A call to rethink politics as we know it

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?

The Anna phenomenon
Indeed, that was the strength of the movement: that it focused on one single issue on which everyone from left to right and from workers cheated of wages to sections of the corporate world could all join in. The Anna Hazare movement was important precisely because it steered clear of what radicals most wanted it to do, that is take a stand on everything in the world. For that would have left, in the end, a motley crowd of radicals with their slogans and little else. Also important was the movement’s steadfast refusal to enter the political domain and demand that their voice — and of citizens in general — be heard in and of itself, and not because it comes through channels of party representation.

Establishment intellectuals sang another tune, though. The call to enact laws on the streets, as the movement in their perception seemed to be doing, was a call to anarchy and mob rule. After all, law-making was the prerogative of the parliament. Never mind the fact that the parliament whose prerogative it was, preferred to sleep over it for well over four decades. Clearly, two different conceptions of democracy were at issue here. One that insisted on its formal aspects — elections and representation, and the other articulated in the speeches of Anna Hazare and his colleagues that invoked the Constitution to say that the people and not the representatives are the real sovereigns. At some level, it is this second notion of democracy that is animating movements across the world. Representation, especially as mediated through the party, is seen as thoroughly suspect.

In our own history we have a robust tradition of the critique of this notion of party representation, especially in the writings of thinkers like MN Roy and Jaya Prakash Narayan. The argument has been often made that representatives elected on party tickets are answerable to the party that gives them the ticket to contest elections rather than to the people who elect them. In such a situation, to repose faith in the fact that members of parliament are ‘elected representatives of the people’ is disingenuous to say the least.

Redefining democracy
Looking at the entire range of movements that erupted across the globe this year, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that, at the very least, they seek to redefine democracy itself, taking it away from the powers-that-be and the way they have defined it so far. At a very profound level, it seems that this round of global mass movements will initiate — it must initiate — a fresh thinking about politics itself. Older notions of politics may not seem workable now, especially as a new generation brought up in the post-cold-war era takes centre stage. Twentieth century shibboleths mean little to them and they are in continuous conversation across the globe and across ‘ideologies’, through the internet.

However, to say all this is not to suggest that the Anna Hazare movement is nothing but a mere instance of a global moment of mass movements. On the contrary, it is very deeply located in its own very specific history in India. This history has to do with the emergence of the right to information (RTI) movement in the 1990s and the final passage of the RTI Act, through which corruption of different sorts was openly challenged. The way the RTI movement actually played itself out, posing a serious threat to many of the corrupt in government and private businesses, was apparent through the number of RTI activists who were murdered by interested parties. That was already preparing the ground for finding more effective ways of dealing with corruption. However, the present movement is not simply an offshoot of that history.
The rustic figure of Anna Hazare who stands, in a sense, outside the dreamworld of consumption by which the middle class supporters of his movement have been so besotted, actually needs to be closely studied. In this figure we have the conjunction of very unlikely worlds. On the one hand, we have peasants on the point of dispossession fighting against land acquisition, gravitating towards the movement; on the other we have the consuming middle classes who are deeply invested in the consumption utopia of the last two decades and yet feel shaken by the 2008 recession and global price rise. How and why the two come together, giving the name ‘corruption’ to their diverse concerns, is a question that needs serious thought. One thing, however, seems evident: because Anna Hazare also stands outside the world of ‘politics’, his figure acquires a special meaning and makes his crusade against ‘corruption’ more believable.

Aditya Nigam is Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi