Arundhati Roy – I Disagree

This is Arundhati Roy’s take on the Anna Hazare phenomenon (the dictionary meaning being “any remarkable occurrence or person”)
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/article2380789.ece

I have previously praised Arundhati in this blog for her frank and fearless opinions. But this latest article has saddened me somewhat. The article is reproduced below with the offending parts in yellow and my comments in embedded thus “**........ **”

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I'd rather not be Anna

Arundhati Roy

While his means maybe Gandhian, his demands are certainly not.

If what we're watching on TV is indeed a revolution, then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan Lokpal Bill, here are the answers you're likely to get: tick the box — (a) Vande Mataram (b) Bharat Mata ki Jai (c) India is Anna, Anna is India (d) Jai Hind.

** Oh, please do your 4 choices make any sense? Would you rather ignore the popular sentiment expressed on the streets. Would you rather ignore the extensive research and work done by the IAC team. Haven’t you heard any of Kejriwal’s elucidations on the proposed bill? Do you purposely choose to simplify a complex phenomenon into smart alecky one-liner? **

For completely different reasons, and in completely different ways, you could say that the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both seek the overthrow of the Indian State. One working from the bottom up, by means of an armed struggle, waged by a largely adivasi army, made up of the poorest of the poor. The other, from the top down, by means of a bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint, and an army of largely urban, and certainly better off people. (In this one, the Government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to overthrow itself.)

**overthrow the state? Isn’t that rather extreme? What about a sense of the outrage that the common man feels. Don’t you think it's your duty to document it? And the ‘largely urban’ and ‘better off’ people, are they the new untouchables then? Or are they supposed to have no voice. I am quite surprised by your tone and tenor here**

In April 2011, a few days into Anna Hazare's first “fast unto death,” searching for some way of distracting attention from the massive corruption scams which had battered its credibility, the Government invited Team Anna, the brand name chosen by this “civil society” group, to be part of a joint drafting committee for a new anti-corruption law. A few months down the line it abandoned that effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a bill so flawed that it was impossible to take seriously.


Then, on August 16th, the morning of his second “fast unto death,” before he had begun his fast or committed any legal offence, Anna Hazare was arrested and jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill now coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the struggle for democracy itself. Within hours of this ‘Second Freedom Struggle,' Anna was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison, but remained in Tihar jail as an honoured guest, where he began a fast, demanding the right to fast in a public place. For three days, while crowds and television vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna whizzed in and out of the high security prison, carrying out his video messages, to be broadcast on national TV on all channels. (Which other person would be granted this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the Municipal Commission of Delhi, 15 trucks, and six earth movers worked around the clock to ready the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand weekend spectacle. Now, waited upon hand and foot, watched over by chanting crowds and crane-mounted cameras, attended to by India's most expensive doctors, the third phase of Anna's fast to the death has begun. “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is One,” the TV anchors tell us.


While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

**How about a detailed analysis here about the ‘draconian anti-corruption law’? How about comparing it with similar laws and institutions in Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere? Or are you above all such kind of research? And we do have such similar institutions in India, the CVC, the Election Commission, the CAG? Are they draconian too?**

Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

**Ok, so you want a broader definition of corruption here. But then, do we get anything perfect the first time around? How can every single person be ever happy with a single bill? That’s impossible, isn’t it? Can’t you acknowledge the need here of a strong redressal mechanism that we have been missing for so long? Why this immense cynicism? Is everything so dark as you imagine it to be? **

Meanwhile the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag waving of Anna's Revolution are all borrowed, from the anti-reservation protests, the world-cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not ‘true Indians.' The 24-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.

**’choreography’? so the words planning, coordination, disciplined approach are to be addressed thus? Yes, there are elements in this movement that I am most uncomfortable with, the aggressive nationalism, the shrill language of some, the unleashing of some baser instincts? But at the end of it? Is this your summary of what has been happening for the last few days? This is not exactly a Hitler we are talking about here, are we?**

‘The Fast' of course doesn't mean Irom Sharmila's fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she's being force fed now) against the AFSPA, which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on right now by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. ‘The People' does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila's fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in NOIDA, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.


