Anna Hazare, corruption and the middle-class

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The movement around the Jan Lokpal Bill was driven by an agenda that chimes with the concerns of the middle class.

Image: vm2827, flickr

The polemic around Anna Hazare's movement gets curiouser and curiouser. Until recently its composition seemed fairly clear – it was a movement of the middle-class, by the middle-class, for the middle-class, the word being used in its widest sense to signify the whole range from lower middle-class to somewhere below the very top. Many things seemed to bear this out – the flag-waving nationalism, the patriotic songs and slogans, the Hinduised idiom, most of the faces visible on television, interviews with volunteers of India Against Corruption. However Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam's largely positive report from Ramlila Maidan during the late fast (carried on kafila.org) presented a somewhat different picture – according to them, most of the participants in Delhi came from lower-middle-class to working-class backgrounds, not just at Ramlila Maidan but middle-class localities elsewhere in Delhi. Later in the same article they assert that the vast majority were ‘semi-literate workers and peasants’, though for this no evidence is cited. More generally, a sector of the (left oriented) intelligentsia has been busy castigating its confreres for being suspicious of the movement and holding aloof from it; for failing to recognize its popular dimension (see various posts on Kafila).

The class composition of the movement matters, not merely for bona fide Marxists but all those who belong to the dissenting tradition of the left, the tradition that nourished a whole generation of European intellectuals from the 1950s to the '80s, who called themselves men and women of the left (even when, like Leonardo Sciascia, they acknowledged Marxism's failures and all but repudiated it). From this point of view any estimation of a movement led by the middle-class is bound to be coloured by the fact that it is the middle-class that, despite its protestations, controls the state. It does so in the most concrete way since the overwhelming majority of government functionaries and elected representatives belong to it; and by the fact that the economic policies of the state, both before and after 1991, have been designed almost exclusively for its benefit.

Clearly the middle-class has every right to protest on issues that affect it alone, or everyone else; and certainly its size is large enough for it to be taken into account as a popular force. It is also, as Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam point out, incontestably part of the people – though, equally incontestably, there are many areas of conflict between its interests and the interests of that other part of the people which lives on less than 20 rupees a day – more than two-thirds of all Indians.

So, is the movement middle-class? Class is sometimes in the eye of the beholder – one man's peasant is another man's farmer, relatively prosperous when measured against the condition of his landless labourers. Perhaps an uncontroversial, or relatively uncontroversial, statement would be that the movement was middle-class to begin with but is widening out. The signs are mixed and confused. In Chennai, from where I write this, the demonstration organized by the local chapter of India Against Corruption was dominated by the well-heeled; but there were sketchy reports of plebeian participation from Chattisgarh. And there is no real reason why this should not be the case for corruption affects everybody – why shouldn't the peasant, the sweatshop worker, the labourer be in agreement with the call to end it?

Setting the agenda
Yet even after acknowledging this, one is left with an impression and a fact. The impression remains that most participants in the movement, in the fast at Ramlila Maidan and the actions in support of it, belonged to the middle-class across the whole of its spectrum (which means that the majority in some places may well have come from its lower echelons) rather than the labouring poor. One pointer to this was the flag-waving, the Vande Matarams, the fervent patriotism which, even if it played up to the media, was nonetheless heartfelt: to suggest otherwise would be regarded as an insult. The poor rarely go in for these displays of patriotism – since their country, or those who govern it, have not treated them well, they are likely to be critical of it even if they possess no other template to judge it by. I've attended my fair share of plebeian demonstrations and can scarcely remember seeing the national flag in one. Fervent displays of patriotism are a luxury of the middle-class which can afford to say: my country good or bad. For the poor and oppressed, the way their country treats them can be, quite literally, a matter of life or death (as it is in Dantewada, for example). Which is not to say that plebeian patriotism does not emerge in times of national emergency (Britain during the second world war), but this patriotism tends to be diffident, ironic, critical. The flag-waving at Ramlila Maidan and elsewhere merely reinforced the feeling that it is the middle-class that determines the idiom of the movement. Meanwhile there seems no doubt that its cadre, comprising the volunteers of India Against Corruption (who count for rather more than Anna's ‘team’), is overwhelmingly middle-class: that being the case, it is clear that their perceptions and prescriptions will set the agenda for the movement as a whole.

In one sense, of course, it has already been set. We have been told repeatedly that this movement is only about corruption, narrowly defined – that is to say the taking of money to provide services that should be provided gratis or in order to obtain illegal favours, and the failure to provide services. Other issues have been mentioned – the taking of land from farmers, the rot in the educational system – but in an anodyne and cursory way, in generalities couched so as not to alienate anybody. Meanwhile the chosen instrument for tackling corruption (even for those like Prashant Bhushan who evidently do not subscribe to the movement's narrow definition) is the Jan Lokpal bill.

Before going further, let us get some red herrings out of the way – the government draft is a bad joke, Anna Hazare had every right to protest (so had Baba Ramdev), and the agitation at Ramlila Maidan did not challenge the primacy of parliament. The relevant law can only be enacted in parliament: no one disputes that. Anna and his followers had every right to mount as much public pressure as they could for their version of the law to be passed. However their continuing insistence that only their draft is valid, and the refusal to discuss the NCPRI draft is indefensible. The logic behind this can probably be formulated as follows: since so many people have mobilized behind our version, it alone is legitimate (in actual fact most participants in the movement have not mobilized around this or any other version, but around an idea and a figure). This attitude is not surprising, which doesn't make it any the less short-sighted, self-serving, even stupid, given the volatile nature of Anna's constituency. Meanwhile the original insistence that parliament pass the bill within a very limited deadline, without extensive discussion by the standing committee, smacked of authoritarianism: which other social group could make a demand of this sort and get away with it? Which other social group could get parliament to pass a resolution formally referring its conditions to the standing committee for consideration?

Having got these caveats out of the way, two questions present themselves. One is that, given the strictly limited nature of Anna's campaign, can it really be as open as it is claimed to be? And, two, does the movement's prescription – the Jan Lokpal bill – appear capable of addressing its limited notion of corruption without doing serious damage to India's democratic institutions (such as they are)? I reckon that the answer to both questions is no and no.

To say that the movement is open and variegated is to imply that it is capable of moving in new directions, incorporating new ideas and new social groups. If new kinds of people, sections of the labouring poor, for example, join the movement, they will bring to it their own agendas and these are unlikely to be restricted to its narrow definition of corruption. The hypothetical adivasi labourer whose wages under NREGA are pocketed by contractors is likely to have other questions as well: the parlous state of state schools and dispensaries (assuming his village has any), the disappearance of forests that once provided a subsistence (mining, heavy industry, dams, forest department?), lack of water (tube wells, industrial use, industrial pollution, an upstream dam?), the pittance paid for work in the unorganized sector (lack of regulation?). These questions, and others like them, inevitably widen into a critical examination of the process of ‘development’, the character of the state's institutions, their opacity and unaccountability, the interests that determine economic policy – in short, the framework of exploitation in which individual acts of corruption are incubated.

