[Reader-list] Hazare - an Evaluation

[A. Mani]

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>From pragoti.org

Why Anna is not Gandhi

Awanish

As concerned leftists, we must defend important national-bourgeois
thinkers of modern persuasion. When I see Anna Hazare being
transformed into Gandhi, I feel the need to rescue Gandhi.

I have many fundamental disagreements with Gandhi and his politics. In
fact, I see little point in Gandhism in all its political variants and
believe that it has committed much harm to Indian society in many
crucial respects. Nevertheless, Anna is not Gandhi because his
movement is not based on a coherent critique of the capitalist system.
Gandhi’s approach to economics dealt with the “ethical” aspects of
economic behaviour. Corruption, then, is a violation of this ethical
code pertaining to consumption and accumulation. While it is correct
to say that many of his ideas were result of his idiosyncratic
insistence at individual levels, it certainly had a systemic element
against “industrial modernity” following, among others, Tolstoy and
Ruskin. Anna’s politics is woven around corruption but does not make
any such connection between ethics and economics, leave alone
presenting a critique of neoliberal capitalism which thrives on
corruption of “moral” and (extra) legal varieties.

Secondly, Gandhi believed in “political action” where truth is
negotiated between individuals. In this respect, it is obvious that
even when he pretended to invoke his “inner voice”, he was not
deceitful or misleading in propagation of his political project. Even
his strongest adversaries were aware of his political goals and
methods. Everybody, hence, dealt with Gandhi in their own respective
ways. Anna, on the other hand, is fraudulent since nobody (not even
his supporters like Mallika Sarabhai and Prashant Bhushan) knows his
alignments with RSS, Ramdev, Ravi Shankar and BJP.

Thirdly, Gandhi, in his utopia, believed in a stateless society.
Modern states, according to him, were founded and maintained not
through “soul-force” but “brute-force”. The individual, in his/her
capacity of a satyagrahi, was given some agency as the arbiter of
moral and political action. This transformation of authority from an
abstract absolutism to the sphere of individual action, at least,
constituted a modern approach to political action. Since every
individual is entitled to his own truth and he/she can base his
actions on it, religious or such authority is then reduced to “pure
ethics”. On the contrary, Anna’s soldiers are steeped in “brute force”
and far from integrated into the politics of our times. The
mobilisation and public posturing in this movement circle around
religious symbols and fake sadhus. Their political project, by their
own admission now, is based on a Hitler-type dictatorship.

Fourthly, Gandhian mobilisation was reasonably successful because it
had some basis in the economic struggles of its time (see Habib 1995).
The popularity of Gandhi among peasants was a result of his consistent
upholding of certain immediate issues concerning them. Anna’s movement
is based on “immoral” class basis. Its goal is to enable accumulation
at the altar of neoliberalism by cleaning up the base.

Finally, Gandhi’s moral authority, at least, in his last days flowed
from his brave personal acts of fighting “communalism”. It can be
argued that he laid his life fighting communalism in its worst forms.
Anna’s authority, even in his small village, comes from fear and
force. His views about caste and democracy are fascist, as is clear
from his recent pronouncements on electoral politics and Modi. In his
article, Mukul Sharma quotes Anna as saying this about Dalits in his
village,

...we started telling them the reasons why people kept them at a
distance. We said that the society condemns you because your way of
living is dirty, your food habits are dirty, and your thinking is
dirty. Therefore, you have to change. With such constant hammering,
the dalits were also made vegetarian (Sharma 2006, p. 1984, emphasis
added).

Also,

The integration of dalits into an ideal village has two components in
Ralegan. One is to assume that they were always there to perform some
duties and necessary services and that their usefulness justifies
their existence in the present...(T)he other component is hegemonic,
designed to get dalits into a brahaminical fold (ibid., p. 1986).

The villagers are beaten up, publicly flogged and serve under a
controlled regime under Anna Hazare. Even when that is not the case,
it is anti-democratic and has no place for social-economic mobility of
Dalits. Anna Hazare is casteist and fascist, that too slyly in his
public and political life. All references to previous political
movements and personalities are mistaken. He does not deserve to be
compared to Gandhi or anybody else.

References

Habib, Irfan (1995). “Gandhi and the National Movement”, Social
Scientist, Vol. 23, No. 4/6, pp. 3-15.

Sharma, Mukul (2006). “The Making of Moral Authority: Anna Hazare and
Watershed Management Programme in Ralegan Siddhi”, Economic and
Political Weekly, May 20, pp. 1981-88.
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Best

A. Mani



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