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Throwing in the Towel
-Economic and Political Weekly

The anti-corruption movement’s antics have weakened other movements for accountability.

The recent fast-unto-death by members of “Team Anna” (a self-proclaimed name which has always sounded pompous even if loved by a media looking for a catchy t­itle) thankfully ended without any calamity on the advice of a group of “eminent” citizens and with a promise to carry on the “movement” in the political sphere. Many commentators have, rightly, seen in this denouement a clear sign of defeat or at the very least, a public acknowledgement of a dead end for the anti-corruption movement which exploded on all of us through the good offices of the electronic media in April last year.

While the uncritical support that this movement received from the media and its savvy use of the media (especially the hyperventilating 24-hour news channels) helped beam its message to homes across the country, a large part of the support it had garnered was based on widespread anger and disgust with the venality in state institutions and among the personnel who man them. The pervasiveness of corruption, nepotism and abuse of power leaves almost none unaffected. The poorer and more marginalised a person, the greater the oppression. However, the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare and his group did not target this daily tyranny faced by millions of nameless citizens, it instead targeted the big-ticket instances of corruption by top politicians and government functionaries. Further, the proposal of Anna Hazare’s group – a gargantuan Jan Lokpal bureaucracy accountable to none and one that would centralise the powers and functions of investigator, judge, and prosecutor – was a solution as bad as the disease that it sought to cure.

Given the public anger against top-level corruption and the incompetence of the government, the group was able to paper over these and various other contradictions in its agenda as well as within its social base. From groups aligned to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who found in this an opportunity to put the ruling Congress-led government on the mat, to those who claimed lineage from socialist politics, representatives of social movements, to funded non-governmental organisations, and to political parties from the Naxalite tradition, the anti-corruption movement had managed to build a large political alliance.

If one looks at the political spectrum which was gathered together, it surely was impressive and harked back to the major cross-class alliances of the Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) movement. Single-point agendas like corruption have often provided a fertile ground for building such cross-class alliances. However, there is a crucial difference between these older movements and that led by Anna Hazare. Behind the wide collection of p­olitical brands, there was little evidence of a political alliance of social classes. The only social class which seemed visible was the urban middle class, itself an amorphous category and difficult to identify, mobilise or retain. The self-proclamation of the Anna Hazare group of being non-political was perhaps as much “Newspeak” as it was an unwitting recognition of its inability to mobilise mass-based political support.

Despite this absence of a political anchor, it was clear that this anti-corruption movement was political from its inception, not just in the more indirect sense but in the manner in which it attacked the government and campaigned in elections to target the Congress and benefit its opponents. The eventual announcement of a formal political identity for the anti-corruption movement was presaged by its demand for probes against the president, prime minister and leading cabinet ministers.

While the move to take on a more formal political role was expected for some time, it is still not clear whether there is any unanimity among those who constituted the core group about what this role will be. Would it be a separate political party as indicated by Arvind Kejriwal, the primus inter pares of the group, or would it be an effort to identify and support “honest” candidates in elections, as announced by Anna Hazare? Further, there are voices from within the core group itself – Akhil Gogoi and Santosh Hegde among others – who object to this openly political role. It is also unclear how the new political formation is going to mediate between the polar positions among the group members on issues like Kashmir, industrialisation, land acquisition and the role of the security agencies.

These are not easy issues to address and will take time and much effort to tackle. However, the very initiation of the political turn has meant that the group’s one abiding support base – the BJP-tilted urban middle class – has already been alienated. Whatever electoral success they manage in this context is likely to hurt the BJP and thus help the Congress. While a political force independent of the established players and free from corruption and abuse is welcome, there is nothing at present to suggest that the proposed new politics will either be free of these vices or will be successful. All that can be said at present is that this incarnation of the anti-corruption movement has been a failure.

However, by raising the issue of corruption – an important one by all accounts – in the manner in which they did, pushing all other opinions aside, then playing politics with it and finally throwing in the towel, Anna Hazare and his group have closed the space and made it that much more difficult for the various anti-corruption, accountability and transparency movements all over India. In that “Team Anna” has, albeit indirectly, given a free pass to corruption and abuse of power.