HAZARE’S MOVEMENT AND THE WORKING CLASS - Arup Baisya
Posted by Labels: Hazare's movement, working class
All the socio-political events can be viewed from the perspective of the ruled and the ruler. Beyond these two diametrically opposite perspectives, there may be a lot many observational interpretations which are the mix of these two in different proportion. The outburst of the professional intellectuals and the middle class people’s pent up anger in the event of Anna Hazare’s hunger fast and the subsequent turn of the situation towards building up a sustained movement is also not an exceptional event that cannot be viewed from divergent angle. The type of ‘civil society’ which develops within the womb of capitalism and acts beyond the institution of state as a buffer for the workers to take relief, cannot be expected in a country like India with a semi-colonial status. The subtle and complex dimension of colonial hegemony amounts to reorganization of civil society of the colonized through a diffusion of cultural-ideological construction and moral regulation. The ‘civil society’ here has an intimate relationship and private aspects of life as patriarchy, skewed views on motherhood, sex and sexuality and inherits colonial property laws and regulations etc. The people or the class of people who appears to constitute the civil society are in anyway the integral part of the state, though they are losing faith on the efficacy of the existing state due to its messy, disorderly and rapidly discrediting nature. So the terminology of ‘civil society’ is misconstrued here. It can not also be explained in the Gramscian or Hegelian sense of the term. Rather we can say that a conglomeration of people who came out to the street in large number belong to the middle class, professional intellectuals, students-youth and section of the elites. Even a section of the corporate leaders honchos who are scared of the falling legitimacy of the existing institutions of the state that may lead to a collapse, are also not averse to an anti-graft act for the limited reform of the system, citing Narendra Modi’s Gujrat and Nitish Kumar’s Bihar as the role-model. The “fourth estate” which has its origin in a revolutionary context jumped into the fray to spread venom against the crass political class not withstanding their desire to increase TRP-rating and not to jeopardize their booming paid-news income. All these were done from a sense of dejection and self-delusion about the efficacy of the neo-liberal market and state system and their shattered dream of residing in a neo-liberal haven. The inequality and the expropriation of the vast masses of people are not treated as the root cause to sustain a system that holds corruption in its womb. The symbols of all kinds of obscurantism, feudal values were emanating from the rostrum where Anna Hazare and his core group members were on hunger fast. So in the wake of loosing legitimacy of all the institutions of the state, and taking the cultural-ideological moorings of the leaders centering whom the masses were coming out to the streets, one may conclude that this phenomenon may favour the ruling class to maintain status-quo of the system eradicating the threat of radical change for popular control of the state structure.
