Arc of Anarchy

Two years ago, the 100th anniversary of an unhappy episode in India’s freedom struggle against colonial rule passed away and was barely noticed. One could say that 100 years is a long time for people and even nations to forget their past. But that is hardly true for India. In 1957 there were events to remember the revolt of 1857; in 2022, the 75th anniversary of Independence, and more. There is, however, something about the events of February 4, 1922 at Chauri Chaura that few want to remember. The event is consid­ered an aberration or even a blot in the nationalist narrative of a peaceful, non-violent struggle by which freedom was attained.

As every schoolchild knows, 22 policemen were killed by an enraged mob during a protest at Chauri Chaura that day. A hand­ful of policemen assaulted some stragglers in a protest procession. The crowd then turned back and the scared policemen locked themselves in the police station only to be killed by the irate mob. Within days, Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement. The resolutions of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress passed on February 11 and 12 reflected Gandhi’s senti­ments. There were sections in Congress that did not agree with him and there was even consternation that a mass movement that had the British on the hook was called off because of “one stray incident of violence”.

Gandhi, however, had different thoughts. Writing in Young India on February 16, he said: “The tragedy of Chauri Chaura is really the index finger. It shows the way India may easily go if dras­tic precautions be not taken.” These are memorable words that show Gandhi’s acute awareness of the dangers posed by anarchy. He went on to say: “If we are not to evolve violence out of non-violence, it is quite clear that we must hastily retrace our steps and re-establish an atmosphere of peace, re-arrange our programme and not think of starting mass civil disobedience until we are sure of peace being retained in spite of mass civil disobedience being started and in spite of Government provocation. We must be sure of unauthorized portions not starting mass civil disobedience.”

The incident was to haunt Gandhi for long. Eight years later, in early January of 1930, when it was clear that India was ready for the next round of agitation against the British, Gandhi was not sure. In his ‘notes’ published in Young India on January 9 that year, he said: “I must confess that I do not see the atmosphere for it (civil disobedience) today. I want to discover a formula where­by sufficient provision can be made for avoiding suspension by reason of Chauri Chaura.”

He never lowered his guard and right until the end he was care­ful in evaluating every situation before he undertook any political action. Even at that stage, he was among a handful of national lead­ers who were aware of the dangers of anarchy in a continent-sized country, one that had never experienced individual freedoms at the mass level.

Why remember Chauri Chaura and the dangers of anarchy 102 years on? The British historian EH Carr once described history as “a continuing and unending dialogue between the present and the past with the historian serving as guide and interpreter.” It is tempting to view the contemporary ferment in Indian politics from the perspective of what transpired 100 years ago. That time is not so remote that its link with the present is tenuous to the point that it is best left to history books. Chauri Chaura is almost a living reminder of what happens when political controls are weak, or more importantly, when political goals are short-sighted to the point that national interests are given a go-by.

These are not empty fears and three recent examples are worth pointing out.

In the last four years, ‘farmers’ from Punjab and parts of Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh have become ‘autonomous’ actors in Indian politics. They are unmoored from any kind of party politics even as all major parties have tried to further their goals by using these ‘farmers’. This has gone nowhere and one can safely say that no one knows how this group will behave. If anything, this group has become even more inflamed after its key de­mand—the rollback of three farm laws—was met in November 2021. Now demands are manufactured at will and everything boils down to getting bounties from New Delhi. Money can be demanded for not burning stubble, a demand that a majority of farmers across the length and breadth of India have never made. This is as close as one can get to anarchic behaviour.

The second example is that of caste mobilisation as a counter to ‘religious mobilisation’ by the ruling party. Assorted demands, ranging from a caste ‘census’ to raising the level of affirmative action are thought of as strategies to pin the ruling party on the mat.

The third example is that of channelling disaffection among the ‘educated youth’ who want high-quality and paying jobs but who, from an economic perspective, lack the skills necessary to engage in a modern, knowledge and skills-intensive economy.

It will be a mistake to think of these examples as routine politi­cal mobilisation, the stuff of party politics in India. These are very short-sighted measures that may well lead to politically useful results for some political participants but will end up damaging India’s economy beyond recognition. It is one thing to offer tem­porary subsidies—to the poor or needy or to encourage a particu­lar sector—but something entirely different to create permanent rents in an economy that is yet to take off fully. The strategy of creating social strife and then using economic means to build permanent voting blocs is an illusion: all it will do is transfer an­archy from the social plane to the economic one. Gandhi, who was horrified at the thought of social strife, would be aghast the contemporary toying with anarchy to gain political power.

PERHAPS IT IS UNFAIR TO BLAME GANDHI for inventing the formula for disorder, the idea of Satya­graha for anything one wants. The truth is that if one probes the depths of India’s past, one can see the rise and fall of empires with regularity. This process continued until the end of classical India in 711CE with the Umayyad conquest of Sindh at the hands of Muhammad ibn al-Qasim. Perhaps the final end of Hindu India can be dated to 1565CE in the wake of the Battle of Talikota that finished off Vijayanagara. These dates are mere indicators of a bigger problem, a conceptual hole as it were. Through the rise and fall of empires, India never fully developed the apparatus to understand anarchy that inevitably followed the end of a political order. To be sure, there was the concept of the Law of the Fish—matsyanyaya—as outlined in the Arthashastra: “[F]or in the absence of the dispenser of punishment, a weak man is devoured by a stronger man.” But this description remained stuck at the level of mere administration, never acquiring the po­tency of Thomas Hobbes’ State of Nature, let alone the conceptual devices that were forged in the 20th century in the wake of war and destruction in Europe: the friend and enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt; the distinction that FA Hayek made between nomos and thesis, and the contrast between civil association and enter­prise association of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. All these ideas—very different in their disciplinary moorings— had one overarching goal: how to keep anarchy from creeping into society and overwhelming order. India never escaped the yoke of imperialism and colonialism for more than a millennium and lacked the wherewithal to think even remotely along these lines. And then, all of a sudden, between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th, it experienced a rapid progression of individual and political rights, albeit under impe­rial control. The process was profoundly dislocating.

When Gandhi published Hind Swaraj in 1910—a text that out­lined the idea of passive resistance—the British Empire in India seemed unshakeable. By the time Chauri Chaura came to pass, a span of 12 years had passed. During this period, the Champaran Satyagraha (1917) was launched and the next year the Kheda Saty­agraha was started. These were campaigns with limited goals that were tightly controlled by Gandhi himself. The Non-Cooperation Movement was the first largescale ‘political experiment’ in India, one where Gandhi could not be present everywhere. All it took was one wayward group of people to waste his best-laid plans. Marxist historians have criticised him ever since: Gandhi was scared of radicalism and did not want the national movement to head in a radical direction. A more reasonable conclusion is that Gandhi finally realised the dangers of anarchy and chaos, two concepts that never percolated to the individual level in India, a place where caste, community and government controlled in­dividual behaviour. The first brush with ‘freedom’ turned out to be unpleasant. As shown earlier, with each passing phase of the national movement—in 1932 and in 1942—he took a series of measures to keep anarchy at bay, with limited success, of course.

Gandhi, however, was a supreme leader—one who was de­vout and one who championed the cause of his incipient nation above all—and it took all his persuasion and tactical acumen to prevent another Chauri Chaura. He kept the national movement channelled to positive ends but one can say, with the passage of a century, he barely managed to do so. At the same time, Gandhi was a mass leader and not a thinker who could forge the concep­tual apparatus to understand the nature of anarchy in India. After Independence, India’s intellectuals had no appetite for crafting a political theory to examine this danger: their ideas were largely borrowed from the West and ‘applied’ to the Indian context. As experience shows, this leads nowhere.

After Independence there were no more movements. How was order maintained? On one side, politics was kept on a safe shore. During the Nehru years, it was developmentalism and nation-building that kept anarchy at bay. But there was something else at work as well: India retained the administrative apparatus of the Raj, one that leftists have never ceased to call the “repressive apparatus of the state”. Between these two walls—safe politics and a well-honed administrative machine—India remained in order even as a large number of countries that had gained freedom from colonial rule were consumed by civil war, anarchy and coups. There were other countries that retained democracy and order but by any yardstick—size, population and diversity—India was and remains unique and exceptional. But it took extraordinary laws—such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) with its various amendments, the retention of colonial-era crimes such as sedition—to keep things in check right until the present day. Does this mean that freedom and democracy are an illusion in India as leftists claim? Not one bit: the repertoire of repression and surveillance is, if anything, much deeper, much stronger if somewhat invisible in countries that lecture India on democracy.

So where does the danger of anarchy spring from in India? It springs from the changing nature of its politics—one that, with its rapid fluctuations in tone and content since the late 1980s, has been unable to find an appropriate equilibrium. But at its root, the problem is the lack of appreciation of the dangers of anarchy and the absence of any local intellectual concepts that explain those risks. It is assumed by all political participants that one can ‘shake things up’ and then once political gains have been made, matters can be calmed down and, if political persuasion does not work, the coercive apparatus can settle things. It bespeaks an in­tellectual hole of sorts, one where anarchy is not even considered a problem. It is dangerous to have ‘confidence’ of this kind.

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