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Interviews | Prof. Yogendra Yadav, Senior Fellow at the CSDS interviewed by Revati Laul

Prof. Yogendra Yadav, Senior Fellow at the CSDS interviewed by Revati Laul

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published Published on Aug 19, 2011   modified Modified on Aug 19, 2011


You said that the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies conducted a survey asking people what they felt about street protest. What did you find?

One of the first national representative surveys was the National Election Study held in 1971. This is when a protest culture was beginning to take shape in the country. There was the Naxalite movement and also a time when the Congress was dislodged for the first time in 1967 in several states.

We asked people: “Would you say these demonstrations strikes, gheraos, etc, in our country are a proper way of drawing attention to peoples’ grievances?” Forty percent of the people said ‘No’, 26 percent said ‘Yes’. Now after the Anna Hazare protests, a reversal of that pattern has emerged. Now 39 percent said ‘Yes’, only 24 percent said ‘No’.

This survey also covers the nation’s pulse on the Lokpal?

Yes. We did our survey and realised that 33 percent said they’ve heard about this thing called the Lokpal. Our next question was whether they knew what it really was (if their reply had anything to do with corruption, we’d deem it correct). That brought down the figures to 24 percent. So actually only a quarter of the country has any sense after such carpet-bombing by the media that there is something called a Lokpal and that it has to do with corruption. We also found that among those who had an idea of the Lokpal Bill, Anna’s version had many times more takers than the government’s Lokpal Bill. Thus these surveys serve as a reality check, provided of course you take a national representative sample.

Since you’re mapping this objectively, what would you say has changed over time in the way people protest in this country, and the way governments react to that?

There are three sides to this question — 1. Have the protesters changed? 2. Has the popular reception changed? 3. How has the state responded. Clearly, there is much more reception today to protest, than there was 30-40 years ago. The protest movements too have undergone a fundamental shift. In some ways, I think the protest culture is simultaneously broader and thinner today than it was 40 years ago. In the 1950s and ’60s, all the major protests originated in political parties. The Communist parties, the socialist parties and the Jan Sangh spawned a series of largely urban protests. There were food riots, the anti-English agitation, the anti-inflation agitations. Gujarat and Bihar movements led by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974 signalled the end of this first phase and the beginning of the second phase of protest movements.

The 1980s were characterised by new social movements — peasant movements, women’s movements, anti-displacement agitations — which were not led by political parties. Then suddenly after 1989, the political system opened up. Coalitions came in. There was a democratic upsurge from below. Hitherto unincorporated movements like Mandal were absorbed into the political mainstream. But by the late 1990s, a quiet closure happened. While some of the leaders of these segments of society were incorporated at the top, and some of their symbolic demands were taken up, the substantive issues raised by these movements were given a quiet burial. So by the first decade of the 21st century, that upsurge came to a dead end, where its positives were only largely symbolic

So what happened to protests in this current atmosphere?

Protest movements like Ayodhya and Mandal got incorporated into the political mainstream. But the real issues that motivated these movements got left out. Popular movements have not disappeared. On the contrary, people’s movements represent one of the most vibrant sectors of our democracy. But there is a distancing of movements from politics. This takes many forms. This is the politics of antipolitics. It’s elite driven, very aggressive, and negates politics in any form.

Does this include the Anna Hazare movement as well?

Baba Ramdev more than Anna. Baba Ramdev’s movement, if one can call it that, represented a danger, the danger that someone could run away with popular anger against politicians and use it for a populist coup of sorts. Anna’s movement is more complex and has many strands. There is a powerful democratic strand in his brand of anti-corruption movement, which could strengthen alternative kind of politics. At the same time, there is an unmistakable element of the politics of anti-politics in his movement. But if you want a very neat expression of the politics of anti-politics, the mobilisation on Mumbai streets after the terror attack was a textbook case. So that’s one form of the current protests — starkly anti-political.

The second category is ‘non-political’ issue-based protests that you find all over the country today. These protesters carefully distance themselves from any political party. Take the struggles against land acquisition all over the country, symbolised by the anti-POSCO protests in Odisha. These are not anti-political but are non-political. They know that their success depends on ensuring that their leaders are not from any political party.

But that’s not true on the Nandigram and Singur protests.