The context of corruption

To believe that corruption can be addressed without addressing wider questions of inequality and justice, of freedom and opportunity, is to live in cloud cuckoo land. Doubtless many of the participants in the movement would dismiss these questions out of hand, or argue that whether or not they are valid, an end to corruption within the existing system remains a feasible aim. This amounts to an assertion that India can magically reproduce the structural order of western democracies in which capitalism flourishes but routine bribery and malfeasance of this kind are absent (needless to say, other forms of corruption exist). This position betrays a near total ignorance of the complex history out of which this order emerged, its virtues and vices – a long tradition of municipal freedom, hierarchies based on estates exploded into classes, the structural violence of the industrial revolution (best told in E P Thompson's classic work), the sequence of working-class struggles that brought about rights and services we take to be axiomatic, the displacement of the system of expropriation upon which industrial growth depends to Europe's colonies, which is to say most of the rest of the world. However Indian elites have always believed that it is possible to replicate the economic trajectory of the West in an altered global context, with a very different social system – to preserve caste as a system of social interaction while abolishing untouchability (this was Gandhi's position); to convert the majority of farmers and peasants into industrial workers even as technical advances increase productivity per worker (thus lowering the number of workers needed in each individual factory); to abolish subsistence occupations, flout every environmental consideration, set aside the state's duty to provide primary education and health, all in the name of mitigating poverty. It is a set of convictions that would be ludicrous if their consequences weren't so appalling.

The connection between a culture of bribery and the systematic denial of social services to the poor may not be obvious but it exists. State atrocities in Dantewada, the reasons impelling hundreds of local struggles from Kashipur to Koel-Karo, these are the other side of the coin of corruption. Yet the Jan Lokpal bill – megalomaniac in its ambitions and hopelessly optimistic in its assumptions – proposes to deal with it, not by reforming our institutions but by adding one more to them, as opaque and unaccountable as the rest. We have been told by Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan that their proposed Lokpal will be accountable, and to the ordinary citizen to boot. How? Why, the citizen can file a complaint in the Supreme Court against the Lokpal and abide its decision. What this means is that the Lokpal will be accountable not to the ordinary citizen but to the Supreme Court, another unelected, unaccountable body. The irony is profound.

A number of bureaucratic appointees are already in the happy position of the proposed Lokpal – they can be appointed by the government but not removed by it (remember the debacle of Prasar Bharti?). One would have thought that the Supreme Court had better things to do with its time than determining which official deserves to sacked and on what grounds. Judicial usurpation of the executive's domain has already done considerable harm to the polity – especially since the record of the Supreme Court in defending civil liberties and the rights of the poor has been less than inspiring. Its judgments, apart from a brief activist phase in the late 80s and early 90s, have always tended to defend the rights of the state and the propertied against those of the poor, witness Narmada, Bhopal etc. The recent judgment on the Salwa Judum (a full six years after it began burning, looting and killing) is the exception that proves the rule – grounded doubtfully in law, it will doubtless be decently interred.

The Lokpal's lack of accountability would not much matter if its size were small and its mandate limited. After all, the whole machinery of the state does not answer to the sacred representatives of the people – the judiciary is structurally distinct, while constitutional authorities such as the Election Commission and the CVC, ostensibly answerable to parliament, operate more or less independently. The difference is that their functions are circumscribed and temporary. The CVC operates a small machinery and its power is recommendatory; the EC mobilizes the entire machinery of the state, but only for a limited period and with the limited purpose of conducting free and fair elections. The Lokpal in the Jan Lokpal bill is a different beast altogether. The gamut of its functions presupposes a very large standing staff, hence the proposal to place the existing vigilance structure, the CBI, and an unspecified number of additional officials under it, all of whom would answer to the Lokpal and no one else.

It can be argued that the potential damage this machinery might do is limited since the Lokpal can neither make laws nor interpret them. Even if this was true, it would be only sensible not to trust solely to the good faith and moral probity of twelve men and women (however honest otherwise) without more tangible safeguards. Alas, it is not: the increasingly complex and murky nature of favours granted and received make it conceivable that the Lokpal will feel impelled to adjudicate decisions that belong to the executive; that it will act, at times, as a super regulator, exposed to all the temptations of the role (the TRAI did not exactly cover itself with glory in the spectrum affair). Nor is it likely that its machinery will become suddenly incorruptible: we can assume that not all its investigators will prove immune to bribes, from a corporate house in order to deflect investigation or an official to cover up his indiscretions. As for service provision, citizen charters and grievance redressal officers might be a good idea in trying to get tens and thousands of schools, dispensaries, public hospitals and other offices to work, but why place them under the Lokpal? Enlarging its standing machinery and lack of accountability can only produce a standing invitation for abuse.

But these, it will be argued, are the vices inherent in government. In that case, the logic of creating a monster responsible only to a small board of nominated members becomes even less obvious. At the very least, the Lokpal must be made accountable in a different way if these defects are to be avoided. This cannot be done until the state's institutions are made more transparent and democratic: in which case there would be no need for extending the scope of the Lokpal's authority. Much of this reform needs to be worked out – methods of making the bureaucracy and the police accountable to ordinary citizens for the performance of their duties, of altering a structure that treats two thirds of Indians as cannon fodder for economic growth (whose benefits flow unequally to the other third), denying them basic social services and the barest modicum of social security.

However since the middle-class doesn't see these as problems, it prefers to throw the responsibility of corruption on the political system and grasp at the most superficial and authoritarian of solutions. Anna Hazare attracts so much support because he is a cipher, someone with no uncomfortable ideas, unlimited moral zeal and deafening patriotism; this is why the leaders of the movement are content to restrict their discourse to the Jan Lokpal bill. If they actually began talking about truly uncomfortable things: about Dantewada, Kashmir, the north-east, of adivasi struggles, about conditions of work and employment in the unorganized sector, of how the poor are treated, they would rapidly find the crowd behind them dwindle to nothing.

Which is not to say that the political system is not corrupt and deeply compromised. For those lucky enough to find comedy in politics, the performance of the Congress during the past weeks and months has been a never failing source of delight: witness the spectacle of P Chidambaram, Manish Tiwari, Kapil Sibal et al tying themselves into knots with serene unconsciousness and heartfelt conviction; not to mention the great panjandrum, Manmohan Singh himself – more robotic, and marionette-like, more vapid and empty than ever. The BJP and its fellow travellers have been scarcely less entertaining: one gets the impression that what they truly deplored in the beginning, before the movement's political possibilities presented themselves, was the government's irresoluteness in dealing firmly with Anna. Which is not to say that the BJP would not have acted in much the same way – the real problem for almost every party is that it is their core constituents, the kind of people usually seen at political demonstrations in Delhi – well fed, well clad, loud, hectoring – that were among those prominent in Ramlila Maidan. No wonder their spokesmen looked sandbagged and couldn't figure out what to do; no wonder the professionals of administration signal desperately for conciliation and compromise.

Politics and the middle-class

Yet the fact remains that both politicians and officials are derived from the middle-class and reflect its attitudes – of getting ahead, bending rules, making money. The doctor who takes a cut from a pharmaceutical company to prescribe its drugs, the executive who fiddles his expense account, the entrepreneur who ignores safety standards and pollution regulations, pays his workers a pittance and bends rules to acquire land, the prosperous landowner who ‘buys’ a government job for his son can scarcely blame politicians for doing the same things on a much grander scale. The corruption of politics stems partly from the way in which elections and parties are funded. A campaign for the public funding of elections, stringent audits of party finances, and laws mandating strict disclosure would probably do more to contain corruption at the very top than the Jan Lokpal bill...

But discussions about structural reform can go on forever: they are unlikely to interest those who believe that the state is fine as it is, and needs only to be made less corrupt in order to conform to the American or European model. Which brings us back to the central question: how to look at a movement whose sole demand one disagrees with and whose capacity to become more variegated one disbelieves in? The usual objections don't apply: I don't think, for example, that it is 'communal'. Some of its members may be, many of them may not like reservations either, but that doesn't mean that the movement embodies these attitudes: this may change, but the question remains open. Nor do I believe that it should take a stand on any and every issue under the sun – an honest discussion on Kashmir, for example, would clearly be too much for flag-waving patriots to swallow. But I do believe that its avowed refusal to take a stand on anything except corruption is self-serving, dishonest, and ultimately unworkable; its remedy against corruption dangerously authoritarian. And in the unlikely event of the movement becoming more radical, I have no doubt that the middle-class would swiftly jump ship. The government would probably pass a bill strong enough to satisfy middle-class opinion, and those protesting against wider abuses would find themselves confronted by a state that has recovered its determination to deal ‘firmly’ with them.

There is plenty to worry about in the way that the fast at Ramlila Maidan was resolved. The Jan Lokpal bill, as a number of people have pointed out, represents a rejection of politics. Behind it lies the belief that what is wrong with the system (and not much except corruption is assumed to be wrong) can be set right by nominating the right, incorruptible people to positions of authority and vesting them with exceptional powers. This is simple-minded. Suetonius, the biographer of the first twelve Caesars, deals with 'the effect of of absolute power on twelve representative men': it was in a word, 'disastrous' (Gore Vidal). There is a reason why corrupt politicians are better than well-meaning despots, and a great deal of history to tell us that reason.

For politicians are minimally accountable to the electorate in a way that judges or super-bureaucrats, for example, are not; which is why parliamentary democracy is planted on three pillars, no more, no less (with the judiciary playing the role of wild card in the pack). This does not imply any notion of parliamentary infallibility. Parliament has passed bad or regressive laws before, with little or no discussion, and will doubtless do so again. But imperfect though it is (and in need of reform), it remains the best forum we possess for making laws. The Jan Lokpal bill would concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people without adequate safeguards. It would make the state less accountable, partly by sweeping the real problems under the carpet, which is why it is attractive to the middle-class, and, paradoxically enough, to the proliferating breed of technocratic politicians who seek to make an opaque and domineering state even stronger – at the expense of its legislative branch and the popular (read plebeian) will.

Finally it seems worthwhile to consider why the fast created such a seismic upheaval. Those with long memories will doubtless remember bigger demonstrations that led to no such result. To claim that this was a consequence of the media frenzy around it is merely to restate the problem in different terms (what made the media, especially the television media, so shark-like). I believe that the underlying reason can be found in the fact that the agitation represented middle-class opinion which the average politician automatically genuflects to, if only because he belongs to the same class. Yet the fast and the proposed bill were also an implicit attack on his probity and behaviour – the reason for the mixed feelings on view in parliament and outside during the passage of the resolution. It is possible that the standing committee will patch together some kind of compromise from the various drafts before it. Equally, it is possible that parliament will come around to the view that an authoritarian Lokpal is desirable simply because the middle-class thinks so (and it is the middle-class that sets the parameters of intellectual debate). If so, the denouement is unlikely to be reassuring.

Meanwhile the movement continues and analogies fly about: unfortunately they suffer from a ludicrous sense of disproportion. Anna Hazare's movement is not remotely comparable to the Arab spring in Tunisia and Egypt, either in the courage of its participants or its wider implications. There is a considerable gulf between staring down a military dictatorship in a police state, where the ruling elite has grown accustomed to pocketing millions, and a campaign against corruption in a democracy whose freedoms exist for the middle-class (though very imperfectly for the poor), and where it is economically ascendant. Nor is it surprising that the Egyptian bourgeoisie led the struggle against Mubarkism: political freedoms and civil liberties matter to the middle-class, for all kinds of reasons, as the historical record shows. However its showing in building anything like a just economic order is considerably more spotty.

The year 1789 is the emblematic example of a revolution that commenced with the bourgeoisie but widened into something deeper, wider, more radical and, yes, terrifying than it had bargained for. But this is to compare little things to great, choppy seas to a cyclone, and none of the signs point that way. It is 1848 that provides an apter though still ludicrous comparison – ‘the springtime of the peoples’ saw a wave of revolutions across Europe led by the bourgeoisie in different countries, all of whom promptly sold their working-class allies down the river as soon as disorder threatened (which is to say their demands became too dangerous). As the French saying goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

~ Shashank Kela is a writer based in Chennai.

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