Anna Gana Mana

By misdirecting public anger against corruption, Anna’s aides are advocating contempt for the Constitution

The second thing we must do is to observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enables him to subvert their institutions.” There is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness. As has been well said by the Irish Patriot Daniel O’ Connel, no man can be grateful at the cost of his honour, no woman can be grateful at the cost of her chastity and no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty. This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country. For in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship

~ BR AMBEDKAR in his address to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949

There are many ways of looking at Anna but perhaps this caution from Ambedkar best summarises our current problems. Bhakti is an emotion Anna’s followers have summoned in ample measure; scepticism or critical thinking is not an attitude they are familiar with. He may well be a saint but he is no Constitutional expert, nor does he seem to understand how a law is drafted in India. In the end, he is more or less doing the bidding of the people who surround him.

If there has ever been a succinct lesson in class in this country, it is playing itself on the stage where Anna is fasting.  If you strip away the names and personalities, you find a retired IPS officer, a former IRS officer, a well-known lawyer, the son of a former law minister of India, all in reasonable physical shape, all avidly backing the Bill, and yet the person fasting is a 74-year-old retired driver.

The ideas Anna is fasting for are not his own. It is good we may ultimately get a Bill against corruption that has some chance of working. It is also good that this government and the Congress party have attracted due criticism. But there is a difference between criticising the Government and questioning the Constitution. Even if the matter is finally settled in a manner that doesn’t challenge the authority of Parliament, the ideas raised by Anna’s aides go beyond this movement and will surface again. And it is these ideas that need to be contested.

There is a difference between Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, however incompetent, and the institution of Prime Minister, which after all has survived non-entities such as Deve Gowda and IK Gujral. There is a difference between individual MPs and a largely corrupt party such as the Congress and the institution of Parliament. When Kiran Bedi stood up on stage and said “Anna is India, India is Anna,’’ she was not just echoing that rather infamous slogan “Indira is India, India is Indira,’’ she was also reflecting the same contempt for the institutions of this country that was inherent in the Emergency.

At the drop of a hat, Anna’s aides start quoting from the preamble of the Indian Constitution, “We the people of India…” Apparently this is where their reading of the Constitution stops. They do not even seem to understand that India is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, and for good reason.

Defending the Jan Lokpal Bill, Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal have both called for a referendum on the law. Bhushan has argued that technology now allows the possibility of direct democracy, as if it is an idea that has never been tried or examined in the past, as if an entire literature of democracy criticising the idea did not exist, starting with the ancient Greeks. Would anyone suggest that the Indian response to a terror attack on Mumbai be settled by popular sentiment in the immediate aftermath? And if only bills are to be voted on, does anyone really think that big corporations canvassing for a bill that concerns them directly would actually reduce corruption in this country? One election every five years, in the absence of State funding, is the source of most of the large-scale corruption in our society; imagine the effects of corporate canvassing for Bills that are to be voted on every few months.

In the end, the justification for the Jan Lokpal Bill lies in a few poorly conducted referendums that cannot be taken seriously and the numbers that turned out in support of the Bill at the Ramlila ground. But if bills are to be passed because 50,000 or even 500,000 people turn out, we are talking of anarchy. There are many who think that while the Government Bill is laughable, the Jan Lokpal Bill has serious problems too. The number of such people is by no means small, and it is they who are being stifled.

Writing almost 225 years ago, the fourth President of the United States and one of the architects of the US Constitution, James Madison, wrote against this very idea of direct democracy, of how it allows factions to flourish and how they can impose their will on everyone through such a process. The problem does not go away even if the faction imposing its view is in majority; it becomes a form of majoritarianism. What a Parliamentary procedure allows is for all voices to make their case, discuss and arrive at a bill through consensus, not a bill that is forced down everyone’s throats by one faction of the population.

If indeed Anna’s aides are interested in changing the Constitution, it is difficult but not impossible; there is a set procedure and they are welcome to follow it. It is unlikely they will do so—it would mean testing the long-term strength of this movement, which for the moment is certainly fed as much by television as it is by public anger against corruption in the country right now.