**So now we are rating fasts here, are we? So you somehow think that by denigrating Anna’s fast you are showing loyalty to the other fasts. Yes, agreed that this is also a media driven movement to some extent. Agreed, that it has got more publicity than the other fasts. Agreed that we as a people are guilty of ignoring some other very just causes. But your anger against our apathy to some other very well-deserved causes translates somehow into shrill rhetoric against Anna. That’s not fair is it?**

‘The People' only means the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a 74-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. ‘The People' are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, like Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we're told. “India is Anna.”


**One person said ‘India is Anna’. Are you going to go on and on about it? Aren’t you insulting thousands of people, sincere people who have walked the streets to show their support to the cause? Or in your vision, of the ideal world, are only the poor, dispossessed entitled to a voice and not us the more well-to-do, as if somehow we should feel terribly guilty about it……**

Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough we've heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer's suicides in his neighbourhood, or about Operation Green Hunt further away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmer's agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn't seem to have a view about the Government's plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of Central India.



He does however support Raj Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the ‘development model' of Gujarat's Chief Minister who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)

**Ok, so according to you, Anna should be giving a comment about each and every issue in India. And if he doesn’t, he is judged guilty by you. There are many elements of Raj Thackeray’s tirades that have my sympathy. But hell!! Would I vote for him? No. Would I like to see him in power in his current avatar? No. And you are reducing the complex phenomenon to a simple black-and-white statement ‘He does however support Raj Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia’. Has something gone to your head? Did you really write this article when you were in your senses?**

Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the back-story about Anna's old relationship with the RSS. We have heard from Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or Co-operative society elections in the last 25 years. We know about Anna's attitude to ‘harijans': “It was Mahatma Gandhi's vision that every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this way, a village will be self-dependant. This is what we are practicing in Ralegan Siddhi.” Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the anti-reservation (pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years. Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and SEZs, and run Real Estate businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic?

**Ok, so RSS is completely evil and so are all the people in it? We are after all talking of a legal organization over here. With a long history, with peaks and troughs, with highly committed, sincere and people with integrity in it, as well as all kinds of madcaps. Hell, I am not even an RSS-supported, generally speaking. But, Madame Roy, can we have a more nuanced viewpoint here? And what exactly do you have against the Ford Foundation? Or would you rather that only people born of virgins donate money here? Perhaps you woud care to add some proof to your shrill hectoring or perhaps we should just take your word for it. All your statements are so superficial, how does one take it seriously, please tell us.**


Remember the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced and it seemed as if some major Captains of Corporate India could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people's anti-corruption agitation. Or was it?

**So you are pointing to something without any proof whatsoever and that’s the foundation upon which your whole stance is based-on. And you hope we will jump on to your bandwagon? But seriously …….**


At a time when the State is withdrawing from its traditional duties and Corporations and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply, electricity, transport, telecommunication, mining, health, education); at a time when the terrifying power and reach of the corporate owned media is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions — the corporations, the media, and NGOs — would be included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them out completely.

**Ok, we get your point. But in your eagerness to point out the dangers of corruption with NGOs and media, you are dumping the baby that we have here. Is that of no value at all? Is this agitation just hot air according to you? **

Now, by shouting louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonising only the Government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for the further withdrawal of the State from the public sphere and for a second round of reforms — more privatisation, more access to public infrastructure and India's natural resources. It may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.


Will the 830 million people living on Rs.20 a day really benefit from the strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and driving this country to civil war?

This awful crisis has been forged out of the utter failure of India's representative democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We're watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at stake.

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Arundhati Roy, you have disappointed with this article. Hopefully you will get back to your old form soon. For now you seem to be painting yourself into a corner.