Ashutosh - Anna: 13 Days That Awakened India

CONTENTS

The Not-So-Strange Case of Anna Hazare

W ho is Anna Hazare, where does he come from, and on what does he perch his political self? These questions are interrelated, but they are not the same.

Anna, we all know, comes from a small village in western India. He has even managed to put that village on the map of India. Many now know it by name. This is not as trivial a detail as it at first seems. The great protagonists of the Indian village, whether in competitive politics or in major non-party political movements identified with the interests of rural India have mostly come from cities. From Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan to their more modest followers such as Medha Patkar and Vandana Shiva it is the same story. It is only in recent decades that such protagonists have begun to actually come from villages. It is a bit like Indias national game, cricket. Only in the last two decades has a section of the national team begun to come from where more than two-thirds of the nation live.

Hazares background has created problems for us, not unlike the ones created by UPs present chief minister. While she comes from the underside of Indian society, Hazare comes from the periphery. They share a style and a language of politics that offend the mainstream, into which they, some feel, have gate-crashed. To a majority of well-educated ideologues, these actors in our public life look terribly unmanageable, unbelievably crude and inconsistent. They seem to lack correct ideology, vision and manners. Due to political exigencies, they sometimes become likeable to our newspaper-reading, televisionwatching public. This is considered forgivable as long as the spell lasts only for short stretches of time or when taken in homeopathic doses, otherwise not. Digvijay Singhs response to Anna is a good example. Singh is an accomplished politician; he does not hold office by virtue of being a technocrat, successful professional or retired civilian. Nor does he depend on the courtesy of leaders who have sizeable political bases. He has an independent support base. If he falters and stumbles when confronting Anna, we can imagine the plight of the amateur politicians who have entered politics with a different set of qualities, who have graduated to politics as first-class-first students or debating stars from prestigious colleges and see the public sphere as an arena where to display their virtuoso intellectual skills in front of an admiring audience.

The other question I have raised at the beginning is more important. What is the source of Annas political strength? The answer to that is more complicated because Anna means different things to different sections of Indians. Ultimately, we are forced to admit that he is a creation of his admirers and detractors. Like all charismatic leaders, he is a projection of our yearnings and there could have been as many Annas as his fans and detractors.

Fortunately, his own rather limited personal and intellectual resources have reduced the range of choices in this matter. But that cannot wipe out the fact that India needed someone like him and it got him. Many in India were waiting impatiently for a figure like him to take up a cause that moved them but also made them feel dreadfully inefficacious and impotent. To deploy a clich, if there was no Anna, they would have invented one so that they could, at the same time, pontificate on the subject of corruption and criticize his simple-mindedness, immaturity and double-faced choices.

Yet, corruption in India now touches not only the super rich and the haute bourgeoisie, but also the urban slum dwellers and the landless agricultural labourers. They too have the right to look at the problem their own way, using their own categories, however ill-formed and harebrained these categories might look to middle-class intellectuals. Only the politically myopic and the ideologically blinkered, with disdain for human subjectivities, will try to supply a purely socio-political and institutional explanation of Annas rise and his esoteric, often self-defeating political style. The mix of inconsistency, naivet, and oversimplification in his public utterances has been an inescapable part of Indian politics for nearly three decades. It supplies crucial clues to the protolanguage of Indias new politics.

However, there is an apparent contradiction here. Anna seems to share with many movements in areas such as environment, peace, human rights and alternative sciences in India an open hostility to politicians. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown over the last two decades that the politicians occupy, along with the police and bureaucrats, the three least preferred occupations. This is not unique to India. The discomfort with and distrust of politics and politicians is gradually becoming a normal part of democratic politics in many parts of the world. Democratic politics requires politicians but we are also learning the hard way that democracies have to live with robust scepticism and suspicion of politics and politicians in the electorate.

As part of the same package, there is also the growing belief that elections are not won only through healthy competition and past political performance, but also through money power, cleverly made deals and opportunistic social coalitions. Some party systems have institutionalized these beliefs; they openly prefer candidates who can mobilize larger war booties. They see a large war chest as a measure of popularity and winnability.

In India, however, this has gone further. Not only is it now mandatory for the losing parties to blame winners of vote-buying and poll-rigging, many have come to believe, despite all empirical evidence, that one can win elections by offering the poorer voters money, alcohol and fake promises. Anna openly shares these beliefs. Not much exposed to professional politics and political analyses, he picks up clues from popular beliefs and stereotypes and has turned them into an odd, rickety but nonetheless effective critical apparatus that has touched millions. Indeed, the more he falls back on that apparatus, the more he seems to be in touch with the people. Sophisticate journalists and political analysts might find his categories prejudiced, stereotypical and gossipy but these ideas are working among a large section of the people, waiting with a clear touch of despair, for some respite from omnipresent corruption and nepotism. (These ideas perhaps have also been strengthened by his long association with the army, as a relatively modest functionary. The culture of our army does encourage some undervaluation of civilian life as more wily, hard-eyed and corrupt.)

The more inane anti-political comments of Hazare come from his life experiences. He may not be the quintessential citizen of late twentieth-century India, but he is identifiably a product of his times and his life experiences. He has entered public life with much of his biases and easy judgements intact. That is his strength and, I must add, his weakness. He represents the anguish and the anxiety of ordinary citizens over the omnipresence and routinization of corruption and nepotism, but he perhaps lacks the robust scepticism, shrewdness and war-weary instinct for survival that has made the Indian voter what he or she is. He is unaware that the legitimacy of the democratic system in India is high precisely because, at the bottom and peripheries of the society and for millions of Indians at the receiving end of the system, the right to vote is an imperfect but powerful means protecting their political efficacy and ensuring social mobility. Democratic politics, with all its imperfections, has changed the fate of entire communities and it still remains the most potent pace-setting force in our society.