The Hazare Effect

Some IGNOU students marked the Anna Hazare(the ex- armyman who turned Gandhian) campaign against corruption in a small way by holding a march and screening of an anti-war film 'Turtles Can Fly' by Bahman Ghobadi. The march and the film were basically held to demonstrate how political power, in the words of the eminent thinker of the 19th century Frederick Engels ,'can do great damage to the economic development and result in the squandering of great masses of energy and material' when it tries to cut off economic development from certain paths and prescribe certain others.The massive corruption of the recent scams is surely a squandering of great masses of energy and material which could have been put to an all around development purposes. Ghobadi's film brought out how even in the context of war, the young ( in this case children) try to organise themselves in a situation where odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them. Perhaps in the Hazare campaign the youth were similarly taking on the state and political power in an issue whose dimensions are mind boggling. Social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan (April 11,HT) confesses to be puzzled by the movement. He agrees with the issue, 'our democracy seems to be emptying out in our ability to handle corruption'.Yet he feels that the participants in the movement are like the millenialists who felt that the bullets could not harm them and likewise they (Hazare activists) feel that authority cannot touch them. He sums up,'they feel that they are at the roots of law, creating law for a new era'. Perhaps it was Fredrick Engels who put the matter in perspective when he argued in the context of relations between money markets, trade and production that 'the reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a topsy-turvy one: it happens without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori principles, whereas they are only economic reflexes; so everything is turned upside down'. Perhaps this accounts for the sense of surreal which Shiv Vishwanathan feels in watching the Hazare protest?(SFC, PG IGNOU with the help of Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)