INDIAN DEMOCRACY: CHANGE IS HERE

Well before Change arrives, discrete signs of the impending tumult start appearing, with increasing frequency and magnitude. Unfortunately, it is often in hindsight that seemingly stray straws are seen for what they really are: pearls on one string.

In 1947, we inherited -- and have persisted with -- 19th century colonial laws, administration, judiciary, police and other institutions of governance. In 1950, we gave ourselves a constitution that promised democracy to the people, but through a copy-pasted model that was developed over centuries by and for a tiny, almost-unitary, and culturally very different society for itself.

In sum, for creating an India of tomorrow, we placed our trust in instruments of yesterday.

The constitution has held till now, as have the electoral process and other institutions of state. And this achievement, more than anything else, is being used by those who have most benefitted from it to resist sorely needed changes which will, and must, pull them down from the colonial perches they seamlessly slid into after Independence.

Ironically, the Change that is threatening them was actually unleashed by them to shape public opinion and discourse to suit their requirements.

The completely unexpected and unprecedented support that Anna Hazare’s fight against corruption has generated contains some extremely important lessons, some of which I had discussed in the previous post. Perhaps the most fundamental message that the hundreds of thousands of young men and women out on the streets today are conveying is that they are no longer ready to wait indefinitely for politicians to deliver on issues that affect them directly, and are ready to force Change, if required.

Supremacy of Parliament and sanctity of the electoral process are the two arguments that opponents of Change offer to deride this upsurge, if not uprising. MPs are elected by the people to frame laws, win elections if you have a problem with what they are doing: this is their standard line.

Unfortunately for them, this is not 1947 or 1950, when a long oppressed, diffident people, led by outstanding, unelected leaders, were elated with the first flushes of freedom. The world has changed beyond imagination in the last six decades, and two generations later, the youth are not timorous like their grand parents -- they have as direct a memory of colonial rule as they have of other periods long past – and they see leaders of today as plunderers disinterested in, and disconnected from, them.

But above all, the most profound change that is driving the Change we are beginning to experience is the information revolution. 850 million mobile phones and a rapidly growing access to the internet have ushered in a social media revolution whose impact and power is re-writing the rules of democracy itself.

There were huge expectations when visual media was freed of government control. People were fed up of tightly controlled government manipulation of news and discussions, and were excited by the prospect of getting ‘real’ news from a free media. Daily voting on questions picked and debated by various news channels empowered them for the first time beyond the ballot box, and gave them a sense of participation like they had never experienced. Every day they got a real idea of the views of a significant section the population on live issues.

Politicians quickly realised that they could use free media by a mix of inducements and threats to shape and distort public opinion enough to alter voting choices of a critical numbers, to change defeat into victory. The people would never get to know, they reckoned, that it was almost DD all over again, without the give-away logo.

Tehelka's sting operation of 2001 and the Pink Chaddi drama of 2009 were two politically motivated campaigns that successfully achieved their objectives of damaging the BJP, and underlined the enormous power of the visual media in influencing, even determining, electoral outcomes.

Media business in India has been slave to the government of the day, and is now even more so, because the stakes are higher than ever before, making paid news and worse extremely lucrative. Media is, therefore, as status quo loving as politicians. The Anna phenomenon would have been successfully discredited and buried by it had a new 'media moghul’ not burst upon the scene from nowhere and fundamentally altered the rules of the information and opinion-making game.

Almost a crore and a half missed calls to Anna’s anti-corruption team, crores of sms messages exchanged about Anna and his anti-corruption campaign, and a free, informed, unbiased debate by well-informed netizens -- 21st century, often-ahead-of-the-curve reporters and opinion makers whom people trust – are the prime drivers of the revolution that we are seeing at Ramlila Maidan and all over the country.

The media – honorable exceptions apart – is being compelled to cover Anna; for the first time, it is following, not leading a campaign. Even more importantly, for the first time, people are not being influenced by the propaganda regularly unleashed by ‘experts’ and shallow, opinionated anchors who have held sway till now: the fast-growing web of social media is their new voice, one that will only grow louder. In fact so stung are some media stars by the almost brutal manner in which they have been sidelined, and their ‘Radia’ agenda lit up, that they have refused to cover this unfolding of history from Ground Zero right outside their doorstep.

