Magic of dissent

The Anna Hazare demonstration shows that political protest in India has become fairly predictable. The logic follows the standard scenarios where either a group of rebels protest against those in power or a group of citizens protest about a delay in reform. Such forms of protest do not question the system.

They either seek reform or seek more power within the system. While welcome as a ritual, such protests lack a sense of variety, a diversity that adds to the content and drama of politics.
One has to realise that dissent has an immense variety, an ethnography of its own and that India was at one time a compost heap of questioning imaginations. The Eighties and the Nineties of the last century produced a range of imaginations which one hopes to choreograph.
Difference articulated as politics can be of several kinds. Every society needs the availability of eccentricity. Eccentricity is visually personal. It is the hallmark of a particular style, a ritualised attitude to life which can be a public reminder of another imagination as a dress, a life. The writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri was an eccentric. He was an Indian who worshipped the British empire and eventually felt it was not British enough.
Eccentricity is seen as an exaggerated form of dissent. But it is usually personalised and remains often a choice of style, a source of pride, or imitation at an individual level.
Dissent is much more public but dissent is a single word that implies a variety of views and performances. The roots of dissent go back to a worldview of an ideology or an ethics. Dissenters are those who question or critique the system and they can do so from a variety of views.
The trade unionist Ela Bhatt built up a union of over one million working women into a legendary organisation called Sewa. Sewa was almost unimaginable a few decades ago in a male-dominated world of trade unions. At that time, women were not seen as independent beings with a right to organise or to even register as a trade union.
Sewa was a powerful dissenting imagination that empowered women in everyday ways — a bank account became a form of empowerment.
One sees a different playfulness in the dissent of the author U.R. Ananthamurthy. Only his domain of creativity is language and he has shown how language can contain a diversity of dissent. Each dialect becomes a form of dissent and every form of linguistic innovation contains the seeds of new dissent. Mr Ananthamurthy uses Kannada to say what the English language cannot say or says differently.
Dissent is a promise of a different world. It is not just an act of resistance. It shows that the world can be constructed differently. It is not mere disagreement. It is the craftsmanship, the imagination to construct a different grammar.
One of the most poignant of dissenting imaginations has been the movement against the dam on the Narmada. It failed politically but caught the imagination of the world — raising issues, pointing out the poignancy of the fate of displaced tribals. The anti-dam movement ended the official legitimacy of dam projects as symbols of development. The anti-dam movement also points to the link between dissent and the alternatives imagination.
An alternatives imagination can be of two kinds. It could be marginal and minoritarian as the tribal or craft imaginations are in a developmental world. The question is how does a marginal group survive in the authoritarian wilderness of a developmental world? What can the tribal offer as the essence of an alternative worldview and does it have value? These are precious ethical issues where one has to embody not just style of thought but the power of a way of life.
The challenge of alternatives is much more important as globalisation forces these worlds into obsolescence. Does India have to industrialise and urbanise or are they alternative visions of the city, of science? At a time when the world watches two behemoths — India and China — imitate the West in all its crudity, one wishes there were alternative ways of dreaming things. The sadness of uniformity clings to globalisation.
This is where dissent becomes important. Dissent has to rethink the uniformity of the unilineal futures we are planning for ourselves. Dissent in such circumstances is not easy. Consider for example the case of environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh. The minister is insisting mines must contribute to forest cover because when a mine destroys nature it is mining away our future. Yet, Mr Ramesh finds himself at loggerheads with the growth lobby which sees him as archaic or fundamentalist, when all he is asking for is a responsibility to the future. Mr Ramesh’s wings have been clipped on the coal and nuclear problem, but we need a sense of alternatives, different ways of dreaming and living the future. It is here that India is being outthought by the West. The Indian celebration of itself as a major nation state is actually the dirge of alternatives.
We have to become a nation of sidebets. Civil society needs dissent and alternatives to give content to its protests. Ask yourself which India is going to survive. Is it only the middle class or a civilisation with all its alternative imaginations? Are our tribes, our dances, our music, our seeds going to survive with us? What is the new imagination of our cities? How are we to look at pain, medicine and healing? Look at it — all our major groups, from our professionals, our business class, even our godmen, are managerialising and modernising needlessly. We are becoming a nation which is starving of dissent hypothecated to the mind of the official West.
I am talking of India as an imagination and the imagination of India. Can we rethink our futures as a democracy, as a South Asian imagination? To do this, dissent is critical. It provides the horizon beyond our current calendars, the surprises we need to thrive on as a democracy. Arresting them is arresting our thought processes and policing our thoughts is the beginning of an empty future. This much we can be sure of: An India without its humus of dissent is an undemocratic India.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist