Arundhati Roy
If what we're watching on TV is indeed a revolution,
then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones
of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan
Lokpal Bill, here are the answers you're likely to get: tick the box —
(a) Vande Mataram (b) Bharat Mata ki Jai (c) India is Anna, Anna is
India (d) Jai Hind.
For completely different
reasons, and in completely different ways, you could say that the
Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both
seek the overthrow of the Indian State. One working from the bottom up,
by means of an armed struggle, waged by a largely adivasi army, made up
of the poorest of the poor. The other, from the top down, by means of a
bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint, and an army of
largely urban, and certainly better off people. (In this one, the
Government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to
overthrow itself.)
In April 2011, a few days into
Anna Hazare's first “fast unto death,” searching for some way of
distracting attention from the massive corruption scams which had
battered its credibility, the Government invited Team Anna, the brand
name chosen by this “civil society” group, to be part of a joint
drafting committee for a new anti-corruption law. A few months down the
line it abandoned that effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a
bill so flawed that it was impossible to take seriously.
Then,
on August 16th, the morning of his second “fast unto death,” before he
had begun his fast or committed any legal offence, Anna Hazare was
arrested and jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan
Lokpal Bill now coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the
struggle for democracy itself. Within hours of this ‘Second Freedom
Struggle,' Anna was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison, but
remained in Tihar jail as an honoured guest, where he began a fast,
demanding the right to fast in a public place. For three days, while
crowds and television vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna
whizzed in and out of the high security prison, carrying out his video
messages, to be broadcast on national TV on all channels. (Which other
person would be granted this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the
Municipal Commission of Delhi, 15 trucks, and six earth movers worked
around the clock to ready the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand
weekend spectacle. Now, waited upon hand and foot, watched over by
chanting crowds and crane-mounted cameras, attended to by India's most
expensive doctors, the third phase of Anna's fast to the death has
begun. “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is One,” the TV anchors tell
us.
While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's
demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the
decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian,
anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will
administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the
power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary,
members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest
government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation,
surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have
its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration,
meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we
already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.
Whether
it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a
matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the
currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in
which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and
smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on
whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop
and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and
sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is
that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal
representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary
people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet
another power structure that people will have to defer to?
Meanwhile
the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag
waving of Anna's Revolution are all borrowed, from the anti-reservation
protests, the world-cup victory parade, and the celebration of the
nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we
are not ‘true Indians.' The 24-hour channels have decided that there is
no other news in the country worth reporting.
‘The
Fast' of course doesn't mean Irom Sharmila's fast that has lasted for
more than ten years (she's being force fed now) against the AFSPA,
which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does
not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on right now by ten
thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power
plant. ‘The People' does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom
Sharmila's fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down
armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or
Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the
Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley.
Nor do we mean the farmers in NOIDA, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in
the country, resisting the takeover of the land.
‘The
People' only means the audience that has gathered to watch the
spectacle of a 74-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death
if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. ‘The
People' are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied
into millions by our TV channels, like Christ multiplied the fishes and
loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we're told.
“India is Anna.”
Who is he really, this new saint,
this Voice of the People? Oddly enough we've heard him say nothing
about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer's suicides in
his neighbourhood, or about Operation Green Hunt further away. Nothing
about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmer's
agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn't seem to have a view about
the Government's plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of
Central India.
He does however support Raj
Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the ‘development
model' of Gujarat's Chief Minister who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against
Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but
presumably not his admiration.)
Despite the din,
sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now
have the back-story about Anna's old relationship with the RSS. We have
heard from Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in
Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or Co-operative
society elections in the last 25 years. We know about Anna's attitude
to ‘harijans': “It was Mahatma Gandhi's vision that every village
should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should
all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this
way, a village will be self-dependant. This is what we are practicing
in Ralegan Siddhi.” Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have
also been associated with Youth for Equality, the anti-reservation
(pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run
a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and
the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia,
key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford
Foundation in the last three years. Among contributors to the India
Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations
that own aluminum plants, build ports and SEZs, and run Real Estate
businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run financial
empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are
currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are
they all so enthusiastic?
Remember the campaign for
the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing
revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G
spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists,
and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as
the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands
of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer.
For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced and it
seemed as if some major Captains of Corporate India could actually end
up in prison. Perfect timing for a people's anti-corruption agitation.
Or was it?
At a time when the State is withdrawing
from its traditional duties and Corporations and NGOs are taking over
government functions (water supply, electricity, transport,
telecommunication, mining, health, education); at a time when the
terrifying power and reach of the corporate owned media is trying to
control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions
— the corporations, the media, and NGOs — would be included in the
jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them
out completely.
Now, by shouting louder than
everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the
theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very
cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonising only the
Government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for
the further withdrawal of the State from the public sphere and for a
second round of reforms — more privatisation, more access to public
infrastructure and India's natural resources. It may not be long before
Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.
Will
the 830 million people living on Rs.20 a day really benefit from the
strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and
driving this country to civil war?
This awful crisis
has been forged out of the utter failure of India's representative
democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and
millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In
which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary
people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We're watching India being
carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being
waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at
stake.
Arundhati Roy
Courtesy: The Hindu- 22nd
August 20011.
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