Anna Hazare becomes Swadesi Samurai

In the Lokpal melodrama, Anna Hazare becomes Swadesi Samurai

Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself, once as a tragedy, then as farce. Indians, much more inventive than Marx, go one step further. They invent history again and again, enacting it as a parable, a Katha, and even a soap opera. Nothing confirms this more than the Lokpal bill. It is a play that has been enacted so many times that one wonders which version we are watching.

The Lokpal bill was introduced forty years ago. It sprang from the suggestions of the Santhanam Committee for Prevention of Corruption but it became a Sisyphean exercise rolling down the hill again and again. The first effort was made in 1968 and it almost succeeded.

Passed by the Lok Sabha, it ran into the elders at the Rajya Sabha. The bill ran through a range of repeats in 1971, 1977, 1985, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2008, only to be spurned every time. Forty-three years after its introduction, it is still waiting to be accepted. Skeptics feel it is a proverbial lemon despite promises from the prime minister and frequent pride of place in electoral manifestoes. But recent polls show there is a major renewal of interest.

According to the CNN-IBN and CNBC-TV18 State of the Nation Poll conducted by CSDS, Anna Hazare has succeeded in forcing the government to acknowledge the issue of corruption. He has laid the foundation for an interesting battle. There are two things the survey makes clear. Firstly, Hazare is a force to reckon with. Secondly, the understanding that the people show of his efforts is more nuanced than the skeptical dismissal of our elite.

Swadesi samurai

Hazare’s campaign has acknowledged the vintage quality of the Lokpal bill and given it a second life. AFP

Hazare’s campaign has acknowledged the vintage quality of the bill and given it a second life. The bill is no longer a legislative chore but a vehicle of  social movement. A sluggish legislation has been revived as a social drama, speaking a new idiom, echoing a Swadesi dialect and sounding almost revivalist in fervour.

Reform, unlike lightening, has struck Delhi twice, once as Hazare and again as Ramdev. The Ramdev movement is currently sulking in the sidelines after being treated as a law and order problem. There is a general feeling that he has trespassed roles, a sense that for all his popularity, he should stick to his original core competence, yoga. It is Hazare who is seen as the trusted warrior against corruption. Although less well known than Ramdev, he has become the Swadesi samurai for this battle.

Anna-ji, as his letters show, is quite capable of giving the PM a lesson in ethics. In his 7 April  letter Hazare reminds the PM “I am not a kid that I could be ‘instigated’ into going on an indefinite fast. I am a fiercely independent person.” Hazare tells the government that “sixty two years after independence, we still do not have an independent and effective anti-corruption system.”  Singh lapses into silence, stumped, as if someone has told him he does not know his Adam Smith.

The Congress struck back by inviting Anna and his team to the negotiation table, trying to show they were legislative illiterates, boy-scouts before the legal acumen of Sibal, Chidambaram and Kursheed. But a bunch of glib talkers with American and Oxford legal accents were no match for Hazare and Swami Agnivesh who invoke the people as the ultimate source of power. The Congress negotiators come off like technicians commenting on a morality play.

Conscience of another Congress
The genius of Hazare lies in separating politicians from the political. To equate the two was to create a reductionist world where politics is what politicians do. Today politics is seen as what citizens and civil society wants their representatives to do. Like Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Hazare realises that the ethical and the political must combine. But as a contemporary Gandhian, he realises that the slum of politics has shifted to the parliament and the centralised bureaucracy, the two most corrupt institutions according to the survey.
The polls reveal something even more nuanced.  Decades ago, the ancestor of these surveys showed that people vote for democracy as a value in itself. They knew that good governance does not immediately follow elections. The current polls reveal that their understanding of governance is equally adept. They realise that Hazare has forced the Congress to acknowledge corruption as a major problem. But corruption, they suggest, is not about individual politicians. It is about institution building. In fact, here they find Hazare naïve. There is a sense that Hazare’s goodness as drama might run its course.

There is another lesson here. The survey shows that the Congress as a party has misread its own strength and weakness. When the UPA began people felt it has two leaders —  Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh — who were seen as being above corruption. Today, beset by scandals and indifference to corruption, it conveys the opposite message.  In a blatant act of pure indifference, the Congress tabled its own Lokpal Bill. This obvious contempt for the movement has not gone well. An elite indifferent to its own acts of corruption that also passes a bill that hardly covers the corrupt rings warning bells.

Hazare might lack legislative brilliance of the cabinet but he understands a deeper truth. Law is not based on contrast but is a covenant of a community. Law has to be anchored in a broader vision of communitas. When the government declares Section 144 at Jantar Mantar it does not realise that power does not always grow from Section 144. Sometimes it springs from goodness of an idea and the convictions of an honest man.
While Hazare has captured the moral and political high ground, there is still no guarantee that he has won the legislative battle. The Congress can use its legislative strength to foil his efforts exploiting the cynicism of numbers. By passing a watered down bill, the Congress not only performs an act of gross adulteration, it actually tarnishes its own image. Hazare becomes a mirror of the values that the Congress once espoused. In his old fashioned style, Hazare has become a mnemonic and a conscience for a Congress that once existed.
A conversation of democracies vs a coalition of corruptions
But Hazare too has to show that he is pragmatic. The objections of the old Right to Information (RTI) stalwarts need to be acknowledged. A combination of Hazare and Aruna Roy might screw the bill to its sticking place. It becomes a twinning of two strategies, the individual and the institutional. Skeptics might say that the Congress could brush aside both groups and that the middle class might tire of these movements as yesterday’s newspaper. Yet what surveys reveal is that peoples’ fight against corruption has durability, a sense of calling. Disgust has become the humus for a committed long-term politics.
What one needs is to pursue the conversation of democracies, but one has to do it with all stakeholders in mind. There are institutional questions one must work through carefully. Incorporating a few measly suggestions conveys little sense of generosity or even less sense of the Congress as a coalition of competing truths in a country where parliament has turned into a coalition of corruptions. The Congress cannot act as if Gandhi today would have just been another khadi clad denizen.
Hazare has reactivated the need to democratise democracy where terms like representation, accountability, investigation, people, civil society undergo the periodic spring-cleaning that makes India such an open society.
It is a truth worth recognising that democracy in India keeps reinventing itself. Our people have a commitment to the openness of politics and the value of democracy that our elite and the Congress might ignore. But in doing so the Congress might be writing its own obituary. Hazare is a moral star that the Congress does not understand.