What we are seeing on the streets is, at one level, the largest ever ‘opinion poll’ or survey ever conducted in India on an issue. Till now, the media was setting the agenda, quoting votes, blogs, tweets etc. of a few thousand – sometimes ever creating false handles to fake results/trends – to tell a believing India as to what its 'real' opinion was on various socio-political issues. Aided by unprecedented connectivity, Anna and his team have snatched that initiative from the middlemen-messengers by reaching people direct with their message.

Elections are a lot less about issues than they are about arithmetic. That is why politicians have become so arrogant and dismissive of the people. They have gamed this deeply flawed process to near-perfection by dividing themselves and voters along every usable fault line. This has effectively removed people from the process of governance and turned them into subjects who, even if they vent their anger after five years, can do little more than choose from among the small pool of the ruling elite that has realised that it can keep doing what it wants to, till election time, and that an election loss is temporary; no matter what they do, their opponents will do no better, and a helpless minority of voters will swing back and give them one more chance.

It is this effective disenfranchisement of the people that emboldened the government to do what it did to Anna Hazare in April, to Baba Ramdev in June and again to Anna now. It is this dis-empowerment that people are revolting against. It is this Change that politicians are either unable to grasp or unwilling to submit to.

The age of real-time connectivity and dissemination of information is here. And it is not one-way. A citizen with a mobile phone or an internet connection is no longer a passive, isolated recipient of news; he is also a creator and disseminator of it. He is an independent, one-man media house. He is not going to wait for five years to express his opinion through a vote that, for 65 years, has not addressed issues that touch him. He is not going to accept the argument that a ‘supreme’ Parliament is the private property of a few hundred individuals between elections.

These are ideas and instruments that were developed in, and were suited to, the age of pigeon carriers, horse-driven carriages and ships powered by oars and wind, by societies tentatively breaking free of the clutches of absolute monarchy. In 21st century, politicians cannot hide behind them and deny to people the power that should be theirs in a democracy. People have a right to demand day-to-day accountability from the people they have chosen to govern their nation. Thanks to technology, they now can.

Anna's movement may be crushed again by politicians. But what is of real significance is that, for the first time, people have come together, and experienced and expressed their power, without latching onto a political leader or party. They will come back again and again, stronger, better organised. If politicians do not learn, at some point they will turn violent too, with unpredictable results.

The days of treating a distorted democracy like a fixed-term dictatorship are over. Change is here. The sooner our politicians get a fix on this, the better.
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ANNA AWAKENS 'WE THE PEOPLE'

Anna is everywhere. Everyone has something to say about him. And almost no one has read the anti-corruption Jan Lok Pal Bill (JLPB) they are supporting or savaging. The debate, therefore, is, for most part, along the same ideological, political, religious and social fault lines that emerge in their ugliness whenever any contentious issue comes to the fore.

This time, however, another participant has entered the arena. And he is not another op-ed writer or a member of a handpicked studio audience taking part in a motivated and tightly controlled discussion. He is -- many differ—the real “We the People.”

Why has Anna Hazare, a soldier and a Gandhian who was barely known beyond Maharashtra till April this year, so caught the imagination of the people?

We are possibly witnessing and are part of a rare moment when a core issue has got the just the right amount of Oxygen it needs, in the form of a spotless leader who can keep it aflame without burning down everything and also not let those who have successfully extinguished it in the past do so again. In such moments history is made; in such moments events occur that seemed impossible just a few days back; in such moments cynics, critics and collaborators are swept by a Tsunami in their pajamas.

Government corruption is an issue that has touched almost every one -- even the destitute -- who has had some contact with someone from the government. Yes, we have all paid bribes at some point of time; some of us have even taken them.

Is, then, this unprecedented outpouring of support for Anna’s war against corruption a reflection of our hypocrisy, as some are suggesting with naked derision? Or has Anna struck a deeper chord in the collective consciousness of India because of the kind of man he is being seen as, because of the very Spartan life he has lived, because of the energy that only a spiritually cleansed ascetic karma yogi can emit?

Is Anna awakening a set of values that we as a people had forgotten, resigned as we were to the rot of corruption because, till April this year, there was not even a ray of hope that things would ever improve? Is Anna giving vent to a primordial anger, even curse, that has been long buried in us against our elected representatives who have not only failed us but mocked us by their increasingly obscene abuse of power and a plunder, nay rape, of their motherland, the one they, for good reason, flinch from calling Bharat Mata anymore?

