The Grammar of Anarchy

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.

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.

Gandhi ji

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?

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.