Anna’s fast: Too legitimate to quit

At this stage of Anna Hazare’s fast it is unnecessary to discuss the monumental folly of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in first arresting him and then abjectly surrendering to him. To draw attention to his and Team Anna’s manifest obduracy would be equally pointless. Their demand that only their heavily flawed Jan Lokpal Bill should be passed by a certain date, and no other version of it, is totally unacceptable.

How the current confrontation between him — which has touched a raw nerve in the country and has drawn huge support from the urban youth — and the government would end is immaterial to my present theme: Whether fasts, finite or indefinite, currently denounced as “blackmail” or attempts to “dictate” to elected institutions, have any legitimacy.
Incidentally, such fasts, whether for political or social ends, aren’t and have never been absent from the Indian scene even after the tryst with destiny. To give only one of countless examples, Potti Sriramlu starved himself to death in 1953. This virtually forced Jawaharlal Nehru to separate Andhra from what was then the multi-lingual state of Madras and is now Tamil Nadu. Fifty-six years later, the fast of the Telangana Rashtriya Samithi leader, K. Chandrashekhar Rao, drove Union home minister P. Chidambaram to announce that the “process for the formation of Telangana state had been set into motion,” only to backtrack later. In between, before “Punjabi suba” was conceded in 1966, Darshan Singh Pheruman had fasted for precisely this cause. The then authorities in Amritsar had handled both the fast and its explosive aftermath with exemplary skill.
Medha Patkar has been fasting all the time of which little notice is taken because her demands are usually local and she fasts far away from the national capital. Shortly after Mr Hazare’s first fast in April, an obscure swami in Uttrakhand gave up his life while fasting against illegal mining; New Delhi did not bat an eyelid.
In distant Manipur, a brave lady, Irom Sharmila, has been on hunger strike for 10 long years, demanding a repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, and nobody is bothered because the police periodically force-feeds her.
The difference this time around is that “Fast Anna” has created an enormous storm across the country against rampant corruption. “Generation Y” is up in arms. The Lokpal Bill doesn’t matter; Anna’s personality does not matter. The man and the moment seem to be made for each other, and the bumbling government knows not what to do.
Despite this backdrop, I have always believed that in the public life of independent and democratic India, there is no place for fasts for political ends even if there is no law banning them. Since everyone embarking on a fast harks back to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi — Mr Hazare’s supporters have gone overboard and are calling him “second Gandhi” — the argument of those of us opposed to fasts used to be that the Father of the Nation had used this weapon against an alien and colonial government. There is no justification for wielding it against a duly elected and easily replaceable government. Deeper thought and some research reveal, however, that the reality is different.
According to Gopal Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma and a former civil servant, diplomat and governor, his grandfather fasted on 30 different occasions. One-third of these were directed against no one other than himself. These were occasions for “atonement” or “self-purification”. Another one-third of the fasts were meant to influence the attitudes of Indian society or parts of it.
For instance, in 1918, the Mahatma went on an indefinite fast because mill-owners of Ahmedabad had declared a lockout against the striking mill workers. Within 48 hours of the beginning of the fast, the mill-owners scurried to lift the lockout.
A profoundly important fast in this genre he undertook in 1930 was to persuade the Harijans (as the Dalits were then called), led by Bhimrao Ambedkar, to give up separate electorates for them offered by the British. The Mahatma argued that this would vivisect each of the half-a-million villages of the country. Ambedkar agreed and settled for reservation of seats in legislatures.
The remaining one-third was meant for “pressurising” (some said “coercing”) the British government. These succeeded some time and didn’t at other times. During the last of these in 1943, at the Agha Khan Palace in Poona where he was detained, the Viceroy had made arrangements for Mahatma’s funeral. But he lived to perform a miracle by his fast in Calcutta in the aftermath of the Great Calcutta Killings. In three days flat, the one-man army of Gandhi put an end to the mad frenzy and mindless slaughter.
What knocks the bottom off my case to differentiate between an alien and a national government is that the first Indian to go on a fast in the heart of Delhi against the government of Nehru and Sardar Patel was none other than the Mahatma. His two lieutenants had refused to transfer to Pakistan `55 crore this country was bound to give it under the Partition Agreement. Their argument that the money couldn’t be handed over while the first Kashmir War (1947-48) was on. On the second day of the fast, the cash was sent to Karachi post-haste.