In the middle of one of the umpteen television discussions on the issue that have become the norm after eight in the evening, Arnab Goswami of Times Now interrupted his panelists to say, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, this is becoming too complex, let us return to the question at hand.’’ The problem lies with this simple assertion. The ideas we are discussing are complex, they have to be, but we would rather set them aside and return to the ‘question at hand’, which could be: are you for the Jan Lokpal Bill, is this a TV revolution, or other such simplifications. And answers that tend towards nuance, which suggest a yes and no, maybe, perhaps, depends on the circumstances, reflecting areas of grey, have to be shouted down—”Gentlemen, gentlemen, this is becoming too complex.”

The discussions operate in a world where all answers have to be a yes or no. Having been guilty enough of a few TV appearances myself, I find the procedure starts with a phone call, where my views are sought on the matter. I find that the person on the other side loses interest as soon as my explanation extends beyond a single statement. “Sir, does that mean you are for or against?’’ is the inevitable question.

The result of such informed discussion and the 24-hour breathless coverage from the Ramlila ground has certain consequences. In his recent book on the internet, The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser describes a 1982 experiment carried out by political scientist Shanto Iyengar: ‘Over six days, Iyengar asked groups of New Haven residents to watch episodes of a TV news program, which he had doctored to include different segments for each group.

Afterwards, Iyengar asked subjects to rank how important issues like pollution, inflation, and defense were to them. The shifts from the surveys they’d filled out before the study were dramatic: ‘Participants exposed to a steady stream of news about defense or about pollution came to believe that defense or pollution were more consequential problems,’ Iyengar wrote. Among the group that saw clips on pollution, the issue moved from fifth out of six in priority to second.’

Now consider the impact of sustained uncritical coverage of the Jan Lokpal Bill for over six days, interrupted by nothing else, and you can draw your own conclusions about what we are seeing today.

I, thankfully, am not, but this identification with Anna and the consequent self-admiration of all those who have turned out in such numbers to support the Jan Lokpal Bill, is largely an exercise in hypocrisy.

Consider this session of Parliament. Among the bills that could come up or are in the process of being drafted are the Food Security Bill, Communal Violence Bill and Land Acquisition Bill. I feel that each of these bills is at least as important as the Jan Lokpal Bill. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the people who are gathered at the Ramlila ground in the name of participatory democracy have not bothered to read the drafts or discussions related to any of these bills.

When they decry the politics of the day, when they express their frustration about how democracy functions in this country, they seem to believe they stand apart from the procedures that make a democracy work. If they could go back and see how the Right to Information legislation was passed, they would understand the process of consultation and consensus that goes into drafting a law in our representative democracy. No Constitution in the world, no system of democracy, participatory or not, can do much about a citizenry who refuse to act as citizens, do not engage with the legislative process and then turn out like petulant children who have let their anger against corruption degenerate into a tirade against the very systems that ensure the accountability of the government of the day, however venal.

Over and over again, young men and women have endorsed the stand taken by Anna’s aides that the Bill must be passed by the end of August. This government may be stupid enough to capitulate, but we should not shy away from the consequences of such demands. Like parrots, these people have repeated what they have been told from Anna’s dais, that the Centre has had 42 years and that is enough time. But if successive governments have not passed the Bill, it is not an argument against Parliamentary procedure or the need for a consultative process where even the voices of those who disagree with the Jan Lokpal Bill are heard.

A movement that should have been about pressuring the Government to bring an effective Lokpal Bill, a perfectly valid demand in our system, has been made into an instrument for the ill-thought-out views on democracy of a few people surrounding Anna. Fast or no fast, there is much more to India than Anna.

About The Author

Hartosh Singh Bal

Hartosh Singh Bal turned from the difficulty of doing mathematics to the ease of writing on politics. Unlike mathematics all this requires is being less wrong than most others who dwell on the subject.