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New, but not yet improved-Suhas Palshikar
-The Indian Express

We must ask hard questions of these mobilisations, before we declare them a new politics

It is certainly not an easy task to enter into an argument with Yogendra Yadav. His plea to understand the “new politics” of urban protests (‘This new politics’, IE, January 2) makes persuasive reading but begs for a critical review of some issues. His point about the need to avoid two extreme approaches to current protests is well taken. Yadav very carefully avoids romanticising the “new politics” he upholds. Indeed, in an atmosphere of political gloom, anyone, and more so a political scientist (turned political activist), would be looking for signs of better politics.

To begin with, it would indeed be difficult to assess the spontaneity of protests in view of the unprecedented media hype both during the anti-corruption agitation and more recently as well. In fact, it is now emerging as a challenge for political analysts to make sense of the media interest in intervening in socio-political processes as key actors. But one can still concede the steady stream of protesters on both occasions, and that surely qualifies for the description of “new politics”. Perhaps we need to start asking hard questions of this new politics before we read too much into it. Four issues mentioned in Yadav’s piece require attention in this regard.

First, it is stated that the participants of new politics are not encumbered by a narrow social vision. This would only be an intuitive claim at best. It is not necessary to prove that these urban protesters do not have a narrow idea of democratic society. From the protests occasioned by the anti-corruption movement, it is clear that the participants are transient, somewhat mercurial and lacking in cohesion. Corruption, and now violence against women, are issues that do not require a cohesive social character among the protesters. A sense of being morally scandalised suffices to induce participation and, as such, the spontaneous crowds gathering mostly in large metros do not manifest any particular social vision. The fact that they are not organised under any umbrella further attests to their non-cohesive, and therefore uncertain, ideological character.

Second, it is not clear how the protests can offer “resources to deepen our democracy”. Of course, democratisation and the expansion of democracy occur through popular interest and participation in public matters, but the deepening of democracy would require more systematic political efforts than we currently experience through the recent moments of protest (against an unnamed adversary). It is another matter that the deepening of democracy could take place if a purposive vehicle for routing these protests into a more sustained politics were available. And even then, it might not happen as the experience of the JP movement of the 1970s showed.

Third, as Yadav himself notes, the protesters want instant solutions. This is a more slippery aspect of the protests. It has the potential of slipping into plain rhetoric, populism, street justice (or more likely, media justice), and denial of consolidating democracy in the longer run. The quality of solutions sought is inversely proportional to the level of education and sophistication otherwise associated with the urban protesters. During the anti-corruption protests, all kinds of instant justices were thought of, including the unrealistic idea that Lokpal is the final solution for corruption. During the recent protests, too, ideas of instant justice predominated the idea of democratic justice.

Finally, Yadav argues that the new politics of spontaneous protests has changed “cosy equations” and made power accountable. This, again, is more a wish than reality. In the anti-corruption protest, the target was the political class and its nexus with vested material interests. That did not change because of the momentary nature of the protests and fragile groundwork to sustain the momentum by those who organised that protest. In the more recent upsurge of protests, if our own civic sense of gender justice was the target, we shall have to wait to see if that has changed, but it would be too romantic to imagine that such protests, without the long and hard work involved, will change the police establishment and make it more gender sensitive.

In the absence of satisfactory answers to these four issues, it would be premature to celebrate the arrival of a new politics as an opening to a more meaningful democracy.

The writer teaches political science at the University of Pune