Hazare, Roy and Thorat - A glimpse into how we Indians think

In response to my previous post about Babu Rao Hazare and the Government of India, one of the readers commented to me that there was no reason for me to think that the right that Hazare has to protest about something is invalid.  So let me just state that I did not and do not intend to take away Hazare's democratic and constitutional rights.  The intent of my post was how Hazare's team is not representative of the desires of the Indian society at large and how the man could not subvert democratic institutions which are manned by elected representatives of the people.  I was posing a rather troublesome question which is "what can we do if our elected representatives have all formed into a cartel and have decided to become corrupt"?  One the one hand the corrupt people are those who have found their place in the parliament through an electoral process and therefore have a right to be where they are but on the other hand they are perpetrating something which is not morally-ethically sustainable.  So the situation is challenging to say the least and Hazare and his team have found a rather easy solution to the problem; create a draconian office called the Lok Janpal and make constitutional institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament subservient to this person.  The powers of the Lok Janpal have been decided not in consultation with any broad consultations with social groups but by a handful of people.

I have been arguing again and again that this is no method of tackling a problem that is so serious that he has consequences for constitutional institutions and constitutional democratic practices.  Here let me quote Hazare's hero Mahatma Gandhi.  Gandhi was trained in legalities and had talked about Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience in the context of unjust or unfair laws in the first place.  He did not advocate either of the two strategies to be taken up on a whim and that is what Hazare is doing.  I have already said that the Government of India's sloppy handling of the situation lent credence to Hazare and a number of sceptics also became believers in his cause and methods once the Government cracked down on him as a preemptive strike.  Suddenly the unreasonable stubbornness of the man seemed like the most appropriate strategy to take on a government that was not serious about doing anything about corruption. Popular thinking rarely goes into the nittie-gritties of constitutional issues and other such technicalities and the government's arrest of Hazare led to people suddenly empathizing with the man.  The government was seen as fascist and I find that accusation hilarious because the subsequent acts of the government proved that it was weak willed and weak kneed and folded up in front of the demands of Team Hazare.  The government was trying to be fascist, I suppose one can say that even to be something like a fascist there needs to be strength and this government which is already beleaguered on many fronts is anything but that.

These happenings should be the ideal catalyst for people who do not support the Government or Team Hazare to exercise their minds and take to people the seriousness and the multifarious ramifications of the actions of both the Government and Team Hazare to the people.  I am one of the people who fall into this category.  I have not been able to suggest any remedies to the situation except that there should be greater deliberation on this issue and more and more people should be involved in the process of finding solutions to make the government act.  But I am no activist.  I have been sitting in front of a computer and typing away my views without any effort to convert them into action and that is certainly a failing in me, and a very big failing at that.  I think I do not want to inconvenience myself too much over something and therefore just prefer to write and do nothing more.  Not the ideal strategy to deal with situations such as these.  But what of Arundhathi Roy?  She is an activist and is "supposedly" an intellectual. But as always she chose to firmly put her foot into her mouth.  Let me clarify.  Ms. Roy has the uncanny ability of attracting controversy out of nowhere.  First of all she sat in a dharna fighting against Capital Punishment at a time when Afzal Guru who had master minded the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament had been sentenced to death.  Surely he was not the first person to be sentenced to death but Ms. Roy preferred to let her views on crime and punishment known at this awkward time.  Then of course she went to Kashmir and said something to the effect of Jammu and Kashmir never being an integral part of India.  

This time too Arundhathi Roy lost no time in coming to the forefront with her unorthodox views and this time it is a greater tragedy.  I say that because when I read the article that she wrote in the Hindu dated 22-8-2011 I thought she made great sense when she attacked Hazare (the freshly minted Saint as she called him) and his methods.  Then she lapsed into her old ways.  She started attacking the support base of Hazare's movement.  She talked at length about how people who were joining his protests were employing means that were very similar to the ones employed during the stir against reservations.  She then wanted to know why it is that only certain kinds of issues get support while others don't and wanted to know why the same enthusiasm is not shown to issues of tribal people and the loss of their livelihoods.  I think the point that she made here should be taken well and I must say that what she said is akin to my belief that this movement has suddenly found support of the normally apathetic middle class because in some way they believe that it is their money that the politicians were siphoning of.  However my disagreement with her is that her mention of means that resembled anti-reservation movements could have been avoided for that takes the focus away from the issue on hand to reservations and who is in the right and wrong about reservations.  It becomes a diversion that takes away any serious debate about the rightness or wrongness of Hazare's team's action.  She also attacked Kabir - the organization fronted by Arvind Kejriwal and claimed that it was being funded by Coca Cola and some other multinationals.  She also mentioned Hazare's RSS/BJP links and his admiration of Narendra Modi and by extension the pogrom that the man had unleashed in Gujarat in 2001-2002.  Then she mentioned that in Ralegan Siddhi the native place of Hazare there is a practicing of caste system and a lack of a Gram Sabha.  By doing this she sounded like Manish Tiwari the Congress spokesman who made the exact same allegations. That is why I said she put her foot in her mouth by sounding like she was using the same methods of diversion that the Government was trying to use.  You could not be faulted if you thought she was doing this on behalf of the UPA and the Congress.

Today I read in the Hindu (23-8-2011) a piece written by Prof. Sukhdeo Thorat the former Chairman of the University Grants Commission and present Professor in the Centre for Studies in Regional Development at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  He too attacked Hazare from a perspective given by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar where he quoted the great man as having said that Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience had to be given up in an independent India which was having its own constitution and therefore not unjust laws of another country.  I wholeheartedly agree with that.  There is no need for Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience when you are looking at issues being generated in your own country where the rule of law is to be supreme.  The sad thing however, is that the good Professor Thorat used this opportunity to take pot shots at Gandhi and his methods and how they have ultimately undermined the welfare of Dalits in India due to their not having separate electorates, a suggestion of Dr. Ambedkar over which Gandhi disagreed and fasted.  He also dissected the concept of "Bhakti" and talked of it as hero worship (which is an unfortunate and terrible translation of that term) and used this yet again to take swipes at Hazare and Gandhi. He was cautioning that Ambedkar had said that hero worship is bad.  (One question to him which is an aside; Is Dr. Ambedkar not worshipped in India?).  Now all of these maybe valid questions to debate about but to put out all these at this time would only take away the focus from the issue on hand.  Both Ms. Roy and Prof. Thorat raised valid points and in the case of the latter even raised a point about constitutionality of actions and these to me were diluted in other points which seemed to take the focus away from what they were saying.

This whole thing was very much akin to what I had seen on TV.  The day Hazare was arrested NDTV was doing the usual discussions where the whole thing boiled down to a slanging match.  Sanjay Nirupam of the Congress and Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the BJP.  While Sanjay Nirupam was struggling to defend the government and its actions, Rudy tried to score some cheap brownie points by saying that the UPA Government allowed a hunger strike by the Hurriyat groups in Delhi.  One Nivedita Rao who was apparently brought in as a legal expert since she was a Delhi High Court lawyer joined the slanging by dragging Yedyurappa into it.  In doing so she looked like she had been planted there by the government.  Even if she was planted there, there were enough legal points to be discussed without having to fall into this useless talk.  That seems to our problem.  We do not focus on the issue at hand.  We need to talk about everything under the sun including our pet peeves when we would do rather well to only focus on a certain issue.  When I look at people who are called "intellectuals" and they do this global tourism (a phrase often used by my teacher Prof. Harshe to describe the lack of intellectual discipline) I am tempted to share Noam Chomsky's scathing dislike for people who like to think of themselves thus.  The biggest irony in India right now is to be seen in the actions of 26 MLAs (24 from the Congress and 2 from the Telugu Desam Party) who have resigned in support of YS Jaganmohan Reddy who is being prosecuted for corruption and against the CBI mentioning his father the late Dr. YS Rajashekhar Reddy as an accessory to and facilitator of his son's corruption.  On the one side there is an anti-corruption "movement" happening and on the other side there is a pro-corruption attitude from elected representatives of the people.  But again, stranger things are known to have happened.

P.S: Written in great hurry and no time to proof read so please excuse the errors.