September 16, 2011, 2:08 am
The Grammar of Anarchy
By ANANYA VAJPEYI
Social activist, Anna Hazare fasting at the Ramlila grounds in New
Delhi, India on August 22, 2011.Adnan Abidi/ReutersSocial activist,
Anna Hazare fasting at the Ramlila grounds in New Delhi, India on
August 22, 2011.
As Western democracies contemplate the ravages of debt and recession,
in India the global economic crisis has manifested itself this summer
as a burning debate about corruption. Led by a 74-year old farmer from
Maharashtra, Baburao "Anna" Hazare, the popular outcry against this
scourge of the Indian polity has consumed the months of summer and
monsoon from April to September. While the Indian media have read
Anna's appearance in public life as a historic moment, in fact it is
an old tension within India's founding principles that has once again
come to the fore.
A portrait of Dalit leader and chief architect of the Indian
constitution B.R. Ambedkar. Brian Sokol for The New York TimesA
portrait of Dalit leader and chief architect of the Indian
constitution B.R. Ambedkar.
That tension – between morally-based mass protest and reasoned
deliberative democracy – can be traced back to two of India's founding
fathers, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar. Mr. Gandhi played
the largest part in the anti-colonial movement during the first half
of the 20th century, using innovative tactics of non-violent
resistance, non-cooperation and civil disobedience, including the
fast. Anna Hazare's much publicized hunger-strike against corruption
was inevitably labeled "Gandhian" by his handlers and commentators
alike.
Working in tandem but often in conflict with Mr. Gandhi during the
nationalist period was Mr. Ambedkar, the leader of the Untouchables –
now called Dalits – who supervised the drafting of the Indian
Constitution. Mr. Gandhi's moral politics made sense against an
authoritarian colonial regime, and ultimately helped discredit and
dismantle the British Raj.
Now that India has had more than six decades of independent self-rule,
electoral democracy, a parliamentary system, and, underlying the
structure of its nation-state, a strong and stable constitution, what
exactly is the role of a mass movement? Does India need a new Mahatma?
Mahatma Gandhi, shown in an undated file photo.J.A. Mills/Associated
PressMahatma Gandhi, shown in an undated file photo.
Educated around the time of World War I at Columbia University, a
student of John Dewey and Edwin Seligman, Mr. Ambedkar was the first
Dalit to get a graduate degree overseas, even as India labored under
British rule and America struggled with Jim Crow laws. He had to fight
many different kinds of discrimination and inequality, both domestic
and foreign, to rise to his place as India's pre-eminent juridical
mind in the 20th century.
The lessons Mr. Ambedkar learned in Dewey's classroom between 1913 and
1916 went a long way toward giving India a constitution grounded in
the twin principles of equality and equity. The Constitution launched
the new Indian state on the basis of equal citizenship, universal
adult franchise and affirmative action – revolutionary concepts in a
society long structured by the hierarchies and injustices of the caste
system, patriarchy, monarchy and religious conservatism (to say
nothing of the preceding 200 years of colonialism and imperialism
under the British).
What would Mr. Ambedkar have made of the movement that gathered around
Anna this summer? Mr. Gandhi invented fasting as a "weapon of the
weak," and used it very effectively to exercise moral pressure on his
opponents on a number of occasions, many of them seen as landmark
moments in the history of Indian nationalism.
It is sometimes forgotten that the Gandhian fast could just as well be
turned on the Mahatma's friends, followers and colleagues in the
Congress Party, especially when he saw no other way to de-escalate
violent hatred between religious communities and to douse inflamed
nationalistic passions that resulted in India's bloody partition.
Mr. Ambedkar, who also had a fundamentally moral point to make in his
political career – that being untouchable was unconscionable in
independent India, and that caste prejudice had to go – did not,
however, support Mr. Gandhi's method of non-violent resistance or
"Satyagraha," of which the hunger strike was one manifestation.
For Mr. Gandhi, the fast would discipline the body and purify the
mind, providing a vital dose of moral courage to the protester who
otherwise eschewed violent means. For Mr. Ambedkar, some combination
of righteous refusal, enlightened self-interest, reasoned negotiation
and compensatory justice was the correct path to liberty and social
equality.
Mr. Ambedkar and Mr. Gandhi disagreed and clashed throughout the two
decades leading up to India's independence in August 1947. Mr. Gandhi
did not live to see the promulgation of the Constitution in January
1950: he was assassinated in January 1948.
On November 25, 1949, in a celebrated closing speech to the
Constituent Assembly, Mr. Ambedkar declared:
"If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in
fact, what must we do? The first thing, in my judgment we must do, is
to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and
economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of
revolution … abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation
and Satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods
for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal
of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where
constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for
these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the
grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for
us."
It seems unlikely that Mr. Ambedkar would have approved of the way in
which the Anna movement sought to force the Lokpal (Ombudsman) Bill
through Parliament, arm-twisting the government with Mr. Hazare's
hyper-televised fast, and insisting that if you are not with us, you
are against us. There is no doubt that corruption undermines Indian
democracy to an extent that has become intolerable to ordinary people;
that institutional reform is urgently needed and probity must be
restored to public office, whether in the bureaucracy or in politics.
But the canker of corruption in Indian political life does not mean
that the basically reasonable and resilient framework provided by the
Constitution has ceased to exist or to make itself fully available to
every citizen. Faced with a monumentally corrupt – and yet popularly
elected – government, Indians are conflicted about whether to turn to
the bulwark of their founding document constructed with so much effort
by Mr. Ambedkar, or follow the new figure of Anna who reminds them in
flashes of their greatest leader ever, Mahatma Gandhi.
Whose vision should guide modern India – Ambedkar's or Gandhi's? Share
your thoughts in the comments section below.
Ananya Vajpeyi's book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations
of Modern India is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. She is
working on an intellectual biography of Bhimrao Ambedkar.
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