Anna: Beyond The Encounter As An Absolute
By Tripta Chandola
09 August, 2012
Countercurrents.org
On the last day of the recently concluded Team Anna protest at Jantar Mantar I got into an argument with a group of men, all strangers. I do not know how the conversation started. Not that the exact deliberations are important here. But I am sure that the beginnings were civil. Perhaps we all were expressing our views on Anna going 'political'. I was offering a critical, and maybe even a cynical, stance. As the argument progressed I was told I was not an 'Indian'; accused of having 'Western values' and of being 'immoral', and thus lacking the merit to comment. The intent of repeating this encounter is not to insert a gender narrative to problematise the Anna 'movement'; at least not here. However the uncontested disciplining of crowds into genteel protesters within a highly gendered and subservient narrative produced its own logic of the space(s) the site of protest opened begs serious engagement in its own space.
The problematic I raise here concerns the compulsion and, more importantly, the reliance on the rhetoric of the 'absolute', so to say, in Anna's movement. Within its apolitical agenda it was 'India against corruption', and now for its political vision it has 'alternative' as the 'absolute' rhetorical moment of aspiration. And here the encounter with the group of men acquires significance. The exact exchange of words is not important here, as it was not important there. It did not matter how and why I was being critical of Anna's intent. What was important that I was critical. And the manner in which the arguments were rejected - by evocation of absolute 'negative' categories (un-Indian; Western; immoral) – is a minor, but significant, instance of the problematic I raise playing it out on the field. The men of course had the vocabulary to engage in the rhetoric of 'absolute1' , but what the Anna movement has done is perfected the grammar, and furthermore extended it a legitimacy.
I will problematise the rhetoric of the 'absolute' by taking the issue of 'corruption', followed by brief questioning of the promise of a political 'alternative' by the Anna movement.
Corruption is a systematic concern. One of the reasons for its perpetuation in India is the structural space available for a ruling elite - caste, class, gender determined, amongst other considerations. These negotiations available within these spaces, whether in the name of tradition or culture, have always sustained a formal and informal economy of exchange, and which can be easily brought under the purview of corrupt practices. The Anna Movement however evoked corruption, and the demand to rid the country of this epidemic, within the rhetoric of 'absolute'. The message was clear: Corruption is wrong in all its manifestations, and the corrupt have no place in a democratic, civilised, moral and thus incorruptible society. At once Team Anna's reckoning of corruption not only allowed abstracting the idea of corruption but also the sites where it unfolds. The self - individually, collectively, politically, and, most importantly, morally - was completely absented from this equation. It externalized the causality to an unidentifiable collective and cause. The pervasiveness of narratives of corruptions – especially by the way of jokes about structural and everyday experiences – reveal this tension in an interesting duality. The pervasiveness is intended to be a critique of the corrupt practices, but its often perverse magnification only establishes it effectiveness. And within this de facto way of being, the Anna movement extended to the participating masses an absolute absolution: everyone except 'you' is corrupt. And if 'you' indeed engage in corrupt practice it is problem of the 'other'. In doing so this rhetoric of dealing with corruption as an 'absolute' category of encounter it equalised its playing-field, as if all actors involved had equal agency in the moment.
This construction of corruption within the rhetoric of 'absolute' allow the masses to feel political, while in fact depoliticizing the issue, and thus further distancing them away from their participation in its politics, and more problematically allowing them to not take responsibility for their participation. And even worse, an action. And here I identify corruption not only as loss to the Indian exchequer to fill the coffers of the few, but every act – everyday and structural – which extends a de facto sense of privilege to an individual, group or community to exercise violence by the way of demanding subservience. Within this definition the exchange (or siphoning) of money is merely a functionality and a symptom of performing these privileges.
Similarly, the problematic about the promised 'political alternative' is on account of its leaning towards abstraction, and thus its de-politicisation. And I address this problematic by raising a question, with the definite political intent to limit the levels of abstracted-ness. It was constantly reiterated by the speakers on the last day that the 'political alternative' will involve giving a platform to candidate 'right' for the country so that the Anna supporters can elect them. The democratic electoral system precisely functions on this premise: multiple parties, multiple candidate, voter's choice. How then is Team Anna's 'political alternative' really an alternative, except perhaps in their over-determination that their choice is the right choice. What is the locus standi of this 'alternative' envisioned by Team Anna within the broader politics of the country, except perhaps to take turns to run it?
For all those invested in this movement of the masses, if indeed it is one, the critics, the collaborators and the cynics need to pro-actively claim it by problematising it to limit the false-truths the abstracted-absolute have the potential to sustain. For it is only beyond the absolute that real, and not the truth, can be encountered.
1 By the way of identification with groups as absolute categories within our Brahminical and patrichial social context, dalits, women, Muslims, homosexuals, etc.
Tripta Chandola is an independent researcher based in Delhi. She completed her PhD from QUT, Australia, in 2010 following which she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
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