Anna’s Fables: An ethical critique

I am a writer by profession and the readers are my only constituency. The only way I can pay back my audience is by responding to them with honesty, admitting my mistakes and yet standing ground when I disagree with them.

As a social scientist, I have been a witness, even a munshi, to some of the great movements of my time. I remember the idealism and idiocy that drove some of my college friends to the Naxalite movement. Police torture and the inability to retain the original passion broke many of them as people. Many switched from socialism to enthusiasm for markets with a vengeance.
There was then that moment of euphoria we call the response to the Emergency. The Left and Right learnt to respect each other in jails and the travails of the Emergency created the effervescence of civil society and the clarity of the civil rights movements. People’s Union for Civil Liberties and People’s Union for Democratic Rights were born and legends like Rajni Kothari and K.G. Kannabiran created an integrity around the notion of rights.
For me, the greatest moral movement of our time was the battle against the Narmada Dam. It created an ethics of memory and the power of land as a way of life. It challenged the technical rationality of the reports which had no measure for suffering and were illiterate about the costs of destroying livelihood and ways of life. The charismatic figures of Medha Patkar and Baba Amte, by their lifestyles, by their courage, by their sheer resistance to the forces of the state, created an ethical imagination which development projects had to confront. Narmada became a worldwide symbol for new and alternative possibilities of energy use. It removed the halo around dams and de-sacralised development.
There have been other struggles which have added to the political imagination. There was the fight of the survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy, talking of justice beyond mere compensation. There is Mahasweta Devi’s struggle against bonded labour and there is also the battle against genetically modified crops. Each of these have added something to the ethical imagination in India. Yet, where all have suffered or lacked is the form of honesty that we can call the internal critique of movements.
Many of these movements have been defeated by the state, by repression, but many also collapsed due to weakness within. What we miss today is a form of storytelling which assesses these mistakes and rethinks the ethical and tactical foundations of such struggles. I am not thinking of a workbook or a catechism but an honest series of reflections which asks critical questions: Did our social movements become a form of fundamentalism? Were they intolerant of dissent, such that they alienated their own support base? When pressure mounted on these movements did they become paranoid about purity and condemned anyone who felt different? Finally, in battling the obsolescence of defeated and marginal cultures why is it they left so little in terms of public memory of the twists and turns, the highs and lows of the movement?
There is a double tragedy here. There is an absence of an internal critique but there is also an intolerance of anyone who criticises movements while supporting them. Such people forget that movements do not need fans, what they need is a critical core of understanding. They need to add to their competence, sustain memory and keep the conversation of politics alive. I do not want Koodankulam to be numbed by silence or indifference. But I do want to ask why are we being defeated again and again? Is the state so clever and so repressive that it can defeat us all the time? I raise these issues because the critique I wrote of Anna Hazare produced violent reactions from some of my readers who accused me of selling out.
I want to ask — Is ethics a corset to be constrained by or a music to be heard and lived out? Secondly, why should people who think differently be immediately illegitimate in terms of ethical power or political integrity.
Civil society and movements need to rethink their fundamentals because we are trustees of democracy. We need the courage to confront ourselves in the mirror and admit we could be wrong. In this sense, the Anna Hazare movement owes a more detailed explanation on why it decided to become a party.
Mr Hazare argued against the logic of parties. He tacitly invoked Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy to condemn parties as tyrannical. He was clear that the party, by logic, was a form of corruption. All he had to offer was the ethics of individuals against the compromising power of bureaucracies. But when Mr Hazare’s movement becomes a party it faces a new set of responsibilities: it has to be more plural; it has to encompass a variety of other perspectives. It has to harness the wisdom of other social movements. One sees little articulations of these perspectives. Mere certificates from “distinguished” people are not enough to legitimise the decision. The right to information is a right, which Mr Hazare must guarantee even within his own community.
Politics cannot just be nostalgia or an act of voyeurism. It then becomes a mere act of spectatorship. We need to create a democracy which has an ecology for mistakes and errors. Voicing these differences does not make it an act of bad faith but part of the trusteeship we call politics. The sadness begins when you look at the human wrecks, the sense of loss these movements leave behind as residues. We need some way of confronting these questions, not as a CIA report or a World Bank archive, but as an intrinsic part of storytelling. Social movements are the great fables of our time and as fables they must have ethical lessons and candid conversations that the next generation
can follow.