Anna, second national movement and lessons from the first

By Shiv Visvanathan The Anna Hazare movement loves its labels and slogans. It is happy to be christened the second national movement and it gives us all the spectacle of the first one – the fast, the crowds, the parallels to colonialism, the tone deaf nervous government, the cries of Vande Mataram. This youngisthan of students is playing out the rhetoric of  their grandparents’ national movement, reclaiming an older history, echoing slogans without their genealogy. Nuggets from the NCERT textbooks, family stories, pictures of Gandhi and Bhagat Singh, Munnabhai and Rang De Basanti all fuse to create a pastiche within which the second national movement is writ large. This voyeurism for the past is fascinating. Both movements have their fasting Gandhian figure. But the cast of accompanying characters is stunningly different. Think of the Mahatma surrounded by Patel, Nehru, Azad. These were giants in their own right and with their own claim to history. Next to them, Bedi, Kejriwal and the Bhushans appear like midgets. It is almost as if history is saying, it is time to economise, that you do not need so much greatness to create history. [caption id=“attachment_68634” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Anna Hazare, center, listens as associates Prashant Bhushan, left, and Arvind Kejriwal, right. Kevin Frayer/AP”]  [/caption] In the spirit of the times let us give these two movements brand names and christen them as Macaulay I and Macaulay II. The babu, the bureaucrat, the professional Thomas Babington Macaulay wanted Indians to learn English so the Crown would have at its disposal “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” In short he want to create the clerk, both Babu  and bureaucracy. More significantly, it created an English speaking elite which was at home in English but did not accept the reduction of India to English_stan_. The first national movement, what we are calling Macaulay I, was inspired by an English speaking leadership, a middle class elite where almost all from Gandhi to Nehru to Kumarappa to Ambedkar were trained abroad. Macaulay II stems from liberalisation and the spread of the Information Revolution. It is equally clear that the poor have little place in this carnival of the middle class. But this does not make it less potent. Macaulay I,  after all, led to Swadesi. Both had unintended consequences. Macaulay thought exposure to English would create the loyal babu, who would dance to the bidding of the empire. Instead it produced a dissenting imagination, a national movement by the very middle class that was supposed to become docile interpreters between the burra sahibs and the rabble. They absorbed the ideas of democracy and demanded self rule. Macaulayism II has spawned similar ironies. It created a new professional class and an electronic secretariat to be outsourced to the world. It created an army of engineers, but instead of being content with prosperity, they challenged the pace of change. Their idea of management was different from the old administration with its obsessive rituals and procedures. Macaulayism II emerges from professionals like Bedi, Kejriwal, the Bhushans. Even the crowd looks as if they have gathered for a college tutorial to get their material ready for a competitive exam. The Information Revolution speeded up their lives. They live in a new information space that demands service with dignity and speed. There are contradictions here too. One visible one is between the technocrats of the information space and the new generation. The Nilekanis and Narayana Murthys criticise the movement, even as half the protestors on the streets of Bangalore seem to be the kind of professionals who would work in their corporations. The professionals realised that protest was essential, that protest was a part of a cybernetic feedback in a society which has gone unresponsive. Secondly, this group did not want the old style of decision-making exemplified by economists like Manmohan Singh or lawyers like Kapil Sibal. They wanted speed. To them the Congress appears as an old behemoth; a replica of the old establishment confronting the new generation. There is however a difference in style. The national movement had its collection of eccentrics. They believed in the power of dissent. The current movement is led by buttoned-down figures, suburban bureaucrats who are tired of the inefficiency of the system. Think of Arvind Kejriwal. He began as an IIT student and the joined the Indian Revenue Service. Dismissed as the clerical mouse of the movement, a pale shadow of the older RTI activists, Kejriwal has showed that he has clear tactics and clearer concepts. He looks and acts as the well behaved architect of the game plan. Kiran Bedi was an outstanding bureaucrat, the first woman in the Indian Police Service. They wave their competence like a flag, hammer home their professionalism, matching brief for brief, bill for bill. There is a playing down of flamboyance and an emphasis on civic virtues. Their statements sound like a catechism class for citizenship. Satyagraha as nostalgia There is another difference. Nationalism had its story tellers. They blended history and legend, song and folktale. Our new movement seems too haunted by social science critique and social survey. It needs to open out more to popular culture, the folk song and the katha to elude the straitjacket of current impasse of social science and ideological politics. But beyond these differences in style, the challenges facing the two movements are different as well. The first built a nation and the second provides a critique of nation building. The crowd in national movement faced the fury of colonial power. Its heroes invented satyagraha and reinvented the fast as potent antidotes to violence. The new movement faces little violence. It follows the old techniques with exhilaration and nostalgia. It wants to renew itself by renewing the spirit of nationalism as nostalgia. One realizes the crowd is compressing history and it does not want to wait. For it, waiting is the  new injustice and this matches the new rhetoric of mobility. But it has to decide how to achieve closure. Where will Macaulay II go from here? The drama of the middle is that period of theatre when origins are no longer in question and the end is not yet in sight. We are now in the  politics of the middle. Politics has now become a waiting game with impatient players. There are fears about Anna’s health. There is trepidation that the new information revolution can create new tyrannies. India watches and waits because the play is no longer about an old man fasting. It is about how India creates a fragment of its future. Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad.