The politics of gherao

NAGPUR: Why is Anna Hazare’s call to gherao MPs being met with so much horror from Leftists and liberals who have always used or endorsed this tactic?
We’ve certainly come a long way—backwards. Forty years ago, our rulers weren’t the remote, security-ringed figures they are now. In Mumbai of the early 1970s, it was routine to gherao a minister. Those doing so weren’t hardened trade unionists but mostly poor and middle-class housewives.Detained for a few hours, they came back for more till the government gave in to their demands.
No minister was beaten or had his face blackened though the women were armed with rolling pins. Page One cartoons regularly lampooned the situation—one memorable one showed a minister being rolled by a woman with a rolling pin till food grains started coming out of his mouth.
Compared to this, Anna Hazare’s call to gherao MPs’ homes to get them to support the Jan Lokpal Bill seems tame. Yet, it has provoked anger from the unlikeliest quarters—a number of liberals and Leftists. While Anna was fasting, his followers did gherao MPs’ homes and even the PM’s. No MP seems to have come to harm. Yet, the call is being condemned as weakening democracy and strengthening ‘mobocracy’.
Why? “Well, asking MPs to support a bill they may not agree with is an undemocratic demand to start with,” says trade unionist N Vasudevan. Writer Rohini Hensman adds that MPs can be “persuaded” but by gheraoing them, one is exerting physical force to restrain their movements till they agree, which, according to her, smacks of intimidation. Veteran journalist Dinoo Ranadive agrees, saying that it might be better to talk to their party chiefs. Vasudevan also points to the possibility of violence if the MPs’ supporters react or agents provocateurs are planted.
Perhaps such alarmist reactions can be ascribed to the parallel histories of the gherao. Mumbai itself has seen two very different kinds of gherao—that led by the Shiv Sena, always violent; and the other led by socialist Mrinal Gore and communist Ahilya Rangnekar in the early ’70s, as part of their anti-price rise movement, demanding the supply of essentials through ration shops. The latter gherao was a mass-based, non-violent pressure tactic that brought relief to Mumbaikars. Additionally, says Gore, it showed ordinary women that they could force the government to listen.
Among the most notable gheraos of the time was that of a cabinet meeting in Mantralaya, when women swarmed the building and waited outside the meeting room, raising a din by beating tin containers with a stick; the gherao of civil supplies minister Bhausaheb Vartak’s home, where women went into his kitchen to check the quality of the rice he ate; and the gherao of Ramdas Kilachand, chairman of the Bombay Oilseeds and Oil Exhange. Kilachand said he had stopped trading in oil; the women produced xeroxes of correspondence between him and the government to call his bluff.
“We went with facts and figures, obtained after we raised these questions in the assembly,” recalls Gore. “And we were confident we could control the women. They weren’t hired crowds—they came after we held meetings across the city, explaining to them the reasons for the shortage of essential supplies and rising prices.”
CPM trade unionist Subhasini Ali believes that in a class society, the exploited have to try every tactic. “But a gherao should be resorted to after proper planning and only with a disciplined group of people,” she says, “else it can get out of hand and backfire.” However, gheraos are often spontaneous. In 2007, agitating for minimum wages for JNU workers, JNU students gheraoed their registrar who had refused to meet them. Recalls a student, “He sneaked out from the back gate, and we gheraoed him there.” It lasted six hours, but the registrar wasn’t touched; nor did he agree to anything. But the students were almost rusticated, a punishment which was withdrawn after widespread protests.
West Bengal’s experience of gheraos has been altogether different. In 1967, for the first time, a non-Congress government was voted into the state. Human rights activist Sukla Sen recalls that this led to a “veritable Left upsurge. We had the massive ‘land grab’ campaign in the countryside and ‘gherao’ in offices and factories. Both were largely spontaneous.”
Although advocate Mihir Desai says that under criminal law, a gherao amounts to unlawful restraint and the Kolkata high court declared gheraos illegal in 1967, in 1974 came a contrary judicial view. Striking down a detention order upheld by the Patna high court on Ram Bahadur Rai of the ABVP because he had called for a gherao of the CM and DM’s offices, Justices Y V Chandrachud and P N Bhagwati wrote: “The glorious history of our freedom movement exemplifies that agitations may primarily be intended to be and can be peaceful.” Surely Anna Hazare’s followers have demonstrated this peacefulness in both intent and practice?
Many activists aren’t against the practice of the gherao. “It’s a way of making autocratic authorities democratic,” says lawyer-activist Sanober Keshwar, “a way of getting them to listen and talk.” Surely we need to do that with those whom we’ve elected? Sums up Desai: “If you block all avenues for people to vent their anger peacefully, you are driving them to violence.”