Anil Gupta: Are the Gandhian tools of civil resistance relevant today?

The recent breakthrough that Anna Hazare had with Indian parliament through a persistent non-violent social pressure has brought issue of civil resistance, or protest and corruption at the centre of national attention. A large number of protestors, I feel, were agitated more by the opposition to corruption than by support to a particular draft of the bill. Not many people realised that converging so much of power in any one institution is fraught with enormous risk in a democratic society. The heart of democratic society lies in checks and balances. More on it later. The instrument of civil resistance was evolved into a sharp tool of political reforms by Gandhiji. It has, however, evolved over a period of time in various ways.

Some of the disturbing trends are:

(a) The struggle between means and ends has blurred; not once did leaders of recent social protest ask participants to take an oath of not giving bribes or even confess to their children the instances when they had paid bribes. The personal was divorced from professional and social - a principle not consistent with Gandhian values; though, it may be pragmatic response to viability of crowd management.

(b) The moral authority of the leader was accepted by most, but of those running the show was suspected.

(c) The decentralised urban protests in the national capital and that too in the central arena have become more important than numerous small, scattered and silent struggles of rural and urban poor. The protests had to be loud to be heard, showing increasing insensitivity and inability of the State to register and respond to feeble protests.

(d) Legitimacy of the political class which became indifferent to norms of accountability and transparency got diluted, was one of the most viable and useful outcomes of the recent protest. Whether it will lead to churning in various political parties and whether they will give tickets on different principles in future remains to be seen.

(e) The demand for extra-constitutional ways of reaching end of social reforms has become louder. While it is true that parliamentary practice has lost genuine democratic discipline (evident when huge budgetary demands are passed every year, no matter under which ruling party, in a few minutes without any critical discussion), reducing its place in polity is fraught with danger.

(f) The involvement of people in the movement whose personal commitment to honesty, respect for human rights of minorities and other marginalised people is not always clear and confuse the masses about emerging role-models of anti-corruption agitation (to call it a social movement may not be right yet).

It is obvious that in a mass movement, nobody can ensure that every participant will adhere to rules of the game unambiguously.

When Gandhi withdrew his call for freedom struggle, when he found some of these rules being violated, he acquired
tremendous moral authority. It took many years and if we ask ourselves, Gandhian values of frugality, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, moderation and aparigrah did not survive in most of public and private or even civil initiatives.

Authentic social movements cannot be built by media or through social-networking sites alone. The experience of Middle East and some other west Asian countries has been misread in this
respect. Spontaneous emergence of protests in different parts of the country was a positive sign and could be a very useful foundation for developing self-design, or autopoesis social mobilisation leading to emergence of social movement against corruption, discrimination and exclusion of poor and other marginalised groups from the main discourse.

I hope that young friends will debate these questions, trends and pointers thoroughly and ask themselves, whether channelising anger only against government will help in the long run. As a young friend commented on my post on Facebook, should some anger be not pointed at ourselves and our own trade-off in favour of short-cuts in life, and thus creating a market for bribes in the society? Let us not lose sight of the roots of the problem which are in us and not just there.

— The author is a professor at IIM-A