Ananya Vajpeyi Interview Transcript

Anna Hazare and the Historical Moment A Pulitzer Center interview with historian Ananya Vajpeyi On Oct. 30, 2011 Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer interviewed Ananya Vajpeyi at her home in New Delhi. Vajpeyi teaches South Asian history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She is currently a fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. She is completing a book on the founding leaders of modern India. Ananya Vajpeyi: My name is Ananya Vajpeyi and I teach, I’ve been teaching for the past few years at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and I’m currently a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, which is a think tank here in New Delhi. And I’ve just finished writing a book about the founding of the Indian Republic and some of the ideas of the founding fathers, particularly their search for an “Indian Self” and the sources of that Self in many of India’s traditions and classical texts. So today I guess we’re talking about the couple of pieces I recently wrote on this new India blog that the New York Times has recently started called “India In ” where they invited me to comment on a major anti-corruption movement that has been ongoing in India through the Summer of 2011 and they wanted me to set it in a k historical context. Because the leader of this movement or the figurehead around whom the movement grew this summer is somebody called Anna Hazare who is a farmer in his 70s and an activist, a social activist, from Western India from the state of Maharashtra. And he suddenly rose to great prominence this year although he’s been involved in various kinds of low-key political struggles for most of his life. And a lot of things were said about him but I think the general public perception was that he was a sort of Gandhian figure and one of the main triggers for that kind of evaluation of his political style was that he declared to the government of India that he would go on a hunger strike, he would fast in order to have his demands and the demands of his movement be addressed by the government and by the state. And these demands included a sort of renewed attention to the problem of corruption, both in the state and in private corporations—endemic corruption that afflicts a lot of Indian public life and Indian business. And what the movement, what the Anna Movement, as it came to be called, was essentially asking was that the government should create an ombudsman or some kind of an anti-graft body that would be able to monitor corruption and adjudicate how to deal with corruption, perhaps at a level that was even above that of the government itself and its various legal and legislative arms. So there was a big debate about what this body should look like, who should be in it, what should be the criteria for selecting members of this “ombuds-body.” But Anna’s stance was that not only would he mobilize people to protest against corruption and to make this demand but that he personally would go on a fast. And fasting is a tactic that Ga u sed most famously and most effectively against British rule in India back in the earlier part of the 20th century so it’s a well-recognized sort of form of protest against state power or the misuse of state power and it’s based on a sort of ndhi idea of being morally in the right even if one is politically weak or not in a position to fight back against injustice in other ways. So the thing that I was asked to write about was: is Anna really a is he like Ga , how would have felt about this movement, does it make sense to have a movement like this when you’re not talking about an anti-Gandhian,colonial kind of resistance but rather Indians against the Indian state, which is also democratically ndhi Gandhi elected and a popular state, you know, a popular government, a representative government. It’s not as though this is imperial rule or colonial rule. So does it make sense to have the kinds of tactics that were used in the anti-colonial and anti- imperial movements, the nationalist movements in the early part of the 20th century, does it makes sense to use those kinds of tactics against a democratically elected government? And the second question I was asked to address was how would another founding father who was also more or less a younger contemporary of —Dr. Biyaram Ambedkar—how would he have looked upon the Anna Hazare phenomenon? Ambedkar was a very interesting figure, a very important leader and figure in the Gandhi's nationalist period and during the creation of the Indian nation-state. He was an Untouchable and became the leader of the Untouchable community. The Untouchables are sort of the lowest of the low in the Hindu caste system and have, for as far as anyone can tell, for centuries, really been oppressed and marginalized by upper castes, by the rich, by the elites, by every kind of powerful group on the Indian Subcontinent. So Ambedkar was the one to really modernize this community, give it a sense of modern political identity, and try to transform the basis of personhood and subjecthood in India from caste and from colonial subjectivity to citizenship, equal citizenship; he kind of introduced that idea. He was a great juridical and legal mind and in fact was the chairman of the drafting committee that made the Indian Constitution, that wrote the Constitution of the Republic of India between 1946 and ‘49. India became independent in 1947, the constitution came into force in 1950 and Ambedkar was the man to kind of shepherd the constitution into its existence—although he didn’t author it by himself by any means, there was an entire constituent assembly, which he led in many ways; he and many others, including [Jawaharlal] Nehru, who was the first prime minister. G died. was assassinated before the constitution came into being. He was assassinated in early 1948. The constitution was promulgated in early 1950. And Ambedkar gave a famous speech right before the constitution went “live,” as it andhi Gandhi were, in November 1949; he addressed the constituent assembly and basically what he, I mean he said many things but the interesting part, for our purposes, is that he said that yes, there had been a nationalist movement or set of movements and there had been anti-colonial resistance and that the methods of resistance that had been used against the British Empire and British rule in India had served their purpose and were no longer relevant since India was now already an independent nation- state. And that now that India had given itself a constitution it needed to graduate into constitutional modes of dealing with social, political and economic problems. In other words, India needed to move from a kind of revolutionary mode into a sort of more procedural and state-led, institutional mode. And Ambedkar made that clear in his speech, in a way obliquely critiquing or perhaps even in a kind of final sense putting to rest the entire Gandhian revolution. And he called it, he called the set of Gandhian methods including civil disobedience and non-violent resistance and tactics like fasting and so on, he kind of grouped them together and referred to them as “the grammar of anarchy,” and now he wanted India to move into a mode that looked like law and order. So you see that kind of transition in mindset from an oppositional—from India and the Indians and Indian nationalists thinking of themselves as an oppositional force vis-à-vis a colonial state—to them becoming actually the leaders and makers of that state, becoming the establishment, as it were. And you see Ambedkar making that statement in his final closing speech to the constituent assembly when their business was all done. So one of the things that I was asked to address in my pieces for this New York Times blog is if Gandhi, if Anna Hazare is a Gandhian, right, then what is the other legacy of incremental change, institutional change and constitutionally led transformation, that you can actually trace from Ambedkar in Indian politics and what relevance does that have in the present, if any? And can you then predict, I mean I didn’t really go that far—just a couple of pieces I had to write, a few hundred words—but can you really predict you know this movement, the Anna Hazare movement, whether it can it have some kind of popular base and force, or whether it’s basically anarchic in its nature . So how would Dalits [Ambedkar’s term for the Untouchables] basically react to the Anna movement? That is potentially one question to be asked, you know. And another way to approach that question is something that has been noted about the Anna movement or the Anna phenomenon and the popularity of this movement in 2011 is that most of its followers and advocates are from the middle class. So they’re urban, educated, professional salaried, upper-caste, upper-class Indians in many ways. And a lot of the team that gathered around the figure of Anna Hazare and basically coordinated his public appearances, you know, spoke to the media, organized city-by-city campaigns—a lot of those people are actually former civil servants, people working in companies, sort of middle class, upper-class, salaried professionals, English-speaking, from the cities; not, you know, grassroots kind of folks.

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