Sunil KhilnaniSunil Khilnani | Sep 24, 2011, 12.00AM IST
The Anna Hazare meteor, as well as many other recent agitations and mobilisations roiling across the landscape - whether battles over mining, land or the siting of nuclear installations, whether about khap panchayats or over gujjar status - are not simply disaffected challenges to the particular party that happens to be in office. They go deeper than the issue of the Indian state's ability to govern adequately. In fact, they display all the signs of a more fundamental disturbance that, periodically, unsettles our sense of the political domain.
Set aside for a moment the disparate individual figures and collective aspirations involved in recent protests, or even their actual substantive demands. The fact is that by resolutely refusing the existing party political channels in favour of direct action, they pose at once a practical challenge to our political routines as well as to our very ideas of what politics actually is. That is, they challenge the accepted definitions of political action and argument, and question the repertoire of acceptable political protest.
The way Congress leaders handled Anna's arrest and imprisonment has been rightly much criticised. Yet what partly explains the government's Inspector Clouseau clumsiness is a conception of politics out of sync with newly emerging pressures across society, pressing to redefine politics anew.
There are at least three clear lines of commentary elicited by this most recent upsurge of conflict. Liberal critics see such movements as sabotaging the very basis of representative politics and parliamentary government, and insist on the observance of constitutional morality: they seem to assume that the domain of the political has achieved a fixed and unchangeable definition.
Those on the Left see in such protests a dangerous populist drift, one that threatens to usurp the organised mass politics supposedly the specialist stock-in-trade of India's Left parties. For the Right as for activists and the disaffected, such dissent stands for a staunch refusal of the ruined domain of politics: it promises a return to sources of moral purity inaccessible to professional politicians.
All commentators draw a contrast between a political realm of professional insiders and a social arena, whose denizens are outsiders variously judged to be irresponsible or morally superior. Yet it would be a mistake to etch too bright a line between these worlds, to see the new protest movements as a refusal or rejection of politics. In fact, they are a loud, rude knock at the gates of the political custodians.
Contest over the definition of the political is a recurring and distinctive trait of India's modern history. In contrast with Europe and the US (where, after the early expansion of the political sphere led by labour unions, we've seen social and popular movements rise and fall, but with little lasting effect on the character of party politics), in India there has been a regular interplay between custodians of the political and those who challenge them - just as there has been considerable fluidity in the nature of party politics.
From the late-19 th century on, India has experienced a cyclical, progressive expansion of both the arena and the content of politics. The first great upswing in this cycle converted the very narrow garden party petitioner politics of the early Congress into Gandhi's mass politics. At Independence, Gandhian mass mobilisation was squeezed uncomfortably into the big attic trunk of constitutional reformism initiated in 1950: a programme that sought to bring into the political and legislative domain a wide array of issues previously left to the realm of social customs and habits.
This constitutional demarcation of the political space more or less held until the 1970s: the Emergency, which marked a refusal to accept the need to revise and expand the definition, itself broke down and spurred the surge of movements during the 1980s and the extension of participation in the 1990s, which together brought new energies and claims into the political arena. That phase of opening was followed by a narrowing in more recent times, shaped by the exigencies of market capitalism.
Now, once again, there are urgent pressures to expand and redefine the political domain. As a result, we are going to see a good many more agitational movements, as the current contestation of the political reaches its full expansive extent. After the surge of electoral participation in the 1990s, we shall see new varieties of extra-constitutional politics sprouting - an all-sorts encompassing the landless, male caste leaders, disaffected urban elites - jostling to insert themselves into the political space.
The way to respond will not be by repression or use of force, nor by prim reminders of constitutional propriety. It will have to involve deft absorption of these energies into the political arena, a disarming conversion of force into dialogue.
To make something political, to bring it into the political domain, is above all to make it amenable to negotiation. Such inductions are never easy - the new entrants necessarily want to make the encounter a clash of wills, to affirm their importance. It will require translating disputes where the protagonists claim the authority of moral certitude or social identity into more malleable political discussion. The perpetual challenge to the modern Indian political imagination has been whether it can turn conflict into conversation, dissent into debate, difference into diversity. We'll need to draw lessons from our own historical experience of expanding the political space - even as we now must invent new ways of doing so.
