Anna Hazare comes to North Campus on a day after Independence day to up his ante against the Government to reconsider the 'Team Anna' version of the Lokpal Bill. The PM office has snubbed his letter asking for permission to protest for more than three days at JP Park by asking him to 'approach statutory authorities'. That's the way of a democracy, isn't it? Mr. Hazare is a self professed Gandhian. Is he reducing the importance of his movement by taking it a bit too far? We cannot but agree that Gandhiji himself was a master of realpolitik. But is there place for repeated popular protest in democracy? Would Gandhiji himself have allowed it? I haven't read enough of his writings to comment on that. It appears though that his adversary on many occasions, and one of the prime architects of Indian Democracy, B.R. Ambedkar would have been skeptical. This is from Ram Guha's India After Gandhi:
Does Anna Hazare then reserve the right to continue his street marches. Perhaps he does, if the Indian democracy has failed, or is becoming increasing authoritarian (recently Anna did say that the current situation has become much similar to Emergency). Admittedly, the failure of democracy in India, in fact the idea of democracy itself as a just political system, is too severely and widely debated for all the issues to be grasped at once. Yet, here's something I chanced upon.
Question: Is there really any point hoping for a 'non-corrupt' political system in a democracy?
Ambedkar ended his speech with three warnings about the future. The first concerned the place of popular protest in a democracy. There was no place for bloody revolution, of course, but in his view there was no room for Gandhian methods either. 'We must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non cooperation and Satyagraha [popular protest]'. Under an autocratic regime there might have been justification for them, but not now, when constitutional methods of redress were available. Satyagraha and the like, said Ambedkar, were 'nothing but the grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us'.(This was said in a speech made by Ambedkar on 25th November, 1949 to the Drafting Committee of the Constitution. Interestingly, the other two warnings were against "unthinking submission to charismatic authority" and contentment with 'mere political democracy'.)
Does Anna Hazare then reserve the right to continue his street marches. Perhaps he does, if the Indian democracy has failed, or is becoming increasing authoritarian (recently Anna did say that the current situation has become much similar to Emergency). Admittedly, the failure of democracy in India, in fact the idea of democracy itself as a just political system, is too severely and widely debated for all the issues to be grasped at once. Yet, here's something I chanced upon.
Question: Is there really any point hoping for a 'non-corrupt' political system in a democracy?
Agree. Even if the 'anna'rchy cause seems righteous, this is what Gandhi used to preach : the ends do not justify the means.
ReplyDeleteThank you Saumya for raising the 'means versus ends' issue here. I have a previous post on naxalism that talks about similar things. Interestingly, the economist in me urges me to think of these issues in terms of outcomes rather than the processes. Yet, i do not consider India to an anarchy/a non-functioning democracy, and put greater faith in constitutional means i.e. I am more inclined towards the means rather than the ends. This might not be such a contradiction given that i believe that there is an equal likelihood of success/failure for Hazare, whichever means he resorts to. Also, though my views on the subject are still not completely decided for want of knowledge and experience, I am not sure if the demands of the Anna Hazare version of the Lokpal bill are justified. More interestingly perhaps it also has to do with valuing democracy for its own sake. Clearly, multi-layered issues such as these cannot be viewed in a single dimension. And yet the hullabaloo about Hazare's movement. I wonder how many of us taking sides have actually thought about at least more than one aspect of the issue. In fact, how many of us are even capable of doing that.
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