Starvation Politics: Kejriwal’s ‘Upvaas’ Vs Sharmila’s ‘Suicide Attempt’

Size zero came back in vogue in Indian politics thanks to the runaway success of Anna Hazare‘s hunger strike, until his magical malnourishment show grew dull with repetition. