by John Elliott
The publicity, however, rarely moves beyond the shock and horror of discovering such attitudes exist within sight of the shiny office blocks of Delhi’s satellite cities that house multinational companies. It fails to recognize the massive social changes that have taken place around cities such as Delhi, where social tensions and clashes created by a rapidly modernizing India are most stark.
Hazare’s Movement
A groundswell of public opinion verging on anger against corrupt politicians and other officials led, in the spring of 2011, to mass protests across the country in support of a hunger strike by Hazare, who dressed evocatively with a pointed white cap, crisp white kurta and spectacles, reminiscent in some ways of Mahatma Gandhi. He was demanding legislation to create the Lok Pal, which had been on successive governments’ legislative agendas since the late 1960s but had been continually delayed by objections from MPs and others who did not want their businesses and connections to be liable to investigations.
The government initially reacted dismissively and clumsily to the protests, but eventually caved in when it realized their strength and half-heartedly agreed to set up a joint drafting committee with the social activists to prepare fresh legislation.19 Government and opposition politicians were scared of what might emerge and were anxious to undermine Hazare’s authority and popularity. They assumed that, if they stalled for long enough during the summer months, they would eventually be able to ignore most of his demands. The assumption was that he would not be able to rebuild nationwide support five or six months later because, judging by previous experience, protestors’ enthusiasm and energy would be dissipated and would not easily be revived. This seriously underestimated the strength of middle-class opinion driving the protests. This was not a frenetic rabble, brought onto the streets by vested interests but a young middle-class revolt that had a life of its own, separate from the ambitions of attention seekers who thronged around Hazare, including Baba Ramdev, a colourful black-bearded, saffron-robed and politically ambitious guru of dubious respectability.
The drafters failed to reach an agreement and Hazare revived his movement in June 2011, threatening a new hunger strike. In a panic, the government stupidly put him in jail when he failed to agree to terms for the length of his fast and accompanying mass protests. It then quickly reversed that decision and tried to release him, but he mocked the authorities by continuing to refuse food in jail until terms were agreed for a 15-day public fast. (Sonia Gandhi was ill in the US at this time, having had, it was widely assumed, an operation for cancer, and her absence contributed to the government’s ineptitude).
The government was understandably resisting some of the demands that would have allowed the Lok Pal to cover the prime minister and the CBI and other investigative agencies. These powers would have been far stronger than was sensible in a parliamentary democracy, and there were also understandable public concerns that the Lok Pal could become another overstaffed and cumbersome part of a basically corrupt bureaucracy, thus preventing it from having any great impact on corruption. Ministerial and other spokesmen and negotiators, however, failed to capitalize on these reservations about the idea and infuriated public opinion through their arrogance, which strengthened the Lok Pal campaigners’ voice.20
Eventually, a Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill covering both national and state-level ombudsmen was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 22 December 2011. It was quickly passed in five days, but remained stuck in the Rajya Sabha for more than 18 months.21 The delay was initially caused by the creation of a select committee to suggest changes, which led to amendments to the bill being tabled in January 2013.22 Then there appeared to be filibustering by the government, which did not have a majority in the upper house and feared defeat on key issues such as the prime minister being subject to investigation and the government losing control over the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The session ended in uproar, without passing the bill, and it was not till December 2013 that the Bill was passed at a time when the government was desperate to show it was acting on corruption.
Hazare’s campaign lost most of its momentum once the legislation was launched in parliament, but it led to an even more significant development when Arvind Kejriwal created the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to contest parliamentary and state assembly elections. Kejriwal had been involved in civic and social campaigns for about 12 years, initially with a voluntary organization called Parivartan that focused on local issues such as governance in a poorer part of Delhi, and on the right to information.