Never before has India so spontaneously rallied together like this against its rulers – and that includes politicians presently in opposition – since they they took on the British. Now, as then, collaborators of the regime who have benefitted from it are staying loyal to their masters, aided by vocal and visible ideologues obsessed with alien theoretic constructs that sound very impressive but work very poorly, if at all, in India's civilisational and cultural cauldron. Like then, arrogant and disconnected rulers are confident they can once again beat back the surge by deceit.

In April 2011, Congress leaders easily succeeded in diffusing the situation when they broke Anna Hazare’s protest with a last-minute personal appeal from Sonia Gandhi that led Anna and his team to believe that she was on the side of those fighting the most brazen plunder India has ever seen, under her protective eye and pallu. In June, again they managed a repeat, this time with brutal force against sleeping men, women and children, after leading Baba Ramdev up the same path and agreeing to most of his demands, only to break them with lathis, and completely forget them thereafter.

This is the third time Sonia’s lieutenants tried the same trick. But this time, the people, prepared for their deceit, have not let them get away. The old cliché about not being able to fool all the people all the time has caught up with them, and they have nowhere to hide. The sordid drama of Anna’s arrest and release has not shown the government’s ineptitude in the absence of Sonia Gandhi but the determination of a people who refused to let it suppress their voice against its arrogance and high-handedness again.

The action has since shifted to Ramlila Maidan, where Anna has continued his fast, and spread like a prairie fire to cities, towns and villages across the length and breadth of India. As the flames are leaping higher and higher, so are voices against Anna and his team, most from usual suspects and a few from most unexpected quarters. But that is only to be expected, and their fury is only going to increase. Till it is consumed in the non-violent flames that Anna has fanned or till it suppresses and extinguishing them, one more time.

Parts of the JLPB may be flawed. But all of those who have read it – and also have real experience of the working of the government – know in their hearts that, at the core, the bill attacks a significant dimension of an enormous problem with the focus and sincerity needed to deal with it. Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, the two brains behind the bill, have detailed insider information about the functioning of the well-oiled machine of government corruption and, therefore, know well the right instruments that are needed to tackle it.

On the other hand, the government’s Lok Pal Bill, drafted by the likes of Kapil Sibal – more need not be said – is, 64 years after Independence and 42 years after it was first mooted, an instrument designed to actually encourage corruption, making prosecution virtually impossible, particularly of big ticket offenders like ministers, politicians and bureaucrats. Every one knows that the real, almost unbridgeable gap between Anna's team and the Sonia's government is of intentions, not provisions of the two bills. Therefore, no one out there with any sense is buying the government’s line anymore.

Anna has undoubtedly roused the people from some sort of a deep slumber. It cannot be an accident that since he has started fasting, there has not been even one murder or rape in India’s rape capital, Delhi. A collective catharsis is taking place; people are again connecting with the Law of Karma, shaken from a Kumbhkaran-like sleep by Anna’s chants of ‘Vande Matram,’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai.’ Non-Hindus too have been similarly inspired by his Gandhian-type secularism, his motivational call ‘Inquilab Zindabad,’ and his powerful evocation of the sacrifices of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev. This is inclusive secularism at its pristine best.

The protests are growing, the crowds are swelling, the writing is on the wall. Yet, it is quite possible that those who have mastered the art of tricking and disempowering people by gaming the electoral process and converting it into a cynical game of numbers by dividing people along every conceivable and possible dimension, are not reading it right even now, and may once again succeed in suppressing this uprising, this Second War of Independence, as Anna calls it, with some justification. It is possible that some of them may again enjoy wine like they did after Baba Ramdev was bundled out of Delhi by the police.

If that happens, politicians would do well to remember that the non-violent fuse that Anna, Baba Ramdev, Kejriwal, Bedi, others and 'We The People' have lit is burning rapidly, and getting shorter. The bomb of corruption that politicians have fashioned is now simply too big to be wished away. It has to be burst. Politicians will do well to heed to Anna's fatherly warning that carries the energy of a true Gandhian and India's youth; it is not to be trifled with, and they should to do it before it blows in their face and unleashes destructive energies that may be very difficult to control. They owe at least this to India.
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