The government’s flip-flops are indicative of
incompetence; the Anna group’s flip-flops arise because of the
compulsions of a particular style of politics on which it is embarked,
which can be called “messianism” and which is fundamentally
anti-democratic. The fact that it is striking a chord among the
people, if at all it is (one cannot entirely trust the media on this),
should be a source of serious concern, for it underscores the
premodernity of our society and the shallowness of the roots of our
democracy.
Democracy essentially means a subject role for the
people in shaping the affairs of society. They not only elect
representatives periodically to the legislature but intervene actively
through protests, strikes, meetings and demonstrations to convey their
mood to the elected representatives. There being no single mood,
freedom of expression ensures that different moods have a chance to be
expressed provided the manner of doing so takes the debate forward
instead of foreclosing it. For all this to happen, people have to be
properly informed. The role of public meetings where leaders explain
issues, and of media reports, articles and discussions, is to ensure
that they are. The whole exercise is meant to promote the subject role
of the people, and the leaders are facilitators. Even charismatic
leaders do not substitute themselves for the people; they are
charismatic because the people, in acquiring information to play their
subject role, trust what they say.
Messianism substitutes the collective subject, the
people, by an individual subject, the messiah. The people may
participate in large numbers, and with great enthusiasm and support,
in the activities undertaken by the messiah, as they are doing
reportedly at Anna Hazare’s fast at the Ramlila grounds, but they do
so as spectators. The action is of the messiah; the people are
only enthusiastic and partisan supporters and cheerleaders. If at all
they ever undertake any action on the side, this is entirely at the
messiah’s bidding, its ethics, rationale and legitimacy never
explained to them (no need is felt for doing so); whenever they march,
they march only in support of the messiah, not for specific demands
that they have internalised and feel passionately about.
When they gather at the Ramlila grounds, for instance,
the occasion is not used to enlighten them, to bring home to them the
nuances of the differences between the government’s Lokpal Bill and
the Jan Lokpal Bill so that they could act with discrimination and
understanding. On the contrary, the idea is to whip up enthusiasm
among them without enlightening them, through the use of meaningless
hyperbole like “the government’s bill is meant not for the
prevention but for the promotion of corruption” and “Anna
is India and India is Anna”. If the venue was one where discussions,
debates and informative speeches were taking place, the matter would
be different but those, alas, have no place in the political activity
around messianism.
Informative speeches have been the traditional staple
of political activity in India. Maulana Bhashani, a popular peasant
leader in what is now Bangladesh, used to give marathon speeches that
were interrupted when people went home for lunch or dinner, or even
for a night’s rest, and resumed when they reassembled afterwards; and
the speeches contained much information about everything, not just
politics but even crop-sowing practices and the best means of
irrigation. A speech was virtually a set of classes; it had an
educative role. I myself have heard election speeches in West Bengal
by the inimitable Jyoti Basu, and also others. The speeches were based
on solid homework and conveyed information and argument to the
audience. They also sought to rebut what was being said by the
opponents and hence carried forward a debate in public. Political
activity of this kind assumed a subject role of the people and
prepared them for it; it was quintessentially democratic.
Messianic political activity does no such thing; it quintessentially
creates a spectacle not just for the audience but above all for
the TV cameras upon whose presence it is crucially dependent.
|
Is the RSS running the Anna show?
Yes! A proud admission by senior BJP leader
Sushma Swaraj
BY IFTIKHAR GILANI
The bulk of support to crusader Anna Hazare
is coming from the RSS’s youth cadres. It is not an allegation
by the Congress but an open admission by senior BJP leader
Sushma Swaraj.
She attacked Home Minister P. Chidambaram in
the Lok Sabha on August 17, during a debate on the Hazare
episode, the text of which was released on August 18, for
getting agitated by the RSS’s involvement in the people’s
movement launched by the crusader for a strong and effective
Lokpal to curb corruption.
Asserting that there should be no doubt about
the RSS’s role in Hazare’s crusade, she pointed out that the RSS
is a part of the India Against Corruption movement, the body
under whose banner he is agitating for a strong Lokpal Bill. She
pointed out that the RSS is not extending any secret support but
officially mobilising support through Youth Against Corruption,
an arm of the RSS’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad (ABVP).
“Why do the police not take any action when
separatists from Kashmir come and make seditious speeches in
Delhi? You protect their human rights. But if a sadhu in saffron
or a Gandhian supported by the RSS comes to protest in Delhi,
you start raining batons on them. I want to know why people get
agitated by the mere mention of the RSS?” she asked, asserting
that the RSS is a nationalist organisation.
She wanted all to know the political clout
the RSS wields in the country though it was an unregistered
“cultural organisation”. She pointed out that “116 MPs in this
House and 45 members of the upper house owe allegiance to the
RSS while seven chief ministers of various states are also
committed to the RSS”.
“Do you still believe the RSS does not have
support in the country? Why is the government then getting so
agitated and upset if a people’s movement is supported by the
RSS?” she asked.
(Iftikhar Gilani is special correspondent with
Tehelka.com. This article was published on www.tehelka.com on
August 18, 2011.)
Courtesy: Tehelka; www.tehelka.com
|
I am not concerned here with whether the Jan Lokpal
Bill is the best piece of legislation on the subject; nor am I
concerned with the possible RSS links of the Anna campaign. These
issues, though important, are not germane to my argument. My concern
is with the “dumbing down” of the people that messianic political
activity entails: “leave things to Anna but do come to cheer him”.
Just as in a potboiler Hindi film the hero single-handedly does all
the fighting required to rid the locale of villainous elements,
messianic activity leaves all the fighting, that is, the subject role,
to the messiah. The people stand around with sympathy and cheer.
When the Anna group announces that he will take up
issues like land reforms, corporate land grab and commercialisation of
education once his fight against corruption is over, one almost feels
that Shekhar Kapur’s Mr India has finally arrived on the scene!
The problem however is that Mr India is a negation of democracy; and
relying upon Mr India, like relying upon the arrival of an incarnation
of Vishnu to cleanse the world of evil, is a throwback to our
premodernity. It is not just an admission of a state of powerlessness
of the people that may prevail at the moment; it reinforces that
powerlessness.
Messianism is fundamentally anti-democratic because it
is complicit in this objectification of the people, this
self-fulfilling portrayal of them as dumb objects that need a messiah.
When the Anna group uses the term “people” as a substitute for itself
(referring to its own bill as “the people’s bill”, its own views as
the “people’s views”), it is implicitly carrying out a conceptual
coup d’état, namely that messianism is democracy! But quite apart
from the fact that the messiah is not elected by the people, a point
made by many, there is the basic point that nobody, whether elected or
not, can substitute for the people in a democracy.
This presumption however explains the flip-flops made
by the Anna group. If Anna is the people then democracy, where
the people are supreme, demands that his version of the bill must
be accepted over any other version, including what the parliamentary
Standing Committee may come to formulate. The people’s supremacy over
Parliament entails ipso facto Anna’s supremacy over Parliament.
Messianism necessarily implies an “Anna’s-bill-has-got-to-be-adopted”
position. Members of Anna’s group, many of whom have been associated
for long with people’s causes, may have occasional discomfort with
this messianic position, and may retreat to a
“we-are-only-exercising-our-democratic-rights” stance, but since they
do not repudiate the messianic position, they perforce come back to
the “Anna-is-the-people-and-hence-supreme” stance. To accept that
Anna’s version of the bill is only one of many possible versions which
the final bill could draw upon, amounts to seeing Anna as one among
equals and not as the messiah, that is, to an abandonment of
messianism; the Anna group is loath to do this. “Negotiations” with
the government therefore come to mean negotiations to make it accept
Anna’s version; “compromise” comes to mean a compromise that makes
Anna’s version final.
It may be asked: if the people prefer “messianism” to
“democracy” then what is wrong with it? Those thronging the Ramlila
grounds or marching in support of Anna in the metros are not
necessarily “the people” of the country and it is dangerous to take
the two as identical. Besides, even if a majority of the people
genuinely wish at a particular time to elevate a messiah over
Parliament, this is no reason to alter the constitutional order, just
as a majority wishing to abandon secularism at a particular time is no
reason to do so. The Constitution is the social contract upon which
the Indian state is founded and it cannot be overturned by the wishes
of a majority at a particular time. If perchance the government
accepts messianism out of expediency, it would be violating the spirit
of the Constitution and undermining democracy. Besides, any such
licence will make multiple (quasi-religious) messiahs sprout, who
would compete and collude, as oligopolists do in the markets for
goods, to keep people in thraldom.
