The Movement against Politics

Having gone into a period of relative lull following the massive mobilization in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan in August 2011, the Anna Hazare movement became headline news once more in December when the Indian Parliament began debating the Jan Lokpal Bill, the legislation to create an ombudsman institution with powers to investigate corruption by government officials, including elected ones. The details of the bill were at the heart of the agitation led by Anna Hazare, who demanded that an independent lokpal have the power to investigate allegations of corruption against all ministers of central and state governments, all government officials of every rank, and all members of the judiciary, and to prosecute the cases in court. These demands the government was unwilling to concede on the ground that they would create an immensely powerful executive and judicial authority outside the present constitutional framework and would threaten the carefully defined balance between Parliament, the Prime Minister, and the Supreme Court. The bill that was introduced in Parliament was described by Anna supporters as unacceptably weak and ineffective. To press his demand for a stronger law, Anna Hazare went on fast in Mumbai while the bill was being discussed in Parliament. However, this time the public response was disappointing, and the fast was withdrawn after three days. In Parliament, on the other hand, faced with opposition even from its own allies, the government shied away from a vote. The bill now remains in limbo.

When at its peak in August and September, the Anna Hazare movement became the subject of much controversy and debate. For its supporters, it was a movement that broke out of the conventional patterns of mobilization by political parties, leaders, and interest groups and drew active support from wide sections of the populace, especially among urban middle classes and youth who had in recent years shown nothing but distaste for political rallies, slogans, and even voting in elections. The demonstrations demanding an end to corruption in government brought tens of thousands of people from different cities and towns of northern India to the capital. The electronic and print media and social network sites were fully engaged in the movement, showing the extraordinary levels of interest generated among the otherwise politically unenthusiastic, if not downright apathetic, people reached by these networks. There were pronouncements of revolution along the lines of Tahrir Square and a new independence movement. Some critics of the movement, on the other hand, saw—quite predictably—signs of a conspiracy by opposition parties to destabilize the government by a show of force. Other critics saw more ominous signs of a fascist mobilization aimed at stifling by threats and blackmail the normal institutions of parliamentary democracy. Neither the supporters nor the critics were right, even though, as far as I can see, the truth does not quite lie in the middle either.

In my view, the Anna Hazare movement is a populist movement, but unlike most others of its kind, it is explicitly antipolitical and in this respect is quite novel, at least in India. It is a populist movement in Ernesto Laclau’s sense (On Populist Reason [London: Verso, 2005]) in which groups with a variety of complaints and demands come together by asserting that their demands are equivalent since they are all demands of the “people” directed against a common “enemy.” In this case, the enemy was designated as the class of politicians and government officials, all of whom were said to be corrupt. Existing or proposed methods of dealing with corruption were unacceptable since they were all internal to the structures of government—whether administrative or judicial—and so were already wrapped within the web of political corruption. What was needed was a moral authority standing outside the structures of the political establishment—whether of government or the parties—which would supervise, adjudicate, and punish all complaints of corruption in government, big or small.

It is remarkable how strongly the argument was made by Anna Hazare himself, and repeated by his associates, that the answer to corruption was not the law, because the law was already tainted and had been proved ineffective, but morality...