The writer is director of the India Institute, King's College, London.
Set aside for a moment the disparate individual figures and collective aspirations involved in recent protests, or even their actual substantive demands. The fact is that by resolutely refusing the existing party political channels in favour of direct action, they pose at once a practical challenge to our political routines as well as to our very ideas of what politics actually is. That is, they challenge the accepted definitions of political action and argument, and question the repertoire of acceptable political protest.
The way Congress leaders handled Anna's arrest and imprisonment has been rightly much criticised. Yet what partly explains the government's Inspector Clouseau clumsiness is a conception of politics out of sync with newly emerging pressures across society, pressing to redefine politics anew.
There are at least three clear lines of commentary elicited by this most recent upsurge of conflict. Liberal critics see such movements as sabotaging the very basis of representative politics and parliamentary government, and insist on the observance of constitutional morality: they seem to assume that the domain of the political has achieved a fixed and unchangeable definition.
Those on the Left see in such protests a dangerous populist drift, one that threatens to usurp the organised mass politics supposedly the specialist stock-in-trade of India's Left parties. For the Right as for activists and the disaffected, such dissent stands for a staunch refusal of the ruined domain of politics: it promises a return to sources of moral purity inaccessible to professional politicians.
All commentators draw a contrast between a political realm of professional insiders and a social arena, whose denizens are outsiders variously judged to be irresponsible or morally superior. Yet it would be a mistake to etch too bright a line between these worlds, to see the new protest movements as a refusal or rejection of politics. In fact, they are a loud, rude knock at the gates of the political custodians.
Contest over the definition of the political is a recurring and distinctive trait of India's modern history. In contrast with Europe and the US (where, after the early expansion of the political sphere led by labour unions, we've seen social and popular movements rise and fall, but with little lasting effect on the character of party politics), in India there has been a regular interplay between custodians of the political and those who challenge them - just as there has been considerable fluidity in the nature of party politics.
From the late-19 th century on, India has experienced a cyclical, progressive expansion of both the arena and the content of politics. The first great upswing in this cycle converted the very narrow garden party petitioner politics of the early Congress into Gandhi's mass politics. At Independence, Gandhian mass mobilisation was squeezed uncomfortably into the big attic trunk of constitutional reformism initiated in 1950: a programme that sought to bring into the political and legislative domain a wide array of issues previously left to the realm of social customs and habits.
This constitutional demarcation of the political space more or less held until the 1970s: the Emergency, which marked a refusal to accept the need to revise and expand the definition, itself broke down and spurred the surge of movements during the 1980s and the extension of participation in the 1990s, which together brought new energies and claims into the political arena. That phase of opening was followed by a narrowing in more recent times, shaped by the exigencies of market capitalism.
Now, once again, there are urgent pressures to expand and redefine the political domain. As a result, we are going to see a good many more agitational movements, as the current contestation of the political reaches its full expansive extent. After the surge of electoral participation in the 1990s, we shall see new varieties of extra-constitutional politics sprouting - an all-sorts encompassing the landless, male caste leaders, disaffected urban elites - jostling to insert themselves into the political space.
The way to respond will not be by repression or use of force, nor by prim reminders of constitutional propriety. It will have to involve deft absorption of these energies into the political arena, a disarming conversion of force into dialogue.
To make something political, to bring it into the political domain, is above all to make it amenable to negotiation. Such inductions are never easy - the new entrants necessarily want to make the encounter a clash of wills, to affirm their importance. It will require translating disputes where the protagonists claim the authority of moral certitude or social identity into more malleable political discussion. The perpetual challenge to the modern Indian political imagination has been whether it can turn conflict into conversation, dissent into debate, difference into diversity. We'll need to draw lessons from our own historical experience of expanding the political space - even as we now must invent new ways of doing so.
The writer is director of the India Institute, King's College, London.
Courtesy : Times of India
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