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Hazare vs Hazare: A Scenario as a Warning by Shiv Visvanathan

As the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement moves to the legislative phase it has to rid itself of the panacea model. The Hazare group has to realise that it has no monopoly on diagnosis or the cure for corruption. The Lokpal is no magic bullet which will solve the problem of corruption. Corruption needs a more cautious and nuanced problematic and a wider set of solutions. To put it facetiously, Hazare’s group should not look like an A grade version of the Munna Bhai effect. Life is like a duller form of documentary. One needs to summon history for a more fruitful understanding of this situation.

Shiv Visvanathan (svcsds@gmail.com) is a social scientist who has written and researched on a variety of issues.

    Imagine the news a month from now. The Anna Hazare group faced its own democratic crisis as other NGOs working on RTI and corruption claimed it was intolerant and deaf to suggestions. The NGOs then conducted a sit-in in front of Hazare’s Mayur Vihar home.

I do not want to insult the power of what is happening but moments of charisma can be deceptive. We not only tend to build a halo around the leader but we also create unreasonable expec­tations about the movement and its possibilities. Soon routine sets in and with it a cynicism that corrodes the very spirit of the battle. The Anna Hazare movement will soon be at that stage. The crescendo of expectations is so loud that some banal issues and problems are quietly forgotten.

The script, so far, has been presented in a polarised manner as an opposition ­between a group of activists and the Congress regime. But the scenario has to widen. What appears as a confrontation has to be reset as a problematic. At the moment a politics that looked like a skit has become more complex. A group that looked heroic now appears dogmatic. The eloquence of a mani­festo becomes prosaic when viewed as planned items in a ­proposed legislation. Even the language seems inept in terms of law and needs ­rewriting to fine-tune responsibi­lity and accountability. Autobiographically, movements often face issues of method. The question is, how does one legislate a dream?

One way of saving the Hazare process is to create a different heuristics of problem solving. First, we need to meet the ­immediacy of routinisation. One suggestion is to create a devil’s advocacy group. A devil’s advocacy group allows a social movement to look critically at itself by also considering how others construct it. ­Hazare’s group could have a few friendly activists and academics to help find out where its blind spots lie. This is necessary to pluralise the group. Second, the Hazare process must invite groups already in the right to information (RTI) and corruption reform process. Hazare has a lot to learn from the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, from individuals like ­Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey. He should ­collaborate with them as coequals because their grasp of ground level developmental processes and their knowledge of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act-like experiments are acute. This also demands that as the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement moves to the legislative phase it has to rid itself of the panacea model. The Hazare group has to realise that it has no monopoly on diagnosis or the cure for corruption. The Lokpal is no magic bullet which will solve the problem of corruption. Corruption needs a more cautious and nuanced problematic and a wider set of solutions. To put it facetiously, Hazare’s group should not look like an A grade version of the Munna Bhai effect. Life is like a duller form of documentary. One needs to summon history for a more fruitful understanding of this situation.

Mistakes of Movements

Every non-governmental organisation (NGO) or social movement leaves behind a memory, a method, an ethic and a lifestyle. Memories of movements tell you of the mistakes movements make. As one listens, one comes across numerous stories of ­intolerance. First, groups tend to curb ­dissent within their own members while fighting for freedom. Second, such movements tend to be ruthless to similar groups which might display slight differences in strategy. Movements in battle tend to be both incestuous and fratricidal. They eliminate those who claim the same turf. The Narmada and Bhopal battles all showed evidence of what I call the social patho­logy intrinsic to NGOs and movements. Macbeth’s observation “the nearer in blood, the nearer bloody” is more apt for NGOs.

Beyond the violence endemic to small differences, there is the issue of leadership. Leaders often tend to behave like prophets. When prophecy works and ­charisma succeeds, the leader sounds ­immaculate. When movements come to a standstill or controversies mar its later phases, the prophet can turn paranoid transforming a fight for truth into the narrowness of a dogma. This often contributes to the ­final dissipation of the movement. They often become unstable both in their nostalgia for the past and in terms of their sense of the future. Anil Sadgopal in the earlier phase of the Bhopal gas crisis or Medha Patkar during the final rounds of the Narmada battle were classic examples of such behaviour. To put it simply, they could be intolerable, their heroic strengths now exaggerating their weaknesses. Anna Hazare according to reliable reports has shown glimpses of equivalent behaviour. Calling him a saint will not solve the problem because saints can be very silly in many contexts.

The question is how do we move from the critique to construct and salvage ­another impressive movement from going underground? How can we prevent the good Hazare from losing out to the bad Hazare? Let us face it; every movement has the possibility of eventually making an ass of itself. His core team is not very reassuring in terms of presence or competence. I am not saying they have not ­surprised me so far but I have a sense that the group is heading towards the usual ­inertias of such struggle.

To open up the playfulness of Phase II requires some change in mentalities. First, Anna Hazare has to move from being prophet to sage, while guaranteeing that his disciples do not become the high priests of legislative reform. Second, the group must break the clichés about the State and governance. The State is often seen as wooden and unresponsive. But of late, whether on the RTI or the debate on ­genetic seeds, the State in collaboration with NGOs, has sought to experiment with partici­patory frameworks where stakeholders openly debate the politics of expertise. For instance, Jairam Ramesh in collaboration with sensitive environ­mental activists like Kartikeya Sarabhai at the Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad, created the dialogic possibilities of such controversy, letting scientists, farmers and seed manufacturers debate with each other. We need to create sites for such debate so that governance can also be seen as a ludic exercise at least in terms of the future.

Dogma also has to yield to method and particularly methods of resolution. The politics of movements need to be captured as ethical norms or as institutional methods. What is the goal of the movement beyond the holy grail of the Lokpal? At what level does the Lokpal operate? Or are we creating an alternative behemoth, a byzantine bureaucracy more Kafkaesque and inquisitorial than the current structure?

After the Current Round

The real problem for hope begins when the current round is over. While Anna Hazare has to be congratulated for heroically and singularly bringing corruption to the centre stage, he has to recognise that his insistence on his model of the ­Lokpal could be self-defeating. There is a need for reworking here. It is at this banal moment that plurality has to be reborn. NGOs and social movements must now craft a new sense of the whole. It is at this moment that the old Hazare has to confront a new reinvented Hazare. The old testament prophet must acquire a new testament sensitivity. The conversation of democracy has to be crafted anew.

The fast as a moral weapon or a walkout as a political tactic may not work at this latter stage. A refusal to negotiate which would have earlier sounded normative would now appear like a tantrum. The movement which has played media lovely for the last few months will now have to share space. Corruption which was till now the text might become context or ­pretext for wider issues of development, institutionalisation or governance. Here the Hazare team might be at a ­disadvantage, speaking as they do an older ­public admini­stration-cum character development lingo. Charisma will have to face prosaic and pragmatic idioms. The challenge of politics begins here. Whether the movement is ready for this other drama is debatable.