Radical politics of all hues is under stress and, by and large, waning. Among a maze of reasons is also the fact that we have realised at the turn of the century that we actually never knew how to bring about radical social change and what we knew was abysmally little. Our ideals never matched our techniques and techniques we knew were swallowed by the imperatives of everyday life. All idealism seems to stop at the doorstep of pragmatism, not because we always collectively will that but nobody seems to have the keys to get past.
Best of intentions and best of political mobilisations repeatedly pale into the horizon, and what remains is a faint memory of the glorious and somewhat heroic days. Memory is mostly the future we wish for rather than history as it happened.
Hugo Gorringe’s book gives us a closer look at why political movements that begin in radical registers with a sense of impatience towards questions of routine and insidious modes of injustice are soon consumed by those very processes of routine and normalisation.
Radical to routine?
The book under review is a fine account of how the Liberation Panthers (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal) of Tamil Nadu led by Thirumavalavan converted itself in the 1990s into the Liberation Panther Party (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi-VCK), after decades of boycott of elections as they believed polls represented the same casteist practices as the rest of the social processes. However, they reverted their decision once they mobilised a sizeable support among the Dalits of Tamil Nadu, in order to realise the dream of gaining political power to affect social change.
In fact, this in many ways was what Ambedkar had also suggested to the Dalits that without seizing political power overcoming caste discrimination would always remain a distant goal.
However, whenever Dalits, including for instance the experiment of the Bahujan Samaj Party, have forged a political party they seem to moderate their goals, minimise their strategies and eventually lose their potential to mobilise. This is true of many other political mobilisations, and not just the Dalits. The India Against Corruption movement, led by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, too exploded onto the social scene and many well-meaning social activists and academics believed this was a turning point in Indian politics, only to be disappointed by the shape it took, especially after it converted into a political party.
Gorringe's book lucidly explains how 'social mobilisation and protest is time-consuming, risky, and costly' and cannot be self-sustaining for too long. Individuals involved tend to lose steam, energy and also their determination. Enthusiasm of the 'take-off' phase of the movements gives way to stagnation, ideas become clichéd and slogans begin to sound repetitive.
In order to keep the issue alive against such odds, political movements become bureaucratic, and depend heavily on front-ranking leaders. The leaders in turn become cautious not to lose their charisma and not to make big time mistakes in their strategies; they also feel the compulsion to keep a distance from followers in order to manage the expectations and various conflicting demands.
All of these in turn lead to disappointments, accusations, and defections and failure to encourage and nurture second-rank leaders. There is also the human element of insecurity and temptation to give into 'image traps' that the leaders are first given, then trapped into and then virulently critiqued for. In this game of 'rise and fall' individuals seem to be cogs in the wheel with very little capacity to manoeuvre the challenges of mass politics.
Failure of protest politics
Gorringe’s account, in spite of his denial, almost sounds like there is an element of inevitability in the way protest politics in their attempts at institutionalisation and mainstreaming are invariably prone to alienation, bureaucratisation, compromise, de-radicalisation, and co-option. This book makes the best of attempts to provide for a sympathetic reading of the compulsions involved in forging, and nurturing protest politics. Further, when a movement converts into a political party there is the compelling need to enlarge its social base and mass support. In order to do that it is understandable that they need to either dilute or neglect their core demands. BSP that began with core Dalit issues, spread to Bahujan, to include OBCs and Muslims, and finally ended up with the slogan of Sarvajan that ironically gave significant place to Brahmins against whom it began its initial political mobilisation. In due course, the party lost its ability to look as radical and maintain its mass appeal. Materiality of symbolism of converting a vertical caste order into a horizontal one gives way to 'empty symbolism'. It blurs the difference between the vertical and horizontal caste orders to end up with circular arguments as to how symbolism is itself the new radicalism.
A stress on collective action and resistance can give way to negotiation and interest articulation. One might well argue what is the use of protest politics if it doesn’t at some stage serve the interests of the disadvantaged. Protest works around the question of justice that is universal, while interests are particular.Particularity always has the capacity to degenerate into sectarianism, but one might again always meaningfully ask why should the disadvantaged carry the burden of the universal?
Between the universalism of idealism and pragmatism of particularism, protest politics always tends to swing towards the latter as universalism is more cognitive and particularism is more experiential in nature. Protest politics of various kinds, including those of the Left and revolutionary kind, have struggled to find a way out. Rigid idealism, as in the case of the Left, tends to become dogmatic, while rugged pragmatism, tends to become corrupt, manipulative and self-serving. The fact that we have realised, as this book stands testimony, that we do not know what is radical change much less how to usher in one, should serve as an occasion to begin some fresh thinking.
