While his means maybe Gandhian, his demands are certainly not.
If what we're watching on TV is indeed a revolution,
then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones
of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan
Lokpal Bill, here are the answers you're likely to get: tick the box —
(a) Vande Mataram (b) Bharat Mata ki Jai (c) India is Anna, Anna is
India (d) Jai Hind.
For completely different reasons,
and in completely different ways, you could say that the Maoists and
the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both seek the
overthrow of the Indian State. One working from the bottom up, by means
of an armed struggle, waged by a largely adivasi army, made up of the
poorest of the poor. The other, from the top down, by means of a
bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint, and an army of
largely urban, and certainly better off people. (In this one, the
Government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to overthrow
itself.)
In April 2011, a few days into Anna
Hazare's first “fast unto death,” searching for some way of distracting
attention from the massive corruption scams which had battered its
credibility, the Government invited Team Anna, the brand name chosen by
this “civil society” group, to be part of a joint drafting committee for
a new anti-corruption law. A few months down the line it abandoned that
effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a bill so flawed that it
was impossible to take seriously.
Then, on August
16th, the morning of his second “fast unto death,” before he had begun
his fast or committed any legal offence, Anna Hazare was arrested and
jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill now
coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the struggle for
democracy itself. Within hours of this ‘Second Freedom Struggle,' Anna
was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison, but remained in Tihar
jail as an honoured guest, where he began a fast, demanding the right
to fast in a public place. For three days, while crowds and television
vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna whizzed in and out of the
high security prison, carrying out his video messages, to be broadcast
on national TV on all channels. (Which other person would be granted
this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the Municipal Commission of
Delhi, 15 trucks, and six earth movers worked around the clock to ready
the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand weekend spectacle. Now, waited
upon hand and foot, watched over by chanting crowds and crane-mounted
cameras, attended to by India's most expensive doctors, the third phase
of Anna's fast to the death has begun. “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari,
India is One,” the TV anchors tell us.
While his
means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary
to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal
Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully
chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of
employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister,
the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down
to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of
investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that
it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent
administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one
that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.
Whether
it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a
matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the
currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in
which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and
smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on
whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop
and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and
sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is
that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal
representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary
people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet
another power structure that people will have to defer to?
Meanwhile
the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag
waving of Anna's Revolution are all borrowed, from the anti-reservation
protests, the world-cup victory parade, and the celebration of the
nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we
are not ‘true Indians.' The 24-hour channels have decided that there is
no other news in the country worth reporting.
‘The
Fast' of course doesn't mean Irom Sharmila's fast that has lasted for
more than ten years (she's being force fed now) against the AFSPA, which
allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not
mean the relay hunger fast that is going on right now by ten thousand
villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant.
‘The People' does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila's
fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen
and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or
Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak,
or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean
the farmers in NOIDA, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country,
resisting the takeover of the land.
‘The People' only
means the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a
74-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal
Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. ‘The People' are the tens
of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our
TV channels, like Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the
hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we're told. “India is Anna.”
Who
is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough
we've heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing
about the farmer's suicides in his neighbourhood, or about Operation
Green Hunt further away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh,
nothing about Posco, about farmer's agitations or the blight of SEZs. He
doesn't seem to have a view about the Government's plans to deploy the
Indian Army in the forests of Central India.
He does
however support Raj Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has
praised the ‘development model' of Gujarat's Chief Minister who oversaw
the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a
public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)
Despite
the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do.
We now have the back-story about Anna's old relationship with the RSS.
We have heard from Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community
in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or
Co-operative society elections in the last 25 years. We know about
Anna's attitude to ‘harijans': “It was Mahatma Gandhi's vision that
every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on.
They should all do their work according to their role and occupation,
and in this way, a village will be self-dependant. This is what we are
practicing in Ralegan Siddhi.” Is it surprising that members of Team
Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the
anti-reservation (pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled
by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors
include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal
and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000
from the Ford Foundation in the last three years. Among contributors to
the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and
foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and SEZs, and run Real
Estate businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run
financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of
them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes.
Why are they all so enthusiastic?
Remember the
campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as
embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including
the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior
journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress
as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of
thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public
exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were
disgraced and it seemed as if some major Captains of Corporate India
could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people's
anti-corruption agitation. Or was it?
At a time when
the State is withdrawing from its traditional duties and Corporations
and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply,
electricity, transport, telecommunication, mining, health, education);
at a time when the terrifying power and reach of the corporate owned
media is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that
these institutions — the corporations, the media, and NGOs — would be
included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed
bill leaves them out completely.
Now, by shouting
louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away
at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have
very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonising only the
Government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for
the further withdrawal of the State from the public sphere and for a
second round of reforms — more privatisation, more access to public
infrastructure and India's natural resources. It may not be long before
Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.
Will
the 830 million people living on Rs.20 a day really benefit from the
strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and
driving this country to civil war?
This awful crisis
has been forged out of the utter failure of India's representative
democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and
millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In
which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary
people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We're watching India being
carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being
waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at
stake.
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