Of late, quite a few people I know have asked me for my opinion on the Anna Hazare affair and I have been averting comment. What with all the rumpus and brouhaha generated by the so-called ‘movement’, I found myself irritated with and disinterested in the entire affair. Now that the episode is well behind us, I feel it is possible for me to reflect dispassionately on the past events and lay down my thoughts on some of the issues surrounding it. I have been surfing the internet for opinion pieces on the issue and most of the ones I came across tended to veer towards extremes – either thoroughly dismissing Anna Hazare as a passing irritant, a blackmailer of democracy, a misguided old buffoon who had no sense of the times (like Arundhati Roy’s diatribe against Hazare, reeking obviously of communistic drivel and conspiracy theories) or else eulogizing him as a modern-day Gandhi and his movement as the harbinger of great changes to come. One cannot expect today’s media to be objective on any issue and it is no surprise then that the more I think about it, I realize that the reality lies somewhere in between the extremes. A rare opinion piece that I found was this, and I feel it puts the issue in somewhat proper perspective. I wish more opinion pieces were written in this vein.
The first question to which I applied my mind was that of the the size or magnitude of this ‘movement’. It is being hailed by many as a mass revolution of the kind not seen since the days of the freedom struggle. All I can say to such commentators is that a basic appreciation of scale and proportion of events is manifestly beyond their grasp. In this age of social networking, when the concept of ‘motion’ is defined by the number of likes on one’s status message or the number of times it has been ‘retweeted’, it is very easy to call an event a mass movement. Even in terms of the awareness that it generated, I suspect much of it was confined to the watchers of 24×7 news channels and Facebook addicts- essentially the urban young and middle-aged. The few who actually ‘moved’ in this movement were the ones who turned up at the Ramlila Maidan, the epicentre of all activity. But even the crowds that assembled there are not a measure of the scale of the movement, for Ramlila Maidan is no far-off Dandi which takes an arduous march to reach, but a centrally located, well-connected public square in the heart of the country’s capital city. I can atleast vouch for the fact that in downtown Jamshedpur, in the corruption-ridden state of Jharkhand, the response to Anna’s call was really muted and I think it must have been the same in any city outside the NCR.
But inspite of all this, it must be conceded that Team Anna are good strategists. They chose their timing (August 15) and location well, and were able to capture the attention of urban India in the shortest time-span and with the least amount of effort. Add to this the government’s stupendous ignorance of elementary statecraft which led it to arrest Anna Hazare and jail him even before he had said the word ‘go’, and you have actually created in a flash a modern-day Gandhi and a crusader against an immoral and highhanded authority. No wonder that even those who were not sure until the last moment if ‘they really were Anna’ were converted as soon as they heard the news of the arrests, if not in the cause of the Lokpal but at least to uphold their own civil liberties.
The next question is that of democracy and whether the tactics employed by Team Anna amounted to a subversion of democracy as some, particularly politicians, have pointed out. I do not see how that can be true. Involvement of non-parliamentarians in the drafting of legislation is an ordinary affair and most bills brought by the government are drafted by experts or bureaucrats who are not parliamentarians. Members of the public, whether in form of NGOs or pressure groups are perfectly justified in seeking representation on a drafting panel, particularly when the envisaged bill is of burning interest to the nation, and it is finally up to the parliament to accept the bill in that form, modify it or reject it altogether. However, the modus operandi adopted by such pressure groups and the government’s reaction to them sets the tone of as well as precedent for future political discourse. In Anna’s case, it was fast-until-death (and pass-the-bill-by-nightfall-or-I-die) which, howsoever justified it may seem to those who are reminded of the fight against the British Raj, is essentially a strong-arming tactic representing complete abdication of reason and appeal to popular sentiment. Unlike the Raj, Today’s government is of our own making and this kind of opportunistic and bulldozing behaviour to bring it to its knees does not really set Anna and his team apart from the very politicians they want to crucify.
Now to the deeper issues in tackling corruption and whether the Jan Lok Pal, if and when it materializes, will achieve anything significant in that direction. From what I understand, the Lok Pal will be another punitive institution to add to the host of such institutions already existing – like the ED, CBI, CAG, CVC, law courts etc. No matter what shape the legislature gives to the Lok Pal, it will be practically impossible for a body comprising of 10-12 persons to attack corruption at the grassroots – which is where it resides and hurts most. As far as the Rajas and Kanimozhis are concerned, the ordinary people are not concerned with their fate, and they are best left at the mercy of investigative journalists and their own fair-weather colleagues. Indian bureaucracy consists of an estimated 3.5 crore government employees spread all over the country and beyond, and it is no laughing matter trying to bring them under the ambit of anything. Investigative and punitive bodies can at best scrape the surface when it comes to dealing with corruption in this behemoth of an organization, and that too only in the rare cases where the wrongdoer has been foolish enough to leave his tracks uncovered.
For any real change to take place, systemic interventions aimed at changing the behaviour and culture of the bureaucracy need to be introduced. (For an example of what I mean by systemic change, take a look at Chief Economic Adviser Kaushik Basu’s policy paper on decriminalizing the act of bribe–giving. Drawing from game theory, he suggests that such a simple intervention can reduce the incidence of corruption in the country significantly.) Policy makers could also take cues from the corporate world in this regard, which has evolved several elegant mechanisms to align the organization’s desire for performance with employees’ fundamental greed for money and advancement. Volumes can be written on such mechanisms, but the moot point here is that the approach to eradicating corruption has to be systemic and not superficial, and the whole idea of Lok Pal belongs in the latter category. Viewed as a first step, it is perhaps desirable, and indeed Anna Hazare’s agitation shall be successful if it serves as a warm-up for more serious discussions to follow in its wake.
Finally I would like to reflect on the person of Anna Hazare in the capacity of a leader and reformer that he is being made out to be. Parallels with Gandhi are being drawn and bandied around effortlessly. (Business schools are in fact already hailing the campaign as a fit case study on leadership.) I cannot say if he is made of the stuff that great, transformational leaders are made of. In fact, I doubt if he considers himself anything more than a Gandhian and an activist, and in the recent episode it was only too evident that he was being used as a mere façade, a figurehead of sorts for the movement while the masterminding was being done by others under his brand name. Leadership I feel is more about long-term vision and bringing about fundamental changes and taking people along (Gandhi went from village to village educating people about the ills of a subservient existence) rather than sitting in one spot and strategizing for the next hour or planning the next move.
Be that as it may, the very fact that so many people flocked to the Ramlila Ground when he announced his fast betrays the deep-rooted angst in people against the rotten system that they are forced to be a part of. They were not looking for a Gandhi at all and they would have rallied around anybody who was willing to go on a fast against corruption. It also betrays a poverty of good leadership of the inspirational kind in our country today, for given the dearth of choice, people can not afford to discriminate. In fact this movement was as much about identifying with a leader as it was about fighting for a cause and it would do our nation a whole lot of good if the politicians of the day are able to read the writing on the wall and rise to the occasion.
Of Gandhi’s arrival in Indian politics, Nehru wrote in his Discovery of India:
And then he came. He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths; like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes; like a whirlwind that upset many things, but most of all the working of people’s minds. He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition…Political freedom took new shape and acquired a new content.
In our anxious wait for that badly-needed ‘whirlwind’, we seem to have been swept off our feet by a storm in a teacup.
@ Sourav Sengupta
please gift an Oxford dictionary to each of your readers.. 😉
anyway, I am ‘eulogizing’ you for this great piece of writing. To be honest, as I am here in Delhi & got the chance of witnessing the event, my opinion somewhere differs from yours. It at least demonstrated the soft power of people in the so called largest democratic country, rather than the political coercion we are so used to to see.
It feels good to follow you in your blog. Keep it up.
Very well written Sourav!!! I too was not totally engrossed with the matter and so do not have a good opinion on it. But your opinion reflects a lot, and its a great piece to read. Keep it up.!!
On another note, your writing undoubtedly is excellent. Try making your sentences shorter, with the good words you use, the complete sentence looks too much extravagant. Sometimes it becomes difficult to understand what was being conveyed. So just a suggestion, if you don’t mind 🙂
Thanks Vinitadi for reading, appreciating and commenting. Of course I don’t mind your suggestion, and I plead guilty to this charge. Others have said the same thing and I hope that with discerning readers like you, one day I’ll be forced to mend my ways!