Lights, camera, satyagraha

When Anna Hazare announced his intention to fast unto death if the government insisted on its own version of the Lokpal Bill, he could not have chosen a more symbolic day. On August 16, a day after Independence celebrations, Indians will awake to a satyagraha for a new kind of independence, ironically made necessary precisely by the party that was instrumental in bringing about the initial freedom from colonial rule.

At a press conference, Anna Hazare went further, committing his entire team to a similar protest, if their demands were not met. A threat of that kind clearly ratchets up the pressure on a government basking in the afterglow of the nation's 64th anniversary as a democracy.

According to Anna Hazare, he will be left with “no option” but the fast if the Government did not include the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice of India in a Lokpal Bill incorporating the amendments that his team insist upon.

NO MASS MOVEMENT

No option other than a fast by a group of individuals, in a nation that prides itself on having dethroned one of the biggest imperial powers through a sustained, non-violent campaign? That bit makes one wonder at the audacity and recklessness of a group of well-meaning individuals that can appropriate the right to represent “civil society” even before making the feeblest attempts at mass mobilisation.

One could argue that the nation, barring the perpetrators of corruption, are behind Anna Hazare, twittering evidence of which floats in cyberspace and whose images were captured so vividly on television channels, candle-lit vigils and all; some street demonstrations by Opposition parties quick to jump in front of the cameras, not to mention the vigorous approbation of the urban middle class, should suffice to crown “Team Hazare” with the moral leadership of the battle against corruption.

Is that so?

Dissemble the ingredients that make up the present “movement” for social reform and what do we get? An age of Twitter-television resentment posing as protest, a satyagraha in this media-fed battle against political venality. By a stretch of imagination not unfamiliar to the more self-conscious, but historically unaware middle-class, both Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev might appear re-incarnations of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

But satygraha was never an individual act of bravery in the face of police repression or attempts at martyrdom. As Mahatma Gandhi showed, it was a slow and persistent mobilisation of the people against perceived injustice or wrong; almost all the seminal struggles against the British involved non-violent resistance not just by “Team Gandhi” but by masses of ordinary Indians.

THE MORAL QUOTIENT

But satyagraha was always more than just a political mobilisation, or a willingness on the part of the subject to die for a cause; it was a moral force that enjoined in the practitioner a unity of form and substance.

It was not enough to oppose the salt tax by shouting slogans; you had to do without it: Swadeshi meant boycotting foreign goods.

And it was the spread and absorption of this political-moral message that legitimised and fortified Gandhiji's leadership and his use of the fast as a last resort; he knew that the threat carried the potency of collective rage.

For both Anna Hazare and for other ‘quick-fix' reformers, the willingness to fast unto death may resonate with the age-old combination of omniscience and ubiquity that religious-social reformers have presumed as their prerogative.

In the case of genuine leaders like Gandhiji or later, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, these qualities were acquired; a ubiquity born out of persistent mobilisation generated an omniscience, the combination of which gave them a moral presence unique in the history of social change.

Just as important, both in India before 1947 and in America of the 1960s, the mobilised received the message of a political-moral battle that involved the overthrow of not just the apparent institutions of coercive power, the army, the police, but also the value systems that equally worked to subject people to the dominant power.

What does this mean for “Team Hazare” and Baba Ramdev, and more so for enraptured Indians who have bestowed upon these “social reformers” an aureole of divine cleanliness? The fight against corruption is a more tangled affair than either makes it out to be, because it is omnipresent in our own lives and so is not as easily apparent as brute political power.

For the fight against corruption to succeed, a more inclusive Lokpal Bill is undoubtedly necessary. But it is as important to create the moral ground, a new social compact that would convince more Indians than are convinced now of the need to move away from an invisible but rampant complicity in actions that in many societies would be deemed corrupt.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Equally, institutions across-the-board mandated to enforce that social compact need to be strengthened. Right now the danger is precisely the exclusivity of the movement against corruption or mis-governance, restricted as it is to well-intentioned individuals teetering on the edge of television-generated celebrity or the judiciary or, what is dangerous, to factions swearing by the gun.

When Anna Hazare gets onto that platform for his fast on August 16, television cameras will whirr, earnest supporters will light candles and offer breathless sound bytes to equally eager reporters about the corruption that taints our body politic, and then tweet the momentous occasion to friends.

Not many have read the Lokpal Bill or contemplated the nature of commitment to any struggle against corruption; to do that “civil society” (whatever that may mean) would have to start reforming itself, too.

>blfeedback@thehindu.co.in

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