiently for Hazare’s release, oddly enough a new space was being born. The apolitical was becoming political by voicing new idioms, summarizing issues in a way skeptics had not anticipated. As a seasoned political activist observed sharply, ‘The demographic dividend had invented the democratic dividend.’
This raises an immediate issue. The Hazare movement has asked its supporters to gherao their MPs till they accede to the Lokpal bill. The question is, can protest be pushed too far such that it destabilizes parliamentary processes? The politics of delay gets mirrored in the politics of acceleration and both can destabilize institutions, which sadly move with the speed and wisdom of a compost heap. Hazare needs to consider the relative speed of law and protest and learn to create a weave of time that can become an example for the future.
Beyond the Middle Class: Meanwhile the movement swung from being a mere spectacle to a political wave. When the dabbawallas of Mumbai joined Anna, it was historical in more ways than one. They had stopped delivering lunch for the first time in their 123 year history. What was still being dubbed a middle class movement had now expanded in scope to include other groups like Mumbai’s municipal scavengers. Something new was being conceived, unknown even to the official midwives of the movement.
Yet the word was out that this is only a middle class movement. When a political group is so labelled, the knives also come out. The intellectuals feel that finally they have got a handle on the movement. They see it as an extension of consumerism, a bastard child of the information revolution. When dalits pan it for ignoring them and some critics dub the political haste of the movement as ‘vending machine politics’, social scientists feel content at having sociologized the movement. They claim a middle class, mid-cult movement cannot go far. It, after all, has no roots in the dalit fight for justice or the OBC fight for representation. Yet two things happened which made critics cautious.
First, the Lokpal bill, long the clarion call of the group, seemed less relevant, its text only a trigger for the new discourse on democracy. What was so far dismissed as being a combination of page one and page three, now looked more creative and experimental. The category of protest was not dalit, OBC, or class. It was a general movement of citizens somehow determined to cut an unresponsive state to size. The middle class and the more amorphous protean group around it realized that the state was gargantuan and the corporations had become a fearsome juggernaut. What the crowds were seeking was a language for a more responsive state. The old model of participation appeared inadequate. One needed an engagement which could cut an egotistic state down to size.
The spectator realized that he was confronting an earlier generation, which believed that democracy revolved around the triad of voter, consumer and the wider vision of citizenship. The new generation argued that fetishizing elections had made India into a one-sided democracy. They had also learnt a lot from experiencing consumerism as a social fact. Consumerism teaches one about quality through brands and standards. One can recall a product or refuse to buy it. Markets are thus seen as more responsible than parliamentarians. This group seems to have extended the idea of consumerism into citizenship, insisting that delivery of welfare and entitlements too can have the same quality. In this they are challenging both the Parliament as a representative system and the state as a delivery system. Goods to be public goods must have the dignity of efficient delivery. The rights of consumerism are transferred to citizenship to create a new charter for democracy.
The information revolution has also influenced this generation. The information revolution becomes a free-floating metaphor. There is a gap between the old bureaucracies built on information delay and the new organizations constructed around speed of delivery, embodied in the difference between the old telephone system, which was treated as a rare privilege and the mobile phone system, which gives its own dignity and playfulness to consumption and citizenship. Corruption, intrinsically accepted as part of the normalcy of the old bureaucratic system, is seen to violate the very spirit of the information revolution based on user interface, the network as a commons and speed as an index of efficiency. The liberalized Congress regime suddenly appears a throwback to the world of old party and bureaucratic behemoths.
Time enters the picture in a critical way. This new generation wants to be part of history without being burdened by it. History becomes abbreviated to nostalgia as participation. The cries of Sare Jahan and Vande Mataram are no longer fragments and figments of another time. Even nationalism is rebranded as the second national movement to make it echo the contemporaneity of the second industrial revolution. Time as speed, History as nostalgia, combine to create a movement which can demand deadlines from legislators. It is almost as if the Lokpal bill is picked up because it was aborted so often.
The Situation Now: Today Anna is out of jail and thumping away like an Old Testament prophet on the necessity of the Jan Lokpal bill. The Congress meanwhile is issuing advertisements pretending they are fragments of a referendum. It is seeking to recover a sense of its old gift for consensus. The scenario appears to be a stalemate between a Congress desperate to add legitimacy to its bill and Hazare’s group, which insists that its own bill be anointed as the chosen vehicle. How does one read such a stalemate?
The politics of stalemate creates a scene much like the soap operas of the time. But the beauty of soap operas is that the characters almost become an extension of the family. It is the family outside whose fortunes we follow assiduously. The Hazare drama is similar. One wants to know how long he will last. Or whether Sri Sri Ravi Shanker will intervene. The spectator desperately wants to add new characters because the drama is screaming for plots our political actors seem too dim to provide.
Think of the following:
1. Justice Santosh Hegde waters down the bill to make its coverage more compact but pragmatic. The bill sud
denly appears more coalitional, less draconian as one moves to one version of the happily ever after.
2. Rahul Gandhi stops being prince-in-waiting and joins Anna at the Ramlila grounds. He tells a nation that it is time for change. A reconciliation Bollywood-style takes place. This is a symbolic act which can help redeem the Congress and send it back to its roots as a consensus party, as a coalition of truths, but new truths in this case.
3. Anna realizes that his trio of confidants is behaving like commissars, sticklers of the text and invites other activists to join in. Can the presence of Medha Patkar and Aruna Roy make a difference? Can the yogi balance out the commissars of his bill and create a world that is more open-ended?
4. Anna’s health deteriorates and with it the movement deteriorates into anarchy. This would be the Congress’ secret dream.
5. Civil society, which has always been innovative, creates an advisory group that helps Anna negotiate with greater aplomb. The wisdom of the soap opera shows that one of the best ways of creating a convincing plot is to add new characters, who add an element of surprise and resolution that everyone is waiting for.
But for all this to happen, the chorus and the audience must allow and help create new possibilities.
I must admit that the political discourse cannot only be a study of activists and the regime. The storyteller and the critic are the third focus of responsibility. One must confess that the critic has lagged behind the storyteller. What he saw as a pantomime of politics has acquired an animated power of its own. His extrapolations of predictability were met with tactical ambush. Anna and his team not only outplayed the regime but out-thought the storyteller.
Our categories and commentaries reveal our predictability. Critique must renew itself along with politics when it faces traditions of discontinuity. Maybe the wise word belongs to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. He said, ‘Criticism is the apprenticeship of the revising imagination…Criticism tells us we ought to learn to dissolve the idols, learn to dissolve them in ourselves. Criticism reveals the possibility of liberty and this is an invitation to action.’ In a way, criticism had frozen into the pomposity of old narratives. Possibly, there is now hope that between the activism of the citizen and the empathy of the storyteller, democracy might yet find a narrative that captures its new inventiveness.
Shiv Visvanathan