Kejriwal’s first test came with an election for the Delhi state assembly in December 2013 when his party won an astonishing 28 of the 70 seats, and he himself defeated Sheila Dikshit, who had been the Congress chief minister for 15 years.23 The Congress was decimated, winning just eight seats compared with 43 in the previous election in 2008 – a humiliating result that was far worse than had been expected. Although she had a comfortable ‘aunty’ public image, Dikshit’s reputation had slipped because she had continuously tried to evade responsibility for Delhi’s significant problems. She had deflected onto others criticism about both the appalling and corrupt preparations for the Commonwealth Games in 2010, and continuing problems with water and electricity supplies and high prices. She was also personally identified with the Gandhi family, so she epitomised much of what needed to be changed.
The Aam Admi Party’s victory is significant because it underlined the desire for a break with the corruption and mismanagement of recent years. Kejriwal talked about a new sort of politics, and the party’s election symbol was appropriately a broom. Focusing on local as well as state-level issues, the party produced individual manifestos for each of Delhi’s 70 assembly constituencies as well as one for the state as a whole. Its success boosted its activities in other states, and it aimed to win enough seats in the 2014 general election to become a significant force in parliament.
RTI and CAG
The middle-class-driven surge of opinion against corruption was boosted by two factors – a Right to Information Act (generally known as the RTI) that came into force in 2005, and the appointment, in 2008, of Vinod Rai, a senior bureaucrat, as CAG. Rai turned this into a campaigning and interventionist role and his reports on issues such as the Commonwealth Games, coal mining and telecoms fuelled public anger and infuriated the government because they led to extensive media exposure and a series of official inquiries. The RTI opened the doors to revelations of hitherto secret information at all levels. Kejriwal used it to make dramatic headlines early in 2013 when he revealed a series of corruption scandals that embarrassed companies and top politicians. One of them challenged the Gandhi dynasty’s closely guarded privacy with an attack on Sonia Gandhi’s businessman son-in-law, Robert Vadra, who was a soft target.24 Since she entered politics at the end of the 1990s, Gandhi had drawn a much tighter cloak of secrecy and silence around herself and her family than earlier members of the dynasty ever managed, and Kejriwal’s publicity broke through that screen.
Gradually the government realized that the extensive corruption during its time in office would become a major issue in the 2014 general election and it began to take more decisive action. There was a flood of CBI inquiries into coal and telecom cases involving some of India’s best-known businessmen, and Rahul Gandhi used his authority as Congress party vice-president to ensure that Lalu Yadav, a convicted former chief minister of Bihar, lost his parliamentary seat25 when he was jailed for fraud in a case dating from the mid-1990s.
No one, however, was doing much about actually punishing those most responsible for the endemic corruption. No significant politicians or prominent businessmen, nor anyone the government wanted to protect, was jailed. A few figureheads were arrested when it suited the government to do so – usually to embarrass another political party, or bring a partner into line, or create a diversion from public demands for action. These were people whom the government was prepared to sacrifice such as Suresh Kalmadi, who presided over the CWG and was charged, with his henchmen, for
allegedly cheating and conspiring on a games contract as well as for using forged documents and other offences.26 A. Raja, the former telecommunications minister who belongs to Tamil Nadu’s DMK and was dispensable, was charged, along with officials and company executives, with offences that ranged from criminal conspiracy to forgery and cheating.27 Three of the executives belonged to a company controlled by Anil Ambani, the less important and influential of the two Reliance brothers. But little was done to speed up the handling of these and other cases.
On a broader front, the government passed the Lok Pal Bill through parliament and Rahul Gandhi took steps to show he realized action was needed. The government removed MPs’ patronage powers to issue land, telephone lines and petrol station licences to favoured friends and supporters, though that too was only tinkering at the lowest and least important end of corruption. It also announced that prosecution of corrupt bureaucrats would be speeded up with stiffer penalties, but officials at all levels of government were so scared of facing corruption accusations that they became reluctant to take decisions.28 This seriously delayed policy implementation at a time when the economy was beginning to slow down.
A ‘Rosa Parks Moment’
At various times when the protests against rape and corruption were at their height, it seemed that life in India might never be quite the same again because the young and newly aspirational middle class had found its voice. Corruption had, of course, not stopped, and new rapes were being reported daily, but people had come out in protest, not pulled by organized campaigners, vested interests or political parties but by a demand from varied classes for India to change.
As someone said in one of the many television discussion programmes that ran for several weeks, ‘the days when gradualism was acceptable are over.’ To put it another way, the government could no longer rely on the quick fix of jugaad or the laid-back acceptance of the inevitable to avoid, or at least stem, social protest and unrest. The statement probably was over-optimistic but it did illustrate a growing belief that the economic and social changes that had begun in 1991 now needed to be reflected in government, the law, and the operations of the police – and that the domination of women by men needed to end.
Was this ‘a Rosa Parks moment’, wondered Nandan Nilekani. ‘This is just like that moment in the US, when one woman’s refusal to give up her seat in the bus sparked off the civil rights movement,’ he suggested at the Jaipur Literature Festival at the end of January 2013. Rosa Parks was a black woman whose rebellion against oppression in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 195529 triggered, as Nilekani put it to me later, ‘a whole set of events – the rise of Martin Luther King, Kennedy and his support for Civil Rights, MLK’s famous speech “I have a dream” and, after Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] fulfilling his intent by passing the Civil Rights Act in 1965.’
Nilekani was suggesting that ‘one seminal event that causes national outrage can have a string of positive consequences in terms of reforms’.30 Tied with that, he believed that ‘the aspiration of millions of young Indians would drive the change’ in governance and other areas. He saw both Hazare and the outrage on the rape case as a demand for better ‘public goods’ such as safer cities, better women’s rights and cleaner governance, and said this was ‘very different from agitations that demand some quota or entitlements for some category of people’.
Rosa Parks’ protest caught a potent moment in American history, when a spark was needed to generate change in race relations. That point may not have been reached in India. Unlike in the case of Egypt’s Tahrir Square and the other Arab Spring uprisings that began late in 2010,31 India’s middle class is not yet ready to be a cohesive force, separate from political parties and other established organisations. A start was however made between 2011 and 2013 in Delhi and across the country. Middle-class opinion became a force that could not be ignored and the AAP’s success in Delhi showed political parties that they could no longer take the voters for granted.
Notes
1. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/police-fire-tear-gas-and-fire-water-cannon-at-peaceful-protestors-in-battleground-delhi/
2. ‘India gang rape victim’s father: I want the world to know my daughter’s name is Jyoti Singh’, Sunday People (UK), 5 January 2013, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/india-gang-rape-victims-father-1521289, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/india-gang-rape-victims-father-1521289, and http://www.punjabnewsline. com/news/Jyoti-Singh-Pandey_-Delhi-braveheart_s-father-wants-world-to-know-this-name.html
3. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/gang-rape-reveals-the-real-india-and-the-glimmers-of-change/
4. Address by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, on the eve of India’s 64th Republic Day http://presidentofindia.nic.in/sp250113. html
5. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/the-plight-of-indias-landless-is-overlooked/
6. Ibid, and Jo Johnson column in the Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dd8761a6-87b4-11dc-9464-0000779fd2ac,s01=1,stream=FTSynd.html?nclick_check=1
7. Justice Verma Committee Report Summary, PRS research organisation, http://www.prsindia.org/parliamenttrack/report-summaries/justice-verma-committee-report-summary-2628/; Full report http://www. prsindia.org/uploads/media/Justice%20verma%20committee/js%20 verma%20committe%20report.pdf
8. ‘New anti-rape law comes into force’, PTI, 3 April 2013, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-04-03/india/38247789_1_criminal-law-acid-attack-rigorous-imprisonment
