“THE MIND ALWAYS HAS THE POWER to outstrip injustice and say I've had enough", wrote Rosa Luxemburg, reminding us that revolutionary moments always begin inside ourselves. World history is of course the history of revolutions of the mind, whether they result in Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the American segregated bus, or Anna Hazare, now in day nine of his fast to protest against corruption in India.
Rosa Luxemburg is an important thinker for our revolutionary times. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, a 600 page collection of intimate correspondence to friends, lovers and colleagues, has just been published this year and I wholly recommend them. They are passionate calls by a utopian revolutionary, with her feet firmly planted in the ground of clear thinking. What is exciting about her work is the way she weaves political, the psychological dynamics and our personal actions on the path of political transformations. Her writings on how the oppressed, become the oppressors are profoundly important for our times. Exploring the nature of democracy, she writes "With rampant inequality democracy is a hoax". I’m wondering if she were alive today, what she would make of the anti-corruption movement that is spreading across India, what her extraordinary thinking ability might bring to the discussions.
Any evolutionary imperative, in India or otherwise, begins with human struggle. A revolutionary moment, whether to stand up simply for our individual human rights, or indeed for those of others, means to take a risk. The ultimate risk is what degree of uncertainty we can tolerate inside ourselves in the ebb and flow of change. Luxemburg wrote to her lover, “One must constantly carry out anew an inner review, or inventory of oneself, in order to re-establish order and harmony.” But it may be a call to ask ourselves in this inventory, what sort of abuses are we accepting as okay, simply because they are common and familiar.
The Gandhian traditions of this non-violent protest, exemplified by Hazare and his followers, are grounded in the belief that when you are governed by unjust laws it is your duty to obey higher laws of our common humanity. Anna Hazare says that he is willing to die for the cause of a corrupt-free India. Many are concerned that if he dies, India will have a blood-bath of some sort, although there are many claims that due to the suicide laws here, he will be force-fed, something even the British didn’t do to Gandhi.
A revolution is the idea that ‘freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Many of the people of India are demanding a new birth, one they can mark on the Indian calendar, a second Independence Day of the country, only from their own, rather than British oppression. This spontaneous agitation, which has been gathering increasing momentum over the last few months, demands greater participation, equality, as well as respect. Respect, Richard Sennett, insists is that compassion for others is insufficient, without some kind of action or deeds that embody the performance of actually changing things. Respect for the right to peaceful protest, was precisely what Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption movement was asked for. Initially they were refused.
The government responded to the beginning of Hazare’s fast, quoting various bureaucratic reasoning, by imprisoning this humble elderly man. The opposition party, the BJP, shared their outrage at the restrictions on public protests, saying they were unheard of even during the period of British rule and demanded "bold decisions" to tackle corruption. Hazare, in a creative act of leadership, when given the right to leave the prison, flummoxed the leadership by refusing to leave until convinced that his protest at Ramlila Park, Delhi, could peacefully go ahead. He held them to ransom by their own bureaucratic musings. With the appeal of a digitally-recorded motorbike handbook, the political leadership of the country seems unable to go beyond a rhetorical of the marketplace, as though appealing to citizens as distant objects rather than the human beings they are. Manmohan Singh, was quoted as saying “All concerned individuals should convey their concern on the (Lokpal) bill to their representatives in Parliament and to standing committee.” It sounded rather like the automated messages from those annoying call-centre in Bangalore.
A further source of leadership instability in India, are the rumours that the empress, Sonia Gandhi is having treatment for cancer in the U.S. One must ask whether the political power has the strength to weather more storms, should she in fact be seriously ill. Singh looks dejected. It’s painful watching him weather the onslaught of attacks by the opposition in parliamentary debates that resemble a free-for-all in an English boarding school. Leadership, for which there is of course no agreed definition, and for which one’s own values are deeply embedded in our preferred construction, has to at least involve two things, the ability to: firstly, to build the architecture of democracy, community and secondly, to energise that community in a way that motivates, is reasonably predictable and contains anxiety. There may be a developing architecture of democracy in India on the outside, but this must go hand in hand with some degree of trust in both the ability and the true intentions of the governing team.
I find it difficult not to see two India’s; the first is the India experience through the eyes of those of us who live here and secondly, the India through the many of the writings of the NRI lense abroad. The lived experience of the effect of corruption, the real human abuses, the denials of a right to human dignity are wearing on even the most robust people. For many, the dissonant effect is to simply put one’s head down, pay a bribe, turn a blind eye and get on with one’s life, flattening one’s energy to a point that the stench of pollution competes with an insidious aroma of depression. But I can’t imagine Jesus, or Gandhi, or Mandela or Luther King, folding their arms and saying, “well, you know, the thing is, there’s nothing you can do, you just have to ignore it.”
The alternative for people living here is to engage actively and refuse any act of oppression however small or great. Rosa Luxemburg, an activist all her life, murdered at the hands of would-be Nazi’s in 1919, was relentless in her passionate fight against injustice or abuse of power. She refused to give up, despite, as she put it, “knowing the gnawing and painful, but creative spirit of social responsibility.” For some Indian’s abroad, I think it may be all too easy and understandable emotionally, to confuse the revolution in one’s own life or in the NRI community as a whole, with revolutionary transformations in India. One does not equal the other. The revolution of the self-made man does not make for community, nor does it necessarily change the lives of the poor.
India may be the 9% poster-child of Asian growth, but that growth is profoundly in the hands of a few and some argue, at the expense of democracy. “Why is every 4th India dying of hunger?” asks the activist Vandana Shiva. “What about the third of Indian children who are categorised as ‘wasted’, who will never grow-up to be physically and mentally healthy?” The biggest wall, she says, that needs to come down is the wall of illusion: the illusion that the more money that moves around, (didn’t we learn our subprime lessons), the better off we all are, in some elusive trickling-down effect. A former physicist, she criticises this illusion for its failure to account for the vector, the direction in which money flows to destroy or build. Campaigning for the rights of farmers, she shares her outrage on many global platforms, of the compulsory purchase of farmers land to build townships in the country. In a recent talk, she described the building of a town outside Delhi, stating that farmers were forced to give up their livelihood and their land, contributing to an ever increasing suicide rate amongst farmers. Their land sold through government and business, finally sold to the developers at a price inflated 200,000%. This sort of profit in the vector did not flow to the farmers, just towards the hands of big business.
No changing Lokpal Bill, however sophisticated, will adequately address these sorts of issues. It will not bring farmers suicide rates into the GDP calculations. That is not to decry the protests in anyway, for all revolutions are momentary movements, important moments, that create unpredictable shifts in consciousness. One must also though, retain as Luxemburg put it, “the freedom to think otherwise”, to think critically beneath the dizzy excitement of the endless coverage of Hazare’s fast, on the Times Now TV channel. At one point, it resembled a fantastic, twenty-four hour long ‘will he die or won’t he’, Bollywood movie, directed by Yash Chopra with a Shahrukh Khan news-anchor. Dare we think, or articulate, or discuss, that laudable as these protests are, we are asking those some people to act entirely against their own interests? They know they can govern with decency, they knew this already.
It’s easy to say don’t bribe the policeman when he asks you for 100 rupees when you fail to stop at a red light. But when you learn that he had to pay a 300,000 rupee bribe to a senior policeman, to get his job as a junior policeman, that his village mother pawned her jewellery to raise this, and he wants to pay her back, we begin to touch merely one layer beneath the surface of the deeper and deeper and deeper rooted nature of corruption in India. Such “Freedom of thought is integral to democracy”, as Luxemburg puts it; no matter what the machinations of the mass-mind are demanding we don’t dare to think at all. Psychoanalysis adds something important here, reminding us that the mass-mind is a place of non-thought, where to think “otherwise”, is to risk affecting the group’s profound source of self-esteem derived essentially from similarity of its members, not diversity of thought or members.
These are revolutionary times that must be understood in the wider global context of citizen agitations around the world for calling for reforms. When we contextualise what is happening here, with important awareness of what is occurring more broadly and how it interlinks with the wider call that capitalism and democracy, hasn’t delivered on all our illusions of what it can deliver, we can be somewhat more measured in our planning and thinking. India is part of a growing global refusal to accept dictatorship, abuse of power apathetic, self-interested leadership, demanding instead, the right to fair and reasonable governance. We are witnessing a lack of trust in government and corporate leadership, with widely held concerns that Roosevelt aired many years ago, that when business and government go to bed together what we are likely to get is fascism.
Of course, there is nothing more degrading or less dignifying, to experience abuse of power in a corrupt society. Democracy, whether on a national or intimate level, entails moments between people, where one “Does not own, control or master the other. It lets the other be,” wrote Luxemburg. Each of us, has to locate within ourselves how we relate to what we believe is fair, or right or just and act accordingly. Every moment of our lives is potentially a democratic moment or one that seeks through some sort of authoritarianism, to deny us our human liberty. I like what India’s spiritual guru, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, reminded me recently, that when you are caught between conflicting imperatives, always choose the one that is in the longer term interests.
Luxemburg wrote, “I am of the opinion that one should, without trying to be too crafty or racking one’s brains too much, simply live the way one feels is right and not always expect to be repaid immediately with cash in hand.” Her friend said of her, “The only point of the cause for her was to increase the human quotient of happiness.” Surely, that is the whole point of these revolutionary times.
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