Anna and Me

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Imagine walking in the chappels of a 74 year old whose legacy includes a lifetime of speaking out and acting against corruption. No immediate family, a life of activism and in the last phase of life, a fast which might be unto death as a chosen path. Not all of us would be inclined to make that choice as a natural corollary to the life we have lived.  For a person of Anna’s ilk however, a possible fast unto death is not just some spur of the moment dharna but rather, his dharma. It’s what he thinks matters. This is not a man who fasts for a call to arms, or whose language smacks of sloganeering. It’s a man who wants a people’s voice to be included. And in the process he casts what matters within the prose of peace.  So what’s he got to do with me?

Last evening I ran into a small cluster women at a homeopath’s clinic. One of them eagerly recognised me and to my surprise recalled us having met in the 80’s, the days of a women’s movement. Given the prevailing “Anna” campaign, she along with her friends, managed a brief exchange of views over our shared experienced with law reform in context of that movement. Over the years we had all had some experience of that process at one time or another– be it child sexual abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual harassment and more.  And we recalled the frustration of that role. Approaching a government office, a law commission, ministries, bureaucrats or local authorities, we went armed with the experience, skill, knowledge, and reality of working with women’s social context. Our goal was to make visible the inequality and injustice of that context and to encourage an appropriate response.  Many of us believed in the imperative of law reform even though we hadn’t quite mastered the complex nuances of that tool.  Differences in approach and ideology aside, each endeavour would terminate at the threshold of government processes, which quickly abandoned the skill and innovation of a vast movement. Issues were swallowed into the uninitiated and exclusive black hole of a legislative will only to morph into a bill and language that lost sight of a vision, the skill and experience of a movement and the goal of enabling social change. That exclusion has contributed in part to a woefully incomplete agenda on women’s rights today.  

Whatever we may think of the Anna chapter, even those critics who brand the campaign as non-inclusive, it is an agenda that has pushed the boundaries for inclusiveness of civil society- it’s made people visible. It’s dared Government to remember that; to value the lived experience of people with systemic corruption and of those who work to transform that experience. True, civil society is shaped by a broad spectrum of experience and yes, inexperience- just like our MP’s and not everyone does their homework. But those who do lend credibility to the skill and experience of their vocation. That’s not something to be wished away, tainted by invoking a breach of parliamentary privilege, subverted by the slippery slope of legalise, or strategized into yet another incomplete agenda. Rather, it warrants respect. Respect which acknowledges that life experience, that which is the cornerstone of every legitimate cause, is what lends substance to a credible law or its reform. Indeed in the march towards inclusive reform, civil society must also come to emulate that value. Trapped within the mirage of personalities, we often become prey to our own territorial instincts leading to its own brand of exclusion and at times self-destruction. Often in the midst of hurtling towards a “victory” we’ve forgotten to contemplate our defeats. 

Which leads me to the matter of “peace”. 30 years ago, this cluster of women and myself were aligned with a wonderfully dynamic movement of women which wanted to stand up and be counted. Those were energetic days characterised more by zeal than peace. We burnt effigies, marched, shouted slogans and sometimes deceived ourselves into believing that some of our self-proclaimed anger was a transformational tool. It wasn’t. It hasn’t been. Anger was the cumulative outcome of frustration, denial, exclusion and invisibility. But it didn’t give us the results we sought. Perhaps a little more living, maturity, the wisdom of middle age and observing the perseverance of this 74 year old man, nudges us towards introspection on that score. It’s not enough to look at what we did or didn’t’ do or might have done or that WE did it. It’s about who we became in the process of doing so. That’s what this 74 year old Gandhian has meant to me.  A sea of cynics who cast him as a World Bank “prop” or “foolish” can't sway me to miss the pearls that have often eluded us in the past.  Inclusiveness and peace– nothing polished, just simply profound.
©Naina Kapur, 2011