The Obituary of a Movement
It was good, it was brief
What
killed the revolt was not its inherent hypocrisy but the fact that the
movement could not escalate from a farce to something substantial.
(Illustration: VIVEK THAKKAR)
There is a type of talented Indian who lives in the United
States with his austere wife to whom he lost his virginity, and has two
children who are good at spelling. He walks with a mild slouch. He is
still intimidated by White waiters, but not Black waiters. In an
elevator, chiefly in an elevator, he suspects he is probably small. He
does not drive a Prius. He is acquainted with the word ‘generalise’ as
something other people should not do. He is often a she. He is
fundamentally a good person by almost all the definitions of that human
condition—he is against genocide, burning people alive, including
Muslims, and stabbing children, including Muslim children. And he
loves
Narendra Modi.
‘And’ not ‘but’, for ‘but’ will mean that he has considered all the
facts and has made a moral decision. He loves Modi for honourable
reasons. He loves the idea of a smart, tough and proud Hindu. He loves
him because he loves Mother India. He was not always so traditional
and patriotic.
He will give many reasons why he is so now, he will give
abstract reasons. He will say love is abstract, love is inevitable. It
is not, in reality. Love is calculated, always. In America’s caste
system, he is nowhere at the top. In fact, at times he feels he is at
the bottom. There are moments, he knows, when brown is the new black.
Back home he was something by virtue of his birth, his lineage and
education, which was clear to all in plain sight. And the riffraff,
which knew its place, readily granted him his, unlike in the United
States. That is why he loves India. That is why the Third World
middleclass and the rich who live in the West are deeply in love with
their homelands. Nations that are filled with the poor are feudal in
nature, and so excellent homes for the middleclass. India is probably
the best.
Resident Indians, despite all their reasonable grudges,
experience the privileges every day. That is at the heart of the
collapse of Team Anna’s apparent revolution, which called for a battle
to the brink to overturn Indian politics, and asked informed Indians to
dismantle what ignorant voters had erected. But then there is no
genuine trauma in the Indian elite for them to soil their lives with
strife. The Indian middleclass (the not-poor and everything above) does
daydream about lining up downmarket politicians and shooting them,
but they simply cannot be angry enough and angry too long. What
reasons do they have really to be angry in this paradise of the
middleclass? They are, after all, the easy beneficiaries of India’s
inequities. It is not just about the maids, the baby maids, the cooks,
the gardeners and the drivers, who come at laughable rates. The
comfort is much deeper. As long as one is from a certain background,
one does not have to be exceptional to go a long way in the private
sector, academics, arts, media, anything really. In fact, one can even
be a low-grade tennis player and still be considered a sports star in
India.
But when it all began in April last year, when
Anna Hazare
arrived in Delhi to fast until he died or achieved the Lokpal, the
middleclass assumed they were the predominant victims of the Indian way
of life. And they thought the moment had finally come, when they could
finally disrupt the political establishment by cheering one old man
as he performed his only trick, which is to starve until the orange
juice materialises.
At the time, he was not known to most Indians. He had by then
won the Padma Bhushan for social work, but such award winners are
usually known only to those who gave them the awards and their small
constituencies of miserable people. In Hazare’s case, that constituency
was a portion of rural Maharashtra. Before April 2011, his name
usually evoked amused smiles from Mumbai’s political reporters. There
was no doubt that he was financially incorruptible and that his fasts
against corruption were not entirely farcical movements. But there was
something material that Hazare adored. He liked the idea of the
powerful taking note of him, his protests, and like all simple old men
of his type he could be a terrible pain when slighted. This,
Maharashtra’s politicians knew very well. At the first hint of a Hazare
fast, they would run to his feet, make vacant promises and from
somewhere the juice would materialise, and everything would be alright.
Sonia Gandhi, if she were advised by men who were not so hopelessly
arrogant, could have probably avoided Hazare’s movement. Hazare himself
carelessly hinted at it the very first day of his dramatic April fast
in Delhi.
He said he had written letters to Sonia Gandhi about the Lokpal,
but she never responded. It was as if he were not important enough.
That inspired him to come to Delhi. (Eventually, he stopped mentioning
this.) He delayed the start of his fast to let the cricket World Cup
fever subside. By the time he sat by the wayside, swearing to die until
the bill was passed, several forces had aligned in his favour—the
growing public disgust over the Commonwealth
Games scam and 2G scam. Also, though the number of those who
walked miles holding the accusatory white candles was growing in
several Indian cities, the idea of a massive, festive public
demonstration against crooked politicians was still new to the educated
urban middleclass, and it was an intoxicating experience for them.
Some families arrived in their luxury sedans to be part of
something they imagined was important. Good fathers carried their
daughters on their shoulders and showed them the distant introspective
image of Hazare. Lovers held hands and sang songs. It was all very
joyous. In states like West Bengal and Kerala, where the middleclass
has always been a part of the political process and were not amateur
citizens, people were not so stirred, but they took Hazare’s name with
affection. On Arnab Goswami’s
Times Now television channel, when I defended my report in
Open
of the first two days of the fast, which had described it as ‘a comic
revolution of an obsolete man’, one of the guests on the show, an angry
young man who was setting out on an ‘indefinite fast’, said, “Get out,
get out, all you cynics, get out.” Which was baffling because I was
sitting in my house.
Television news loved the revolution for reasons other than just
business. After the revelation of the Niira Radia tapes, some anchors
were facing a crisis of credibility—were they merely agents of
politicians? And Anna Hazare presented them with a sexy story through
which they could appear to trash the political system.
It is true that mass movements need the assistance of farce.
Common sense and rational analysis do not have the profound influence
that farce has on a large body of people. And for some time, it did
appear that the farcical beginnings of the movement were indeed coming
together to become a more meaningful and cunning parallel political
force. An inner circle of Hazare rose and came to be called Team Anna.
It was a circle of unlike minds—Hazare is a villager, infatuated with
the right wing, who hates corrupt politicians who do not respect him
and likes tainted politicians who flatter him (Vilasrao Deshmukh, who
is facing graft charges, is an agreeable politician in Hazare’s eyes).
Arvind Kejriwal has a discreet contempt for reservations in colleges
and jobs (he was once driven away from the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru
University by Dalit students). And Prashant Bhushan is the human
embodiment of Arundhati Roy’s prose. He has deep socialist tendencies,
is suspicious of capitalism, and appears to believe that the efforts of
modern economists to put a huge mass of humanity firmly in the saddle
is a conspiracy of saddle manufacturers.
Team Anna was not composed of natural allies but it was held
together by the common cause of the fight against political corruption.
It was inevitable that such a battle in India had flaws in its very
reasoning. It assumed that corrupt Indian politicians are an unnatural
phenomenon while the fact is that they are merely the success stories
in a republic where savage practicality has always been valued more than
ethics. Is there anything in the Indian system, in the Indian way of
life that will help a clever impoverished child from a remote village
reach the top layers of society through honest hard work?
Also, as Sharad Pawar showed in the municipal elections in
Maharashtra, even as the Hazare movement reached its peak, the shame of
corruption is not a disadvantage at the polls. All Indians, including
voters, lament that corruption is destroying the nation, but again and
again they return the corrupt to power. The middleclass, through the
media and films, has made corruption appear to be the most loathed
aspect of Indian society. Yet, circumstantial evidence suggests that
when they have to make a decision, Indians not only consider other
issues more important than corruption but also rate corrupt
politicians as more efficient, impressive and useful than the soft
good folks, of whom there are not many in politics anyway.
Despite all this, Hazare’s war against political corruption
received massive support in 2011. Who can deny that it was a greatly
enjoyable war—the underdogs on one side and the arrogant, filthy
politicians on the other.
What killed the revolt was not its inherent hypocrisy but the fact that the
movement
could not escalate from a farce to something substantial. For an
enjoyable revolution, and it is important for a revolution to be
enjoyable, the scenes have to keep changing. But Indians were stranded
with the same old man and his inner circle, doing the same things and
saying the same things for several months. The middleclass, whose
primary instinct is to be an island untouched by India, lost interest in
the revolt and went back to its life — among other things, bribing
government officials and accepting huge amounts of black money while
selling homes. It was inevitable that television anchors, including the
delightful evening patriot Goswami, should abandon the movement. And
the comic revolution of an obsolete man finally died.
Mourners say that it was all still worth it. At least, the political
establishment knew that there are dangerous adversaries lurking around.
That is not true. What the brief life and death of the farcical revolt
has done is ensure that a more substantial and potent rebellion
against Indian politics will not come anytime soon.
