Shikha Mukerjee | Why Calling Rahul Gandhi ‘Anarchist’ Does Not Work
Singling out Rahul Gandhi as an anarchist is a mystery unless the BJP was rattled by his act of accompanying Sahil Lochab to first the Mandir Marg police station and then the Sansad Marg police station. If scaremongering is what the BJP intended by pasting the anarchist label on the LoP, it backfired
Different rules for different sets of people is chaotic governance, a violation of the fundamental principle of equality and the rule of law. As a former minister, a senior functionary of the BJP and a national spokesperson of the party, Ravi Shankar Prasad cannot be excused for getting over-excited and accusing the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, of doing “politics of anarchy.” By using a verb like do/does/doing Ravi Shankar Prasad implied that all that the LoP does is pursue the politics of anarchy.
Had Mr Prasad paused to consider what he was about to say before he actually spat out the accusation, he may have reconsidered the use of a descriptor like anarchy. First, the politics of anarchy is not a crime. The Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, by his own measure believed the ideal society was “enlightened anarchy.” His disciple, Vinoba Bhave, acquired a label, “ahimsa anarchist”. Neither of these two leaders is despised or trashed by the BJP; they are not the same as the party’s favourite punching bag, Jawaharlal Nehru. Indeed, Bhagat Singh, a strange icon for the BJP, found anarchism’s “idea of universal brotherhood,” to “have the same meaning” as “the Sanskrit sentence vasudev kutumbakam”.
Singling out Rahul Gandhi as an anarchist is a mystery unless the BJP was rattled by his act of accompanying Sahil Lochab to first the Mandir Marg police station and then the Sansad Marg police station. If scaremongering is what the BJP intended by pasting the anarchist label on the LoP, it backfired.
Indians spend money to watch online and in cinema halls films like the Gangs of Wasseypur, Badlapur and the classic Omkara; they even watch a film like Kathal (Jackfruit) where a local political honcho has the police guarding his favourite jackfruit tree from thieves. Like it or not, the nexus between crime, police and politics is a favourite as are themes of the heroic young man overturning the system like Rang De Basanti, Jawan and Sarkar with Tamil Nadu chief minister Chandrashekhar Vijay in the lead as a vigilante against voter fraud.
No one has accused the Bhim Army’s Bharat Ekta Mission functionaries “of cheap, attention-seeking politics that Rahul Gandhi displayed today outside the Sansad Marg police station” as J.P. Nadda did when they met the senior superintendent of police Ankita Sharma, Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, in her office where the district magistrate, Avinash Rai, was also present to submit a complaint that a district secretary of the Azad Samaj Party, Kanshiram Sonam, was locked up and beaten inside the police station, while Aman, the Bhim Army functionary, was falsely accused in a police case.
Far from calling out those who padlocked the gates of a police station as two brothers , Dilip and Sudip Ram, both junior level local BJP leaders did in Entally constituency in Central Kolkata, on the night of August 15, for doing “politics of anarchy,” the West Bengal BJP has merely, temporarily, suspended them from membership.
If Rahul Gandhi “does politics of anarchy,” for police station hopping followed by a seven-hour dharna to get a FIR registered against the police for pellet gun injuries on Sahil Lochab, a protester at the July 20 protest in New Delhi, so do others. The BJP ought to have remembered this when sending Mr Prasad out to vent against Rahul Gandhi.
As a matter of fact, the BJP ought to have thought of what anarchism is and why Rahul Gandhi cannot be called an anarchist, strictly speaking. The responsibility of using labels with some degree of accuracy is not difficult, especially not for a party that talks almost nonstop about its ideology vis-à-vis the lack of ideological moorings of its political opponents, most of whom the BJP leadership, including Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, loudly proclaim are on the make, that is, faithful to the cause of enriching their families at the expense of the poor and the public at large, meaning parivaarvadis.
Anarchists are not bomb throwers only; they are not terrorists as such; they do think that freedom and equality can only be attained through all forms of resistance and struggle against coercive institutions, including (and the list is long) states, armies, slavery, the wage system, the landlord system, prisons, monopoly capitalism, oligopoly capitalism, state capitalism, bureaucracy, meritocarcy, theocracy, governement, patriarchy, matriarchy, oligarchy, protection rackets, intimidation by gangsters and more. In other words, anarchism opposes government in all its forms, meaning the rigid prescriptions that are the rules of governance.
By insisting, like many others before him and after him, that the Delhi Police register an FIR based on Mr Lochab’s complaints, Rahul Gandhi, contrary to doing the politics of anarchy, was as a matter of fact tyring to ensure the police followed the law, that is sections 181, 181 (1) and 185 of the Bharatiyta Nyay Sanhita, that deal with voluntarily causing hurt or grievous harm by using dangerous weapons and committing acts that seriously endanger someone’s life.
To be accurate is a necessity in politics, because fixing the wrong label or making false accusations or merely indulging in rhetorical flourishes have consequences, when the accumulated political capital seems to be running out rapidly. The Cockroach Janta Party’s successful movement to remove the Union education minister and its subsequent School Thik Karo programme in all states is proof that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are seriously annoyed with the way government works in India, at the Centre and in the states.
No one wanting to make the government work as it should have done over the past almost-80 years in getting the basics right, like having world class infrastructure in all government schools with world class teachers can be called names like ‘Deshdrohi’, ‘Dimagi Naxal’, ‘Tukde Tuke gang’, ‘Urban Naxals’ or whatever new label the BJP in its rage invents. All that the Gen Z to Gen Alpha protesters are doing is simply telling the government that building world class Metro railway lines, bullet trains, highways, ports, airports and even rebuilding New Delhi to the BJP’s design, is no reason not to fix schools and competitive public examination systems.
Fanciful distortions of good intentions is a serious malaise of the insecure or the arrogant. All governments, be they run by the BJP or any other party needs to acknowledge that years of doing little to raise standards in education, health, housing, water supply, electricity supply is no longer tolerable. Nor is jobless growth, unemployment, under employment, terrible conditions of work, low wages and less opportunities. Nor is the extremes of inequality that keep widening the gap between the crazy rich and the crazy poor, like the woman who lives on Kolkata’s Park Street.