Both these movements began outside the party political domain and gathered legitimacy on that basis. Because they were up against a very formidable political establishment, they took the support of the anti- Left parties, especially the Trinamool Congress. But they wanted to be seen basically as movements of affected farmers.

Then there is a third form of retreat from politics. This happens with movements that are political in their vision and understanding, but which over the years have reconciled to a very narrow political space for themselves. I think of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and the Narmada Bachao Andolan. These are not apolitical movements. But what they have now accepted over the years, quietly and reluctantly, is they must not try and challenge mainstream politics by counter- mobilisations that could disturb partypolitical equations. They have decided to shun electoral politics. There is a sense that they would lose whatever little political space they have if they entered electoral politics.

So today, we have more protests in the country. But what do I mean by thinness? I mean that — that particular issue about which people are protesting is not understood in its depth. What is the source of corruption? And what is the solution for corruption?

One of the reasons Anna Hazare succeeds is precisely this. He is the perfect person for this kind of protest. The Gandhi topi, no skeletons in his closet. He does not disturb you with talk about corporate corruption or corruption in the media. He talks about the corrupt babus and politicians who everyone loves to hate. I am not sure if he would have received as much media attention if he had offered a more broad-based understanding of corruption. The problem is that the system encourages you and actually rewards you for being shallow. So the chances that you will succeed, in a very limited way, are higher.

What about the other side of the coin? The State’s response to protest?

That’s changed for the worse. Because the character of our political establishment has changed. The State functionaries are also much less political today, just like our movements. Look at the top of our political establishment — Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. You cannot say that they are political animals. Someone like Kapil Sibal is clearly not a person who’s led any street protests or demonstrations in his life, or spent days on end in a shamiana on a hunger strike. I asked myself, who is the last leader who came into the Congress party through an agitation, or a movement? You know the name I came up with? AK Anthony.

Really… what movement was this?

In 1959, when EMS Namboodiripad became chief minister (of Kerala). And an almost right wing Christian movement was started to dislodge the Communists. He came to the Congress via that. I’m not interested in judging the character of that movement. But he has seen street action. Who is the other current Congress politician who can claim that?

The BJP has some leaders who’ve seen street action.

That’s true, but as the party ‘matures’, even they are being sidelined. So what you have in the establishment today is a decline of political experience. Politics provides you with a capacity to negotiate. If you had Atal Bihari Vajpayee today, (and I hold no brief for him), he would have handled the Anna Hazare protest very differently. He would have tried to outsmart him, show Anna up to be someone who knows nothing about what he’s saying, or would have simply absorbed him. This is the art of politics.

What strikes me about the current situation is the inability of the establishment to respond to it politically. There is a decline in political imagination and political judgement.

What should they have done on the morning of 16 August ? The political judgement that we witnessed was astonishingly poor. They can’t distinguish Anna Hazare from Baba Ramdev. They’re clueless about what ordinary people think and what kind of street protests this can lead to and they have no idea what kind of martyrdom they are offering Anna Hazare.

I’m not saying that Anna Hazare’s is a media-manufactured protest because there is a genuine mass support to his movement. He has put his finger on the nation’s pulse by raising corruption when it was a burning issue. The movement has more appeal than the ruling party realises.

The media has made comparisons with the Jayaprakash Narayan and Gandhi’s civil disobedience movements.

Unfortunately, this reflects a poor sense of history. Those who say so have not seen or even read about Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement. When JP gave a call in Delhi, the Ramlila Maidan was full. The government of India had to play the film Bobby that day on Doordarshan (the only TV channel at the time, that too State-run) to prevent people from coming to the grounds. Yet all streets leading to Ramlila maidan were choking. This is the scale at which people were mobilised. And it wasn’t a rent-a-crowd sort of political mechanism. These comparisons themselves indicate how much our worldview has shrunk. Whether we look at the tate or the social movements or the media, we witness a decline in politics, shrinking of political imagination and a loss of political judgement.

Revati Laul is a Special Correspondent with Tehelka.
revati@tehelka.com

 

Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 34, 27 August, 2011, http://www.tehelka.com/story_main50.asp?filename=Ne270811C
OVERSTORY.asp  

Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 34, 27 August, 2011, http://www.tehelka.com/story_main50.asp?filename=Ne270811COVERSTORY.asp


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