By Yanis Iqbal
The political upheaval which India is currently experiencing is one among the many quasi-anarchist movements like the Occupy Wall Street movement, Alter-globalization movement, Arab Spring and the recent Algerian Hirak movement. The historical resemblance of the Anti-CAA protests to these quasi-anarchist movements is derived from the “horizontal internal structure” of this resistance movement. The Anti-CAA movement which Indians are currently witnessing is leaderless and its soul-conquering significance stems from the purism of the true idea of a people’s movement. Its soul has still not been colonized by the electoral opportunism of political parties. These characteristics evince that anarchism has been diffused throughout the political atmosphere of the resistance movement.
To show how the Anti-CAA protests confirm to the ideals of anarchism, we have to prove that these protests are firmly moored to the fundamental theories of participatory action and freedom. The protests are participatory in nature due to the absence of any top-down bureaucratic machinery. These protests can best be described as the sudden efflorescence of a critical skepticism about the dominant power structures. This critical skepticism has accordingly given rise to the central theme of anarchism which is freedom. The freedom which has been generated is similar to the one which George Orwell experienced when he was in Catalonia during the Anarchist revolution. He had remarked how he had “breathed the air of equality”. The freshness of the freedom produced due to the Anti-CAA protests is mainly due to the fact that it has been given birth by a deep sensibility of revolutionary spontaneity. No one told the masses to agitate against the anti-secular legislation but still, the oppressed people of India went through an epiphany which illuminated their consciousness. And these mutinies are truly people-oriented because they are rooted in what Noam Chomsky calls the “deeply felt needs and ideals of dispossessed masses”. Due to this element of spontaneity, we can find some convergences between the Spanish revolution of 1936 and the ongoing Anti-CAA protests. The essay entitled “Spontaneity in the Spanish Revolution” by Enric Mompo offers an insightful analysis about the radically spontaneous structuration of the Spanish Revolution and one can apprehend the affinity between the two historically different movements by reading this essay.
The Anti-CAA protests have also synergized two different conceptions to produce a coherent ideology of liberation. These two concepts are Anarchism and subaltern counterpublics. Subaltern counterpublics is a concept developed by Nancy Fraser which describes the discursive platforms established by subaltern classes where they can engage in a process of identitarian self-exploration and constructively counter the majoritarian instincts of the hegemonic groups. In India, subaltern counterpublics have been sublated in the larger architecture of anarchism. Because of this synthesis, a process of humanization based on the idea of a free individual has been initiated. In this process of humanization, Indians have coalesced their different identities into a common conception of a free individual. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed that the fundamental fabric of human nature is freedom, he expressed this conception of a free individual. Similarly, when Mikhail Bakunin asserted that he was a fanatic lover of liberty, he too posited freedom as the essence of human nature.
Anarchism has been defined as “stateless socialism” which wants to obliterate the centralized locus of power which is the state. So, anarchism is essentially a fight against the state, aiming to comprehensively erase it. But the Anti-CAA protests don’t embody this desire to destroy the state apparatus. Their main motive is to force the government to rescind NRC, CAA and NPR. Even without the impulse to annihilate the state, these protests want to establish a radical democracy which shares some features of anarchism. It is an attempt to move towards participatory democracy where there is considerable scope for self-administration and self-organization. The fight to achieve this type of democracy is highly strenuous due to the polar pull between bourgeoisie representative democracy and a radical participatory democracy. If anarchist ideas can be spread, then we can make some progress towards what Ralf Burnicki calls, “anarchist consensual democracy”. The aim of this form of self-administration is to end the tyranny of majoritarian decisions. All this may seem as unrealizable and organizationally unfeasible. But, a glimmer of hope is presented by what Andreas Wittel says about the renewed possibilities of reviving anarchism. He says that the massive global technological and digital changes can potentiate large-scale anarchist measures. Moreover, the intensified neoliberal campaign and the rise of right-wing populism can also help the people to realize the significance of anarchism. When neoliberal capitalism and corporate globalization further reduces the worth of human to a mere appurtenance of the machines, the people will surely rise in revolt and end the brittle numbness of capitalist demagoguery. For now, it can be said with a certain certitude that the Indian people have refused to be beaten with the “people’s stick”.
About the Author:
Yanis Iqbal is a freelance writer based in Aligarh and writes analytical pieces on current affairs.