India’s Tea Party Time by Dilip Bobb

The Gandhi topis, the non-violent crowds, the banners and other symbols of protest, including tonsuring of heads, meditating mendicants, patriotic songs and fervour and, of course, the fasts, are seen as a throwback to the days when the Mahatma exerted enormous and unquestioned moral authority over the ruling government, political leaders and the populace. Most references to the “revolution” started by Anna Hazare and his group, now immortalised as Team Anna thanks to inventive headline writers, compare Anna himself and his ever-expanding crusade to Gandhi and his principles of ahimsa and public displays of self-sacrifice. Anna Hazare has that part down pat, but there the resemblance really does end. Gandhi’s crusade was to do with the eviction of a colonial power and, once that was achieved, the focus shifted to a crusade against communalism, casteism and other social and cultural faultlines in Indian society. Of course, India was too poor and economically backward for corruption to be an issue, but he was perceptive enough to understand that India’s core problems were to do with religion and caste and that rural India was the key focus area to solve those contentious issues.

Hazare and his band are taking on their own government, a battle joined from the capital city, and the ever-widening support they are attracting is from so-called “civil society” which they say they represent. It’s largely an urban phenomenon, populated by the middle class which finds real resonance with the call for a corruption-free world. There is no dearth of idealism, no shortage of catchy slogans, no barriers to dreaming of a supercop that will ensure the Rajas and Kalmadis of this world are prevented from putting their hands in the public till. No one can argue with their message, even if the methods may be debatable, but there is a hidden danger: a challenge to the established instruments and norms of parliamentary democracy. The problem is that those who sit in Parliament, the politicians, are perhaps enjoying their lowest level of credibility and the issue itself, corruption, has aroused such powerful anti-establishment sentiments that the Hazare movement has taken on a life of its own with very little knowledge of where it will end. History, and events, have been hijacked by a portly little man in khadi and headgear we had forgotten about.

Today’s events, in effect, draw great comparison with another movement thousands of miles away. American politics has been hijacked by the so-called Tea Party, and their aims and objectives are very similar to those of Team Anna. The Tea Party movement is an American populist political movement that is bypassing traditional political channels to influence change, attack the Obama administration’s fiscal policies and, in their words, return America to the original interpretation of the US constitution. Like Team Anna, the Tea Party is composed of a loose affiliation of national and local groups that determine their own platforms and agendas. Its activity is described as “Astroturfing”, a form of advocacy in support of a political agendadesigned to give the appearance of a “grassroots” movement. The name stems from the famous Boston Tea Party, a protest by colonists objecting to British tax on tea, an act that triggered the American revolution in 1773.

Like the Anna movement, it is largely backed by conservatives, mainly the middle class, who see themselves as patriots standing shoulder to shoulder defending the constitution. Their main slogan is: “One man with courage is a majority.” Sounds familiar? They also have taken American politics by storm, despite nothaving a central leadership, just a man, John Paul, described by some as the “intellectual godfather” of the movement. The candidates they support are emerging as serious contenders to become the next president of the US in a situation where, like in India, the popularity polls for the head of the state are at their lowest ever.

Here are more commonalities. What unites Tea Party supporters is less their geography or demography than their policy views: a deep-rooted conviction that the government has gotten too big and too powerful and a fear, largely irrational, that the nation faces great peril. Here’s more. During the last election in America (2008), the Tea Party didn’t exist. Now, it has energised the most active segment of the electorate, one that has created a new constellation of political heroes. Indeed, in America, political analysts refer to the Tea Party movement as less a party than anti-party, with a generally dyspeptic view of organised political power.

As Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose book about the movement, The Whites of Their Eyes, is scheduled to be published in October, says: “It’s a party opposed to the idea of parties.” The Tea Party reminds her more of a religious revival than a political movement, and the number of saffron-robed saints and sants and gurus who are congregating at the Anna camp smacks of a similar convergence. In polls and other indicators, Tea Party supporters have been profiled as a deeply engaged, highly sceptical group of people who do not identify with any political party, though they mostly support right-wing Republican candidates. Their main concerns are economic — taxes, national debt, government spending — but they are essentially a group of mavericks (Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin) looking to topple the established political order. Their main battle cry is less government, but what really resonates with the public is their conspiracy theories and the picture they paint of a dystopian future for America.

Like Tea Party adherents, in Anna’s case, what has brought the urban middle-class out on the streets is their supposed sense of entitlement in governance. They feel they have earned the fruits of growth, not purloined it, and that allows them to stake their claim to a more transparent form of governance and greater vigilance on its actions. The demand for a more accountable government is in consonance with a new sense of participatory citizenship. The new urban Indian citizen now wants accountability for the tax that they pay to the government, and thatisthe mood that Anna has tapped into. Yet, if eradication of corruption is predicated on a supposed change in governance, even government, civil society in India must equally take into account the other issues that challenge the idea of India, casteism, communalism, violence against women, to name a few. In America, the Tea Party is seen as blinkered and narrow-visioned. How different is Team Anna?