Team Anna and the 'Parliament Of Whores'

What Anna Hazare, back at Ralegan Siddhi on Friday after his protest-fast for the Jan Lokpal Bill, called the UPA-2 government was not much different from what PJ O’Rourke called the prevailing American political establishment in his 1991 book Parliament Of Whores.

O’Rourke, a right-wing humourist, critiqued big government, demonstrating two things: first, that even after the conservative revolution led by US President Ronald Reagan, the American right was still upset with the expanded scope of their federal government, the high taxes they paid to maintain it, and its intrusion into their lives; and second, only in America can you get away with a title like that (in thin-skinned India you’d be pilloried for misusing freedom of speech, and also find yourself facing criminal cases, income tax cases and privilege motions).

O’Rourke’s hilarious Parliament Of Whores has two decades later found echo in the American Tea Party movement. Tea Partiers seek to reduce government and taxes to almost zero, and have been propping candidates that even the US Republican Party finds extremist (and which could arguably help Barack Obama return to power despite his inability to pull his country out of economic recession).

The book also finds resonance two decades later in our country, where a group of citizens express similar disdain for government, to the extent of abusing it. This is one reason why Team Anna and its supporters are more like the Tea Party than the Arab Spring, despite the latter’s momentous spread through several countries in 2011.

Team Anna, unlike the Arab Spring, is not revolutionary. It does not seek overthrow of government, much less overthrow of the system of government; rather, it seeks an additional check-and-balance in our Constitution.

The Arab Spring movements were/are looking to overthrow dictators who had run their countries for decades; Team Anna is fighting an abstraction that has been around for decades called corruption (and tell me, who honestly thinks that corruption is about to end?).

The Arab Spring protestors occupied the central public spaces of their capital and towns, facing down their dictators’ militaries; Team Anna was handed the Ramlila ground by the government, and the most they potentially faced were the lathis of the Delhi police.

Like the Tea Party, Team Anna castigates government for wasting public money. Many liken Anna’s supporters to those who came out for the anti-Mandal agitations two decades ago; these are middle-class Indians who benefited from the 1991 economic reforms but feel uncomfortable with the thought that further reforms might benefit those who could one day elect Mayawati prime minister of India.

Team Anna’s supporters are people who say that social legislation like the NREGA is wasteful, in the way that the Tea Party says the US welfare and healthcare systems are wasteful; you will increasingly hear voices telling you how NREGS “handouts” turn rural people unproductive and create dependencies, very much in the way that Tea Party supporters characterise American “welfare mothers”.

Team Anna has recently been asked to support causes of the marginalized in India: Anna has been invited to Manipur to demonstrate solidarity with Iron Sharmila, who has been on a hunger strike for years (she is force-fed and weighs only 37 kg) for the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a far more life-or-death matter than corruption for Indians living in her state.

In Kashmir, the separatist Hurriyat conference has invited Anna to help seek answers in a recent discovery of unmarked graves, which are the likely result of extra-judicial killings. They sound like serious and worthwhile issues. Yet these do not concern the Indian middle-class which has grown deaf to such complaints and which deludes itself into thinking that separatism can be erased by “good governance”. You do not need a thought experiment to know how the Tea Party would feel about Kashmir or Manipur.

The difference between the Arab Spring and Team Anna is that the former dismantled autocracy in four countries (and counting. It isn’t over yet). Mubarak is gone, Gaddafi is gone, but Manmohan Singh is still there; even if he goes, he’ll be replaced by either Rahul Gandhi or by another UPA-2 non-threatening stop-gap arrangement.

Team Anna is more like the Tea Party which had its impact in the last US Congressional elections and which may influence the selection of Barack Obama’s 2012 opponent, but whose influence faces the law of diminishing returns. Anna Hazare is similarly likely to end up a one-agitation wonder, his tactics producing diminishing returns.

Let’s not forget: the Tea Party, while vocal and able to whip up thronged rallies, represents a fraction of Americans. Anna’s thousands at the Ramlila grounds are miniscule compared to the 12 lakhs that Chiranjeevi mobilized at Tirupati, for instance, when he joined politics in 2008.

Movements succeed against dictatorships, but cannot succeed beyond a point against the institutions of participatory democracy. Team Anna would never find middle-class support for an agitation against Sonia Gandhi because, well, she’s been elected. What Team Anna, like the Tea Party, needs to learn from the Arab Spring is that a Parliament Of Whores is better than no Parliament at all.
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The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai