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While the Arab Spring tried to bring democracy to countries ruled by despots, the Occupy movements and the anti-corruption protests in India sought to redefine democracy itself. Who is really in charge — politicians or the people who elect them? This was the question that fuelled both movements, writes Aditya Nigam

Two decades ago, mass movements rocked the former socialist world, bringing down some of the most oppressive regimes of the last century and heralding the end of the Cold War. Amidst the jubilation that followed, came declarations of the final victory of liberal democracies and indeed, of the ‘end of history’! American neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama triumphantly declared that these movements did not merely signal the end of the cold war or a phase of human history but of history itself. This was a contemporary rendering of a well-known formulation by philosopher GWF Hegel, where history had apparently realised its final destiny, arriving at the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. Fukuyama and many others saw these mass movements for democracy in the last century as signalling the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the ‘final form of human government’.

The movements of 2011 tell us how off the mark this celebration was. For a while everything did seem to be in order. After all, the ‘Arab spring’ comprised a series of mass movements in what were essentially anti-democratic and tyrannical regimes. Wasn’t the explosion of the desire for democracy on what Asef Bayat called the ‘Arab street’, simply the desire of a deprived mass of Muslim citizens who aspired to western values? Wasn’t it yet another confirmation of the Fukuyama thesis that it is the desire for liberal democracy that is moving the world?

When democracy is a sham
That was how the Western opinion makers, including Eurocentric radical philosophers like Slavoj Zizek, saw the uprisings. However, very soon there would be eruptions in the very heart of the Western world. The militant mass protests of students against fee hikes in Britain towards the end of 2010 had seemed to be an aberration but suddenly things changed rapidly. With mass sit-ins and demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and other Spanish cities, primarily against the multi-million Euro bailout plans for banks, militant street demonstrations in Greece and finally the Occupy Wall Street movement that started in New York and spread to other cities in the United States and to other parts of the world, a different story started emerging. From the indignados in Spain and Greece to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the one thing that bound these movements was the demand for democracy — ‘real democracy’ and ‘direct democracy’, as opposed to the sham that went by that name in these ‘advanced democracies’. Not surprisingly, the western media fell silent. Wasn’t this going against the script of politics as liberals — and powerful Eurocentric philosophers — had written it? Hadn’t we already arrived at the final destination of human society’s political development?

The real culprit
Two things stood out in all these movements — both of which we in India had already witnessed in the Anna Hazare movement that occurred in the period between the Arab spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The first was the strident rhetoric, not simply against the ruling party but against politics as such. It wasn’t one particular party but the entire domain of politics that was seen as suspect. Politics, that is, politics conducted through the political party, was and is increasingly seen as the culprit in the hijacking of ‘popular will’ and the transforming of ordinary lives into pawns in the corporate game of profit-seeking. The second was the focus on corruption. ‘Robbery’, ‘thievery’ and ‘corruption’ were recurrent motifs in the movements across Europe and the United States.

And so it was with the Anna Hazare movement in India. Right in the heart of the ‘world’s largest democracy’. Following on the heels of a whole array of exposures of corruption in high places where corporate loot and crony capitalism had been having a field day, the movement gave voice to people who do not otherwise participate in politics. Once again, the feeling that the hard earned money of the tax payer was being squandered was palpable.

Once again, our very own Zizeks, leftist and radical thinkers of all hues, found themselves, as always, in a quandary, completely missing the significance of what was going on. Grammarians stepped in to correct the grammar and language of the protestors.

What is their definition of corruption? Why are they raising the issue of corruption and not of hunger and poverty? Why are they not protesting army rule in Kashmir and other parts of the country?

Why are they not rising up against capitalism?