Democratic Meaning of the Anna Movement: One View

by SATISH K. JHA

The true meaning of the Anna phenomenon would be known only in due course of time. In the meantime, the debate surrounding the Anna movement has got so much charged up that it is becoming difficult to make a political judgment on it.

The whole spectrum of the debate is so diverse and polarised that the characterisations of the movement have acquired mind-boggling proportion. It starts at one end by declaring it as a middle class cyber-politics and a corporate sponsored tirade against the political class, in which the erstwhile beneficiaries of corruption are jockeying to foreclose ‘the level playing field’ from the reach of the new entrants to the state sector. At the other end of the debate, one finds a position that castigates it as a camouflaged attempt of the neoliberal elites to discredit the state institutions in order to get a free-hold lease of societal resources. The apprehensions are galore and it is alleged that this movement, with Anna as a mascot, is a clandestine move of the entrenched classes and castes to neutralise people’s power (Parliament) by foisting a non-representative body like Lokpal for its superin-tendence and thereby sabotaging the so-called ‘silent revolution’ of the deprived people like Dalits and OBCs, who have started calling the shots through their increased presence in the elective political institutions for the first time in post-independent India. In support of such a contention, Anna’s selection of Hindutva symbols, like Bandemataram, Bharat Mata ki Jai, and exclusion of Dalits and OBCs from Team Anna are cited.

The debate, however, is gradually becoming so passionate and over-charged that other meanings, which the movement also transmits, are getting blurred. In the event, one vital issue, which was simmering for some time and has found expression in the Anna phenomenon, is being conveniently side-stepped. This pertains to the representational deficit in Indian democracy.

It cannot be mere coincidence that whenever a movement against corruption starts in India, be it the one led by Jayaprakash Narayan or the one spearheaded by Anna, it invariably rakes up the question of betrayal of the trust and mandate by the elected representatives of the people. Though it may not be difficult to see the linkage between the two, as the essential premise of parliamentary democracy is rooted in the principle that Parliament would render effective control on the administration by subjecting the executive to its rigorous auditing and accounting and thereby keeping vigil on the incidence of corruption as well. Hence, whenever Parliament has been found wanting in this role, the nations practising parliamentary democracy embark on devising mechanisms to complement it. Thus, whereever the institution of Ombuds-man (Lokpal) has been institutionalised in a practising parliamentary system, be it Sweden, New Zealand or England, it has been conceived as a helping arm of Parliament; so much so that it is called ‘Parliamentary Commissioner’ in New Zealand. Hence the raison d’être of this institution is in the failure of the legislature to render effective control on its own, for whatever reason, upon the administration. It is, therefore, natural that whenever a movement against corruption materialises in India, it is the legislature and elected representatives who face the ire of the people. The Anna movement is no exception.

However, what is disturbing in the whole Anna episode is that in the heat of the moment, the crucial question of the representational deficit in Indian democracy has been forgotten. No one would deny that the movement of Anna is on the question of corruption and the institution of Lokpal. But the larger question it puts before the political class also needs to be addressed and understood before it is too late to wake up! The nationwide protest witnessed in recent months has amply proved that the legitimacy of electoral representation has nosedived to an all-time low in India and there seems to be few takers of the Prime Minister’s argument that the civil society was breathing down Parliament’s neck and if the parties did not close ranks and understood its implication it might jeopardise the constitutional edifice of the country. On the contrary, the general perception which has gained ground is that the Congress-led government as well as the political classes in India are skirting the key issues in the turmoil.

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THE anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare has highlighted, consciously or uncons-ciously, the fault-lines in the established frame-work of political representation, which keeps surfacing off and on in Indian politics. In the post-colonial period if Jayaprakash Narayan became the tallest figure to voice the legitimacy-deficit of the elected leaders to speak for the masses, the current Anna movement might become a decisive interrogation of the representative democracy based on periodic elections in India!

The outpourings of public support for Anna’s fast and the way the Indian middle class got incensed on the issue of corruption have brought some startling similarities with the JP movement of 1974, which had been kicked off on the similar plank of corruption in Gujarat and Bihar and only later acquired an all-India stature in which many issues of society and polity got converged. The JP movement, like the recent Anna Hazare event, had highlighted the maladies of governance in the post-colonial democratic India and had found itself pitted against a duly elected Congress Government led by Mrs Indira Gandhi, who in her second stint in office, after getting a landslide victory in the general elections of 1971, had turned arrogant and apathetic to the concerns of the people and was casting a blind eye to the incidents of corruption in high places! But, since at that time the electronic media was not as omnipresent and vigilant as it is today, the Right to Information Act had not been enacted and the judiciary was yet to fully embrace the role of an activist, the scams of that period remained covered and could not reach the public domain for scrutiny. However, people’s disgust with corruption could be gauged from the fact that as soon as JP came out from his political sanyas and took the matter to the streets, people lost no time in grabbing the opportunity and extending full support to the anti-corruption platform of the movement.

But, interestingly, there seems to be a big similarity between Indira Gandhi’s storming back to power in 1971 and the UPA’s second innings in office. If Mrs. Gandhi was rewarded at the hustings for her deft handling of the Indo-Pak war and her call to eradicate poverty, the UPA-2 romped home with comfortable majority due to its socio-economic agenda like NREGA and its slogan for good governance.

The similarity does not end here—it appears that many negative features of the then Indira team are being copied by the present government! There is no exaggeration in saying that the UPA-2 is moving on the footprints of the Congress Government of the pre-Emergency period in more than one way. Arrogance of power, highhandedness of the high and mighty in the government, intransigence towards the plight of the people and, above all, the one-point programme of the managers of the government to keep the chair safe for the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, besides promoting the unholy alliance between the corporate world and the government, are some other instances which put the Manmohan Singh Government in an ugly historical parallel with the Congress Government of 1971-77. It has been rightly said by Marx that ‘history does not repeat itself and if it repeats then the first time it comes as tragedy and second time as farce’. I hope the strategists of the present ruling dispensation are aware of this dictum!

Whatever may be the similarity and difference in the craft of governance and the art of politics in the two crucial moments of Indian democracy, no one can deny that the Anna episode has given the historic opportunity to both—the votaries of procedural democracy, who scoff at the very idea that popular sovereignty could also reside outside electoral politics, and the custodians of state power, for whom any attempt by the civil society to take account from the elected representatives before the end of their term in office is to devalue constitutional governance—to do a self-introspection! It is high time that they, in their own interest, revisit some of the conceptual premises of the representative democracy which seem to be losing their sign with each passing day, particularly when the gap between the representatives and their constituency is widening at rapid speed. Although the growing distrust for the elected representatives may not augur well for the overall health of electoral democracy, the salience of the message it transmits to the political class about the depth of the discontent which has set in the society, cannot be minimised.

But surprisingly, the response of the political class is so banal that any imaginative engagement with the issue appears a remote possibility. The elected representatives, we are told, are the only legitimate voice of the people in a parliamentary democracy and any attempt to question their actions would amount to a crime against the Constitution.

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BUT if that is the case, then one wonders as to why so many democratic actions and aspirations in today’s India are materialising outside the framework of electoral democracy. The present Anna episode, even if we ignore similar chur-nings in the recent past, brings out sharply a latent tension which is brewing within the conceptual matrix of democratic representation that the political class as a whole is yet to realise. The Anna movement has refreshed some of the questions which Jayaprakash Narayan tried to raise in the 1970s through the grid of legitimacy and accountability in democratic governance. And since some of these questions have re-surfaced in the form of a face-off between the government and civil society on the issue of enacting a Lokpal Bill, such moments should be utilised to reflect on the weak links in a representative democracy like ours, rather than debunking them as the ‘grammar of anarchy’. When Anna’s movement questions the legitimacy of the government to be the true representative of the people and casts doubts on its sincerity to create a strong and effective Lokpal, it only echoes JP who called upon the people to disobey the elected representatives for the betrayal of the trust reposed in them at the time of elections.

There is no denying the fact that there are very few mechanisms available, practically none, through which the popular will of the people could be ascertained on a continuous basis in a democracy like ours. Hence, sometimes it adds strength to the argument on that side of the political divide which argues that only the elected leaders have the locus standi to transact on behalf of the people! Not only this, the purists of parliamentary democracy even say that any attempt to question the authority and legitimacy of the elected members of the legislature before the expiry of the term, except through the constitutionally mandated procedure of no-confidence and no-trust, is tanta-mount to spreading the ‘grammar of anarchy’, a phrase, interestingly, used by Ambedkar in his last speech on the floor of the Constituent Assembly while winding up the debate on the draft Constitution. But while invoking Ambedkar’s phraseology in defence of such a position, one should remember the broad contours of this argument, which he presented in his earlier speech in the same Assembly while moving the draft Constitution. In the said speech, Ambedkar, quoting Greek historian Grote, had extensively dwelt on the importance of ‘constitu-tional morality’ in the representative democracy due to the possibility of a distance between the people and their representatives. He said ‘constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.’ The upshot of his statement is quite clear—the spectre of the ‘grammar of anarchy’ is the speed-governor in institutional democracy whereas ‘constitutional morality’ as self-restraint should constitute the ground rule for the free play of democratic politics.

But the moot point is: whether the political class in today’s India can claim adherence to it. Does not this appropriation of Ambedkar’s argument from the Constituent Assembly debates by all and sundry today look insincere, selective and insensitive to the larger context in which it was presented, with the obvious intention of just running away from a more nuanced and reasoned debate on the issues in question?

However, the question as to whether the representative is a trustee of the people’s will or a mere delegate, who is to be continuously commanded by the constituents, is itself an open and unresolved issue in the annals of representative democracy since the time of Burke and Mill, who had strained their nerves to come to a definite answer to this dilemma. The present turmoil on the issue of enacting a Lokpal Bill seems to have further aggravated this unresolved riddle of democratic politics, which has been smouldering since the time direct democracy of a participatory mode made way for the indirect one; along with the resultant question as to whether authorisation through election implies giving a carte blanche to the representatives till the next election to do whatever they may consider and construe to be the constituents’ interests. Or, are the representatives only delegates, who have to take directive and command from the people, whom they represent, from time to time and at different stages of political transactions? Not only this. Would the represented, when they feel that their mandate has been betrayed, be within their democratic right to demand an account from their representatives and foist their will on them through democratic means, even before the expiry of their electoral term?

Though, what constitutes democratic means in a democratic polity is itself an unsettled matter in today’s context, as electoral politics no longer performs its role as the only dependable channel of democratic transactions for the people due to a number of its operative deformities. And one thing is very clear that these posers are growing in importance by the day due to the legitimacy-deficit of the elected representatives and each time they are put forth by a discontented civil society, they only cast a longer shadow on the fate of representative democracy which often waxes eloquent about the procedural legitimacy, institutional efficacy and neutrality of its political space. One of the members of Team Anna, Prashant Bhushan, observes that ‘the representative democracy was developed at a time and in the circumstances when there was no mechanism available to know the views of the people on various issues on a continuous basis. But with the technological advances attained over the years, we can now move in the direction of more meaningful involvement of the civil society in the governance through dialogue and deliberations.’ By saying so, he rakes up a crucial issue; that is, the issue of accountability and responsiveness of the representatives towards their constituents in a democracy. One of the authorities on the political representation, Hanna Pitkin, has said that ‘responsiveness need not to be constant activity in the representative democratic system. But there has to be a constant condition of responsiveness in the sense that the potential readiness of the representatives to respond should ever be present. The question which stares us in our face today is: whether such conditions obtain in India. Instead of bemoaning at the erosion of the authority of Parliament and castigating the civil society for poaching on the parliamentary prerogatives, both Manmohan Singh and Kapil Sibal should mull over it!

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NEVERTHELESS, recently a lot of people have expressed their unease with the method adopted and the demands presented by the civil society, particularly the one that pertained to the demand to participate in the drafting of the Lokpal Bill and the pressure brought on the government to present its version of the Bill before Parliament. It has been observed that such an act on the part of the civil society amounts to political blackmail and is an encroachment on the job of the elected members. It has been further stated that in the absence of a formal and mutually agreed method of formulation of the demands in the civil society, how would one find out what the ‘general will’ in the society desires? Hence if such acts, we are warned, are repeated again and again it might lead to chaos and confusion, which a country like India cannot afford. In short, what is being stressed is that the procedural value of democracy has to be privileged and should override the amorphous structure of the civil society, which is masquerading as the ‘popular will’, if the democratic goods are to be delivered to the people.

It has been further argued that since the civil society is not a homogenous category, there are multiple interests and ideologies which work at cross-purposes. There is no procedure in place to ascertain and quantify umpteen numbers of choices and opinions within it, the way the periodic election does in a representative democracy. Hence, it is difficult to involve the agents and agencies of the civil society in the legislative and executive acts of the government. Moreover, it is also said that since the civil society often speaks in multiple idioms, how can one expect from the state that it would rank one among them to be the true and represen-tative voice coming from it? Even the counter-argument, that in spite of the absence of a formal procedure in place in the civil society, the state does not bow down before all the demands emanating from it and engages only with a group which generates some following for itself, does not cut much ice with the skeptics. The contention that the state only negotiates after it fathoms mass support behind a cause, as was demonstrated in the case of the Anna movement when the government took many somersaults within a short span of time with the rising tide of support in favour of the agitation against corruption, does not convince these purists.

Undoubtedly there are many holes in the civil society’s argument, so far as the representation of the popular will through the non-electoral channel is concerned. Why does the state adopt an ostrich-like approach towards the decade-old fast of Ms Irom Sharmila Chanu in Manipur, protesting against one of the most draconian laws! Is it because she has no mass support for the cause that she is espousing? Or, does her demand harm the political class more than the creation of the office of the Lokpal? Or is she being ignored because the middle class of India has not lapped up her movement the way they have done with Anna? These are some hard questions to be answered by the prota-gonists of the civil society. Moreover, the criterion of mass support certified by the state to judge the ‘popular will’ outside the electoral arena is equally fraught with danger. Who ultimately should be the adjudicator of the popular will? Does it also reside outside the electoral arena? Should the state’s inclination to negotiate and engage with a civil society group be the only proof of the legitimacy of the issues in question? Such questions are more relevant today than the conflict between Parliament and the civil society and depiction of Parliament as the only repository of popular will, as is being made out in certain quarters.

The age-old conundrum of democratic accountability is as relevant today as it was when direct participatory democracy transited towards a representative system. Now it is being proved again and again that the accountability and responsiveness issues are valid in themselves and have to be settled on their own terms. They can neither be taken care of within the emotive politics of group rights, as the failure of the social justice politics and their champions in some of the Indian States to stand accountable to their own social constituency, which had reposed so much faith in them, would bear it out. Nor can they be mortgaged to the abstract liberal democratic discourse of institutional neutrality, constitutional oath and secular fidelity, as their omissions and commissions have now become political folklore. Hence, if such meanings are derived from the Anna phenomenon, it would be a better service to the cause of Indian democracy than hiding behind the political rhetoric of parliamentary sovereignty and the civil society’s deformities in India.

It hardly needs any mention that India has neither gone for parliamentary sovereignty of the British type, nor has it adopted the judicial supremacy of the American variety. It has, instead, settled for a doctrine of ‘constitutional supremacy’, which proclaims sovereignty of the people. Can anyone overlook the fact that the Constitution of India swears in the name of ‘we the people’ at the very outset and this precedes everything else including the institution of Parliament?

The author is an Associate Professor in Political Science, RLAE College, University of Delhi.