The Indian summer and its snake oil revolution

Participants in the Anna Hazare anticorruption rally in Delhi on Aug, 14

By Paul Dharamraj

It’s undeniable that the Arab spring was contagious. Large numbers from the middle class took to the streets in several countries over the last year, squaring off against their governments and demanding their rights. However, the media has been rather generous with the word “revolution.” While some of the events in the Middle East and North Africa mark a historical watershed, there were less significant movements that hoped to piggyback on the shoulders of these larger global upheavals.

Earlier this year, while the cameras trained on Damascus and Benghazi, the world's largest democracy was engaged with its own little “revolution.” A 74-year-old man from western India was taking on the government in classic, Gandhian protest fashion: by staging a hunger strike. Anna Hazare, an army veteran disillusioned with growing corruption in public offices, went on a public fast unto death in the country's capital. He demanded that the government pass a piece of anticorruption legislation called the Lokpal Bill, which has sat on the backburner for over four decades.

What ensued was an absolute media circus, with sensationalist news readers spinning this as a one-man-versus-the-evil government act and news scripts worded like cast-off Bollywood screenplays. However, this struck a chord with the country’s middle class, who came out in large numbers to support the man they saw as channelling Gandhi's spirit of protest. In no time, the subcontinent was in the middle of its “Indian summer,” and the word “revolution” was being bandied about quite a bit.

What's wrong with this picture? Plenty. At the outset, I don’t deny that the Indian government, steeped in corruption, has had this coming for a long time. But having said that, the crisis was greatly exaggerated. The middle class, who hypocritically are probably the biggest cog in the corruption wheel, felt good about engaging in several rounds of politician-bashing. However, media reports found that very few people who actually hit the streets even knew what they were demanding.

The Lokpal Bill is on the end of a road paved with good intentions. It looks to establish a central body to curb corruption at every level of public life. But in its attempts to achieve this, the Lokpal comes across as possibly the most

Anna Hazare was portrayed as a man "channeling Gandhi's spirit."

draconian draft of legislature ever put together. From searches without warrants to subverting the entire process of electing representatives, the “people’s bill” is flawed beyond belief.

The bill also makes provisions for setting up a centralised corruption “super agency” that would have the powers to police society and hand out sentences. Such an unbalanced concentration of power, many fear, is hazardous to the country’s democratic fabric. Riddled with sections of ambiguity, the super cop/judge rolled into one is hardly accountable to anyone. The election procedure of its members has also raised several questions among skeptics of this bill. How long will it be before this Frankenstein-in-the-making is used as a tool of vendetta to settle political scores? A sizeable section of civil society has, in fact, asked Team Anna to rework the bill.

But, Anna (whose name, in a strange twist of Orwellian irony, means “big brother” in Indian languages) will have none of it. Until very recently, his team refused to allow the bill to be tempered with reasonable changes in the greater public interest. Media reports show that Anna himself has a dodgy past. Despite casting himself as democracy’s knight in shining armour, the village he “transformed” with social activist fervour has not had local elections for over two decades. Public flogging is employed to deal with alcoholism and petty crime. He called for the corrupt to be hanged and campaigns for right-wing nutters like Gujarat's Narendra Modi (who was involved with the riots and mass killings of Muslims decade ago) to be the country’s leaders.

On Oct. 2, India celebrates the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, regarded as the father of the nation. Over the course of the freedom struggle, Gandhi always used fasts to show empathy for the plight of his country’s marginalised. Anna uses them to politically blackmail a government into giving in. This sets a very dangerous precedent for a democracy as it seeks to subvert the very institution itself. The last thing the government wants is Anna’s blood on their hands and it has caved in.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press in India went to town with this story, calling Anna’s battle and supposed victory the “second freedom struggle since 1947.” While the feel-good vibe washes over the nation, it is only a matter of time before this celebratory bubble bursts. India, with its huge monolith of laws, has time and again seen how draconian legislature fails to achieve any objective. We have tough-on-terror laws that impinge on personal freedoms. Yet, the instances of terrorist strikes all across the country have doubled over the last decade.

India's corruption problems are not as black and white as Team Anna makes it out it be. The bill is a one-size-fits-all solution that will not work in the complex Indian society. Our system is one that thrives on decentralisation. Instead, tools such as the Right to Information Act (a close cousin to Britain’s Freedom of Information Act) are more effective in dealing with corruption at its roots.

Anna is far from being the messiah of the masses: He is an anachronism in modern India. And the Lokpal Bill is far from being the revolutionary panacea that the media would have you believe.

IIJNM alumnus Paul Dharamraj is a student of international journalism at Cardiff University. This article was originally carried in Gair Rhydd, the university's student newspaper, and is republished by kind permission.