The Fast and the Spurious

Why fasts like Jagan Reddy’s and Chandrababu Naidu’s fail before they begin

In another country, two men making a competition out of a refusal to eat would be slightly surreal, but here it is the first chapter in the Dummy’s Guide to Become a Politician. The cast of characters in the present drama is Jagan Reddy and N Chandrababu Naidu, both fasting so that Telangana is not carved out of Andhra Pradesh. Both know that there is little hope of success. What is on offer, however, is the opportunity to stay relevant in what remains of Andhra Pradesh. Even though they don’t know it, there is one way they can actually get their impossible demand. For that, morbid as it might sound, they would have to die.

Consider what a political fast is. It is the display of one’s willingness to exterminate one’s self, and the use of the moral force drawn from that to ratchet up public sentiment, and thus blackmail the State or whoever to concede their demands. The most successful fast in post Independence India was also related to Andhra Pradesh. In 1952, when Potti Sriramulu was fasting to demand the separation of Andhra Pradesh from Madras, Jawaharlal Nehru was disdainful. In the words of Ramachandra Guha in his book India After Gandhi: ‘On December 3, Nehru wrote to Rajagopalachari: “Some kind of fast is going on for the Andhra Province and I get frantic telegrams. I am totally unmoved by this and I propose to ignore it completely”.’ Three days after Sriramulu died, Nehru agreed to create the state.

Unlike the present breed, Sriramulu meant it when he undertook a fast unto death. As a Gandhian, he had a history of going on fasts for social issues like the right of Dalits to enter temples. One of the reasons Nehru reacted with such alacrity after Sriramulu’s death was because it provoked widespread violence, which also shows how connected violence is to non-violent movements. Sriramulu’s guru Mahatma Gandhi was nicely placed to do political fasts because it was also a spiritual exercise to him. To use a modern metaphor, it would be akin to a marathon freak running to death until his demands were met. In 1943, when he was 74 years old, Gandhi fasted 21 days. He clearly had no fear of going the limit.

Most fasts by career politicians today don’t work because everyone knows it is melodrama. The Reddy and Naidu fasts fall into this category. But even Anna Hazare, who is a well-intentioned man, was exposed during the Lokpal movement when it came to his willingness to die. Everyone initially thought he was a fast-unto-death kind of person, but then realised that he fell into the indefinite-fast-willing-to-be-called-off category. His last fast was a complete failure because he broke it for the paradoxical reason that his health was deteriorating. It didn’t make sense because the whole point of a fast is for health to deteriorate—in fact, to deteriorate slowly and so badly in full public view that the famished body becomes a symbol of moral spleen. Hazare wasn’t ready to die. If he had died, you can be sure some form of the Lokpal Bill would have been passed into law.

Arvind Kejriwal has all this week been in news channels saying that he was forced to form a political party because otherwise the Government would have let them die at Jantar Mantar. But isn’t that the rule of the game? That you stake your life against the Government’s apathy, until one or the other wins? In this case, they failed because they were not willing to push it far enough. No one really identifies with a one-day, seven-day or indefinite fast where there is a clear path of retreat. If you want to win, you have to blow up the bridge to the way back. And then you might not die because your condition and courage will agitate people, which is what governments fear.

The only interesting element in the current fasts of Jagan and Naidu is who will break first. If you were a gambling man, would you put the odds on the young upstart carving a kingdom or the old hand trying to make a return? Both are equally desperate, but are they ready to die? You can bet your family silver not.

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