9. https://www.facebook.com/rvprasad/posts/10151345569564841
10. Crime in Delhi 2012, http://www.delhipolice.nic.in
11. ‘The Dark Side of Sunny Porn;, India Today, 18 February 2012, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/pornography-on-the-internet-hits-indian-society-sunny-leone/1/174081.html
12. ‘Crimes against women including rape cases declared by MPs, MLAs and candidates’, Association for Democratic Reforms press release, 20 December 2012, http://adrindia.org/content/crimes-against-women-including-rape-cases-declared-mps-mlas-and-candidates
13. ‘Prohibit Degrading “Test” for Rape – Forensic Exams Should Respect Survivors’ Rights to Health, Human Rights Watch, 6 September 2010, http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/09/06/india-prohibit-degrading-test-rape
14. ‘“Two-finger test violates rape survivor’s right to privacy, traumatises her”: Supreme Court’, PTI, 19 May 2013, http://ibnlive.in.com/news/twofinger-test-violates-rape-survivors-right-to-privacy-sc/392604-3-244.html
15. In conversation with JE, January 2013
16. ‘Fear of death envelops inter-caste couples’, The Times of India, 25 January 2013, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-25/madurai/36547023_1_inter-caste-police-protection-parents
17. ‘Honour killings: Supreme Court says those who kill for “honour” deserve death sentence’, Mail Today, 10 May 2011, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/honour-killings-sc-for-death-sentence/1/137621.html; Bhupendra Yadav, ‘Khap Panchayats: Stealing Freedom?’, Economic & Political Weekly, 26 December 2009; http://www.epw.in/commentary/khap-panchayats-stealing-freedom.html
18. Bhupendra Yadav, ‘Khap Panchayats: Stealing Freedom?’, Economic & Political Weekly, 26 December, 2009, http://www.epw.in/commentary/khap-panchayats-stealing-freedom.htmlhttp://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2009_44/52/Khap_Panchayats_Stealing_Freedom.pdf
19. https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/india-is-at-a-turning-point-that-might-go-wrong/
20. https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/greed-breeds-social-unrest-in-india-and-the-uk
21. https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/are-the-lok-pal-bill-and-the-ambanis-brotherly-love-for-real-or-just-for-the-numbers/
22. The Select Committee’s accepted recommendations on the PRS Legislative Research website http://www.prsindia.org/theprsblog/? p=2448 and http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Lok%20Pal%20Bill%202011/Lokpal%20Select%20Committee%20comparison%20 with%20%20govt%20accepted%20ame
ndments.pdf
23. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/india-state-elections-demand-political-change-without-the-congress/
24. ‘Robert Vadra’s extraordinary jump to fame and power’, 6 October 2012, http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-robert-vadra-s-extraordinary-jump-to-fame-and-power/20121005.htm
25. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/rahul-gandhi-stops-a-small-compromise-on-lalu-yadav-but-does-he-have-the-stamina-to-be-a-leader/
26. ‘CWG scam: Delhi court frames charges against Suresh Kalmadi’, PTI, 4 February 2013, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-02-04/india/36742391_1_promoters-of-two-construction-akr-constructions-p-d-arya
27. ‘2G scam: Charges against Raja, others’, NDTV, 22 October 2011, http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/2g-scam-charges-against-raja-others-143384
28. https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/india-staggers-and-stumbles-along-a-long-corruption-trail/
29. ‘Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies’, New York Times, 25 October 2005, http://www.nytimes. com/2005/10/25/us/25parks.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&
30. In conversation with JE.
31. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/india%E2% 80%99s-protection-against-tahrir-square-style-rebellions/
10
The Plunder of Land
While it was corruption and rape that brought the middle class onto the streets in 2011 and 2012, it was land that caused unrest throughout the 2000s when it became the country’s most sought after and controversial commodity. Land for real estate development and for mining was the biggest creator of greed, corruption, crime and wealth. Newly rich politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats cheated, bullied and swindled individuals and society of the country’s riches, grabbing natural resources at low prices and reaping rich rewards.