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India: Anna & Co can no way be called Gandhians

18 August 2011

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In these fraught and intolerant times, disclaimers are essential. Firstly, the UPA - II has forfeited all legitimacy to rule and has neither a sense of vision nor does it have a sense of purpose. Secondly, by behaving in the manner that it has in the past one year, the Congress and its allies would solely be responsible if the BJP were to come to power in 2014 or whenever elections are held. Caretaker governments have had a greater sense of purpose than the present government, which has rendered itself and the country into a sordid spectacle.

Character

Having said this, the limited point that I want to make here is that Mr. Hazare is no Gandhian and neither is his movement.

A Gandhian would follow a methodology that is based on a larger moral and ethical framework. It entails an appeal, first and foremost, to earn the legitimacy in order to question an unjust order. While corruption is a major issue in the country, it cannot be perceived only in monetary terms. To do so is to reduce the idea of fighting corruption into a jingoistic abstraction.

In a Gandhian universe, the first level of appeal is to individuals to question moral, ethical and material corruption in their own backyard. For instance, I cannot be working for a corrupt and unethical organisation without questioning its legitimacy and raising my voice against what I perceive to be wrong with that organisation, and yet join in a movement that questions systemic corruption.

For this reason alone, neither are Mr. Hazare and his followers Gandhian nor is their movement Gandhian. In order to follow a Gandhian strategy, personal interest has to be set aside and considerable sacrifice is entailed. Rather, the Hazare - led campaign is just a middle class movement, which appeals to the impatience of the middle classes and shies away from appealing to the people to earn the adhikaar to question an unjust system. It renders, mindlessly, the idea of ‘people’ and the ‘masses’ as automatically virtuous and right, without working for the enhancement of the moral and ethical core of individuals questioning an unjust system.

Further, it is un- Gandhian because it demonises not the evil but the evil- doer.

It has revelled in creating a rogues’ gallery of all politics and of all politicians without explaining to its followers the subtle, but significant, difference between fighting evil versus the perpetrators of that evil. Hazare and his followers are not remotely Gandhian because they allow the mobs around them to quieten anyone who dares question their means and methods. They have divided India into those who support their cause, and these are by definition, pure, truthful and above board and those who disagree with them, being relegated to the status of vested interests, Congress agents and immoral self-seekers. Causing such a divide is also violence, never mind the protestations on part of the Hazare supporters that the movement is a non-violent movement.

Gandhi

Gandhi was always open to rational debate and was open to being relentlessly questioned. Neither was he always right.

Tagore questioned Gandhi’s call to Boycott and warned him by saying that "the anarchy of a mere emptiness never tempts me, even when it is resorted to as a mere temporary measure. I am frightened of an abstraction which is ready to ignore living reality". Passive resistance, warned Tagore, cannot be moral in itself and can be used against truth itself. When a force like boycott or passive resistance succeeds, it becomes temptation. Tagore goes on to warn Gandhi that his martyrdom for the cause of what he perceived to be truth can degenerate into mere verbal forms and become self- deception that hides itself behind sacred names.

In responding to criticisms from Tagore, Gandhi’s language and tone is that of courtesy and restraint. He is firm in his rejection of Tagore’s misgivings but the question is never personalised. Even with adversaries who were not of the stature of Tagore, Gandhi maintained a tone of utmost respect and practised an aesthetics that seem to be alien to Hazare and his followers. Most importantly, Gandhi often resorted to his inner voice without giving his intuitions the air of finality or certainty. He never claimed that God and truth were exclusively and solely on his side.

Many commentators have remarked in recent days of the picture of Mr. Hazare sitting separated from his followers in the middle at Rajghat and have extolled it as a great Gandhian moment. The image, as well as the strategy to fast for a cause, also needs to be questioned. Gandhi in his time was criticised for his frequent fasts in order to force compliance as well as being instruments for self- purification and personal atonement. In commenting on the Gandhi- Ambedkar debates, D. R. Nagaraj had pointed out that the strategy of going on a fast turned people’s attention to the individual rather than the cause. It led to the glorification of the individual rather than serving the cause.

Gandhian methods have to be modified and critically examined by people who, to use Tagore’s evocative expression, hide behind mere sacred names.

Democracy

In saying all this, no one who is a democrat, and wants India’s democracy to flourish, questions anyone’s right to protest, put pressure on the government and desire a certain outcome. But the people who support this mythical, and regressive, entity called the civil society can be tomorrow’s mob asking for the legitimacy of khap panchayats to hang dissenting individuals or promote one form or the other of medievalism.

The modern state is a necessary evil and democracy is the most desirable but imperfect system because it rejects the self- appointed, self- righteous and selfserving morality of individuals or groups in favour of a formal and impersonal rule of law. Gandhi did not necessarily favour liberal democracy, and his reasons were different.

The sangh parivar does not favour liberal democracy and their reasons are different too. But the makers of the Indian Constitution chose this form of polity because Dalits, women and the minorities would be best protected under this not- so- perfect system; they can hardly depend on the capriciousness of a mythical entity called civil society.

The system is dysfunctional today but it still is the best we have. And it is a representative democracy and not a participative democracy, as Prashant Bhushan often likes to call it. Participative democracy ended with Periclean Athens. Now the choice is either ideologically driven revolutions, or the mob. Even Gandhi resisted the mob after Chauri Chaura, not only because the movement led to violence, but also because he felt people had not understood the implications of a nonviolent movement in letter and spirit.

Hazare and his followers will have to ask themselves a question: do they have the patience to educate people in order to lead a rightful movement that seeks to address a genuine grievance? Will Hazare condemn what happened in Gujarat in 2002 unequivocally as moral corruption? Will he be swayed by his own sense of destiny and inaugurate the beginning of the end of Indian democracy? In the end, they will do what they think fit and they have every right to do so. The only problem is the Gandhian mask. It neither fits them, nor is it appropriate.

The writer Jyotirmaya Sharma, teaches politics in University of Hyderabad

P.S.

The above article from ’Mail Today’ is reproduced here for educational use and and is for non profit purposes only.