1 Sruthi Muraleedharan, SOAS the Anti- Corruption Crusade: Civic
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Sruthi Muraleedharan, SOAS The Anti- Corruption Crusade: Civic Virtue, Performance and Subjectivity in India Abstract This paper will analyze the recent powerful anti-graft protests held in India led by a coalition named “India Against Corruption *IAC+’’ in 2011 under the leadership of Anna Hazare and his team. This movement was crucial because it brought large number of masses to the streets, considering that the level of civic engagement has declined in the context of a neo- liberal politico-economic order and the general political apathy. Performativity in this protest then represented an interconnected triad of identity, experience, and social relations; as, they also interrupted the ‘habitus’ of a fixed political subject. This paper will be divided broadly into two sections; the first section on Performance of Protest and Political Action will highlight the nature of mobilization and the narrative of embodied sense of virtue and moral resoluteness that defined the protesters as opposed to the ‘corrupt’ political class. The next section on ‘Civic’ subjectivity and Citizenship will discuss how the movement was able to rally a ‘civic’ performance of a ‘citizen’ as opposed to a sectarian identity. Finally, I will be arguing that these protests were emblematic of a sociality and mode of appearing in public which contributed towards a creation of a stronger political community underlined by the spirits of civic virtues of a self’s duty, patriotism, accountability and most crucially political participation in the democratic life. Anti –Corruption Crusade: India Against Corruption [IAC] The Anti –Corruption protests in India needs to be contextualized within the global citizen’s activism unfolding since 2000s around the world whether it was the Arab Spring or the Occupy Movement all of which did lead to an anti- establishment upsurge from the masses resulting in altered political subjectivities. In 2011 India witnessed an upsurge on the issue of Corruption which also represented a critical rupture on Indian politics. It sparked off a momentous groundswell in urban India and came to be called the ‘second freedom struggle’ and the Ramlila Maidan [Ramlila Ground] as ‘our Tahrir Square’. The immediate context for the IAC/Anna Hazare movement was a series of scams that the government and the political class was embroiled in - 2G spectrum scam [telecom sector], Commonwealth games, mining scam and the Adarsh Society Housing Society scam in all of which there was huge 1 diversion of public funds . These protests have been the most powerful mobilization on the issue of corruption in mainstream politics after the Jay Prakash *JP+ movement in 1974. The IAC’s demand for the passage of the Jan Lokpal Bill (People’s Ombudsman Bill) as a strong anti-corruption instrument brought to focus the indispensability of an ombudsman and sought to introduce a legislation that Parliament had resisted for decades. As highlighted by Gupta, one of the crucial ingredients of discourses of citizenship in a populist democracy such as India has been that state employees are considered accountable to "the people" of the country. The movement which started off as a coalition of NGOs and independent activists under the banner India Against Corruption [IAC] in due course of the movement and negotiations with the incumbent Congress Government led to the eventual emergence of a new political party –the Aam Admi Party [2012]. *Common Citizen’s Party+. Apart from the fact that this anti – corruption movement was one of the most powerful protests that attracted spontaneous participation from people of different political dispositions in India’s recent history, it also changed the nature of politics, the political culture of New Delhi and most importantly the nature of the constituency referred to as- ‘the people’ in Indian Democracy. These protests instigated a heated debate in the Parliament and in the public domain about the very notion of democracy, citizen participation and the role of civil society. Anna was the transnational symbolic figure of the Anti- Corruption Movement in India. As the face of the movement he positioned himself as the embodiment of Gandhi and his strategy of non- violent protests. Time Magazine says "It's hard to imagine this diminutive, celibate octogenarian being the dynamo behind an entire popular movement. But in India, Anna Hazare cut a Gandhian pose that transfixed the world's largest democracy and put its sitting government's feet to the fire."1 From his arrest onwards, from refusing to budge from the Tihar jail till his concessions were met to asking his supporters to occupy the maidan [ground] till the Lokpal has been passed; his acts of defiance were quite powerful. His release from the Tihar jail was followed by Anna paying obeisance to Gandhi at Rajghat and the Amar Jawan Jyoti at the India Gate after which he headed to the Ramlila maidan. Hazare referred to his fight against corruption as the ‘second freedom struggle’ and started his anti- corruption agitation by starting the 11 day fast at Ramlila Maidan on 16th August 2011. He claimed it as the second independence struggle because according to him despite independence, the real freedom had still not been 1 In ‘People who Mattered’ 14th December’2011 issue of Time Magazine. 2 achieved and realized. Often hailed as the Gandhi of our times, he always sat with a huge Gandhian imagery in his backdrop and dressed after him. Performance of Protest and Political Action The nature of mobilization of the Anti- corruption protests was very performative; and these performative engagements inevitably were emotional and placed the expressive body in the public sphere. By focusing on corporality and presence, performance theory plays a very important role in linking symbolic gestures and performative action. In this section I intend to analyse this relationship which represents a sociality and a mode of appearing in public which is beneficial to the construction of community in this case a ‘Civic Community’; performance itself, as an embodied practice, embeds the abstractions of democratic representation in a participatory activity. Hence in the context of this anti-corruption mobilization it is crucial to look at how individual subjects gets positioned and influence political subject’s livid experience and political citizenship. Butler’s remarks on acts and norms are insightful here when it comes to comprehending these political performances as acts of citizenship. Political subjects can only be constructed in acts that (re)affirm, claim, deny, transform and create new standards of political normality. This ‘performance’ entailed in politics concerns with embodiment and social change and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Therefore it becomes crucial to interface ‘performance’ with ‘performativity’. Performativity is a related conceptual tool that emphasizes the political aspect of performance and its exercise of power developed by post-structuralist feminist theorist Butler. Performativity is then interconnected triad of identity, experience, and social relations. The movement targeted official corruption and the political class wherein the appeal was to the individual sense of morality and what it felt to be ‘right’. One of the most defining characters of this movement was its anti-political stance, implying thereby that they stood largely outside the arena of the political parties. Anna Hazare became the signifier of all that is ‘good’ against all that is ‘dirty’ with the political class. There was a tendency to mock and systematically delegitimize the institutions of representative democracy. The narrative of political corruption 3 identified the ‘Other’ in the political class or the politicians. As Roy2 highlights, ‘First and most common are anti- neta performances, i e, the self-presentation as the diametrical opposite of the establishment Indian neta or politician.’One of the most striking aspects of his discourse has been the sheer dislike for the political parties and the political class. His platforms have always been ‘anti -political’ which implied in practice that no member of any political disposition would be allowed to share/enter the stage. Not only was politics always described to be ‘dirty’ but also the political class was considered to be corrupting, untrustworthy and disloyal. He preferred non- party based political representation rather than political party/interest based representation. As he says, that democracy has been ruined by political party based representation. He brought in a discourse of morality in politics into the mainstream public sphere not only by adopting non-violent methods like fasting and dharnas [sit ins] but also stressing on character building and honesty in public life combined with high sense of duty and commitment to the nation. The Anti- Corruption Movement redefined the conception of a civic community and the symbolic geography of the capital city of Delhi. Spatial mappings have a very crucial role to play in understanding social practices in contemporary politics especially in the context of the boundaries of these spaces, social construction of these spaces and the types of subjectivities that constitute or inhabit these spaces. Symbolic geography for Tilly 3includes "use of emblematic monuments, locales, or buildings in dramatization of demands, [and a] struggle for control of crucial public spaces in validation of claims to political power". Delhi is spatially demarcated on the basis of economic activities, partition patterns and occupational affinities with a very visible lack of social cohesion and overarching civic identity. The Ramlila Maidan emerged as a powerful counter space for the creation of a new community. It became a site for spontaneous mobilization, public deliberation and politicization of masses aiming at transformation of the society. Another aspect of this movement was that not only state assigned spaces of protests like Jantar Mantar or Ramlila ground became part of everyday discourse and political participation; it also led to the peripheral alleys, streets as well also becoming centers of protests.