By Shehzad Poonawalla,
For the past few months India has been witnessing a movement, tailor-made for 24X7 television, timed perfectly to tap into cynicism that invariably accompanies an economic slowdown triggered by the domino effect of a global economic recession, which has managed to galvanize the “consumer class” guilt against corruption and has painted the entire spectrum of political class in general and the ruling dispensation in particular as the fountainhead of all evil. While, on the face of it, it may seem to the amateur, naïve or perhaps biased observer of political trends to be a movement that is apolitical or even one that has its origins in a political vacuum created by lack of leadership, a well informed student of history would be easily able to draw several parallels between the on-going stir and the movement led by JP in the mid 70’s, an analysis of which would reveal the striking resemblances in the collective social forces behind both these movements that would belie any claims of rank political innocence of such movements.
JP and Anna
Although, no parallels can be drawn in terms of legacy or appeal between Jai Prakash Narayan and Anna Hazare, the strategies employed by both are marked by numerous similarities. Both the elderly gentlemen were firstly able to project their age and past record of nationalistic service (JP being a legendary freedom fighter and a contemporary of Nehru while Anna Hazare boasted of a relatively modest track record as a truck driver in the Army) to create an aura of selflessness, ascetism and sacrifice that caught the imagination of an otherwise materialistic and privileged consumer class. Ironically, both JP and Anna were able to use the narrative of “shock and awe” corruption to rally support of a vociferous section notwithstanding the fact that they were and are the biggest economic and social beneficiaries of corruption in the political system, directly or indirectly, thanks to their larger, almost disproportionate stake in political power. In fact, the all pervading bijli-sadak-paani corruption which is practiced even at the lowest, primary level of the daily Sarkar-Janta interface was never the rallying point of either the JP movement or the current one and today even as Team Anna attempts, rather half-heartedly, to co-opt the slogan of the latter kind of corruption into their movement, the poor and disadvantaged sections mainly coinciding with the lower castes and minorities, who have been largely victimized by this kind of corruption seem less than enthusiastic by the current goings on and for quite obvious reasons. Be it the modes of communication chosen by Team Anna to spread its message (namely social networking and private media channels driven by TRP calculations and other considerations) or the fact that the movement has failed to throw up notable or even noticeable faces from these deprived sections, as it were, busts the myth that the movement is deemed to be a credible effort directed at putting an end to the scourge of corruption in India. Worse, it perhaps even exposes an inherent class bias of the managers of this movement. As a leading lawyer put it, the “Jan Lokpal Bill itself is more of an articulation of misplaced middle class frustration that almost mocks at the egalitarian constitutional provisions and consequentially at the realities of the large masses of disempowered and disenfranchised people who find protection under those provisions.”
Has Jan Lokpal Bill public endorsement?
In fact, members of Team Anna often claim that the Jan Lokpal Bill is a perfect piece of legislation churned out after massive deliberations over the internet on its English draft!! This in a country where a majority of the people do not have the luxury of a personal computer or internet connection and do not speak English. Team Anna also says that they have carried out surveys which threw up one sided results in their favour. Assuming that these surveys were indeed representative in terms of the sample size and social profile of the sample chosen and were carried out scientifically and with integrity, one still wonders how a survey could be carried out to assess public sentiment on numerous individual, specific and contentious provisions of the Jan Lokpal Bill? Moreover the meetings attended and addressed by Team Anna members hardly ever turned out to be intensive two way discussions or dialogues on the bill itself. Rather one witnessed only abstract anti-corruption speeches at these meetings. And if indeed, as I presume would be the case, that the surveys much like the “dialogue” carried out by Team Anna, was merely a generic almost rhetorical one on the idea of corruption rather than specific provisions of the JLPB then with what moral conviction does Team Anna say that 1.2 billion Indians support the JLPB in toto?
It is no wonder then that several places including Delhi even witnessed anti- Team Anna protests being taken out by Dalits, who may have on the one hand found the absence of any Dalit representative in the Team and on the other hand, the presence of anti-reservation and anti-quota activists quite disturbing. A Dalit activist this writer spoke to even voiced his concerns about how this movement, buoyed by its possible victory over the Jan Lokpal Bill, could in future train its guns on an issue like removal of reservations unmindful of the complex realities that necessitate it in a society as discriminatory as ours!
Did anti-Congressism of 70’s benefit Indian Nation?
In the late 1970’s the JP movement saw the coming together of socialists and capitalists, liberals and conservatives politically opposed to the centrist position of the Congress trying to cobble up a political coalition of sorts under the banner of anti-Congressism. And so by 1978 India ended up with a Janata government, led by a former Congressman in Morarji Desai, who was far better suited to American interests than Indira Gandhi, whose pro-soviet tilt in the context of Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 (which led to the creation of Bangladesh out of East Pakistan) had surely not endeared her to the US administration. The irony that the Jan Sangha, which for all its nationalistic propaganda, was able to support such a government, which was relatively more pliant to the US, who in turn had openly declared its unstinting support for Pakistan by even sending its Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to deter India in the 1971 war was not lost. But the other stark irony was that socialists of the time ended up pledging their support to the very same Morarji Desai, who owing to his neo-liberal economic agenda, had to be removed by Indira Gandhi as Finance Minister before she could carry out the nationalization of banks which was perhaps the most defining socialistic step taken by the Indian State. What was comical is that the guardians of bourgeois interest found themselves in alliance with those who opposed Indira’s move to abolish privy purses for erstwhile princes!
Today, the political contradictions of the JP movement are virtually being replicated in Anna’s movement. As political forces rally around Anna Hazare in their opposition to the Congress once again leftists find themselves supporting a movement aided and funded by American organizations who have been the biggest promoters of neo-liberal economic policies. So at a time when the world including several capitalist economies are seeing the “Occupy Wall Street” protests directed against crony capitalism and against austerity measures translating into the virtual withdrawal of state and undermining of the concept of welfare state , the leftists in India are once again in alliance with those forces whose panacea for fighting against corruption would eventually translate into the neo-liberal economic solution of smaller governments and greater private sector participation under the context that the private sector is much more transparent and holier! In fact the entire anti-corruption movement in India has been talking about corruption exclusively in the domain of the state but has maintained a deafening silence on the corruption prevailing in the private sector perhaps in a bid perhaps to rationalize and legitimize the replacement of the state from several sectors by private player participation instead! That it comes just when the UPA II government sought to expand the concept of welfare state through massive social programs like MNREGA, NRHM and right to food and has been reluctant to disinvest its stake in public sector undertakings as was done under the NDA regime of Vajpayee also leads one to question the logic of the left supporting the Anna movement.
Closer analysis also reveals that the solution which was churned out by JP’s anti-corruption movement ended up only ensuring that a rather unstable Janata Party government came to power, ironically led by a former Congressman backed by the entire gamut of incopatible and irreconcilable political forces opposed to the Congress party including the Jana Sangha and the Leftists( and which collapsed under the weight of its own inherent contradictions within two years). But precious little was done to overhaul the corrupt system as had been promised including the passage of a Lokpal Bill, which today is being cited as a panacea. So JP’s idea of getting rid of corruption through Sampoorna Kranti finally translated into the opportunistic political slogan of Indira Hatao and as history almost repeats itself Team Anna’s Jan Lokpal Bill solution, which also promises “Total Revolution” is slowly shaping itself to be a mere Congress Hatao slogan to galvanize the opposition on the plank of anti-Congressism. Whether corruption free governance is on the cards is anyone’s guess but if history is anything to go by, India may once again ominously see itself straying down the path of political instability in the years ahead.
(The author is Law Student, ILI, New Delhi)