Anna Hazare and the Battle Against Corruption

The first decade of the twenty-first century in India was marked by two critical events. In a general sense, India and China were recognized as emerging markets and superpowers. There was also a sense of a demographic dividend in India in recognition of the fact that 70 percent of the population was under the age of twenty-five. These young people had different memories of socialism, sexuality, desire, and the bureaucracy. A new generation also implied a new sense of India in terms of identity and perception.

Critics however added that there was a second phenomenon that needed immediate attention: the decline of the political. The large-scale social movements of the seventies and eighties had become moribund. The anti-dam battles, the battle for the forests that created legendary achievements like Chipko had died out.¹ Our trade unions as well as our student movement became silent in the face of the vast epidemic of liberalization that swept the country. Even the fact that thousands of farmers were committing suicide created no major tremor of concern. Social conscience had become a small-scale activity. The emphasis seemed to be on individual desire and mobility rather than on large-scale political protest. Into this silence, which almost appeared part conspiracy, part consensus, there appeared a strange Old Testament figure, almost cockily confident of his role in history. On April 5, 2011, Anna Hazare decided to fast to death as a protest against corruption.

The semiotic power of Anna Hazare has to be understood. He was a Gandhian who began his career as an army havaldar.² Committed to change, he introduced drip irrigation in Ralegaon Sidhi, his region, and fought social battles against alcoholism. For his development work, Anna Hazare was awarded the Ramon Magasaysay prize. What began as a cottage industry of reform was ready to explode into an efflorescence of protest by 2010.

Protest when it begins is always anarchic, even spiteful, springing up where it is least expected, inspiring actors who have been otherwise indifferent to politics. When Anna Hazare began his fast against corruption, the media and the social pundits saw it as an exercise in well-intentioned idiosyncrasy. A dour septuagenarian protesting with a phalanx of disciples was hardly going to create a ripple within the indifference of bureaucratic Delhi.

If politics is the art of judgment, the ruling government underestimated two things. First, the mimetic impact of the Hazare movement triggered overlapping protests from a sector of which we had little sociological understanding. Second, religious and spiritual leaders who spawned myriad ashrams and millions of followers entered the fray, providing an everyday mass base for protest. Two groups in particular decided to add to the dialects of protest against corruption.

The first group, led by Baba Ramdev, emphasized the pursuit of yoga as a central tenet of the revival of traditional ideas of health and culture. The second was the Art of Living movement led by Shri Shri Ravi Shankar. Both these movements had a political penumbra where spirituality under the mentorship of the guru was meant to revive the normative nature of politics.

The spiritual movements did two things. First, they provided a different dialect of protest. They added a style that evoked the ashram and the satsang,³ where the congregation rather than the cadre provided the organizational basis of recruitment and logistics. Both Ramdev and Ravi Shankar are telegenic figures. Their spiritual programs are a part of Indian everydayness. Ramdev, ever the source of politics, had clashed with the Communist Party Marxist (CPM) leader Brinda Karat over the efficacy of his medicines. For Ramdev, the medical multinationals had appropriated health in India and had become a source of evil. Their presence demanded a civilizational or at least societal response. Ravi Shankar was more canny, more used to the corridors of power and had even been invited to act as a mediator during the Kashmir controversy. Both were savvy businessmen, prone to franchising their products.

The presence of these spiritual and religious figures, along with additional cadres from fundamentalist groups like the Bajrang Dal, triggered warning bells. Many...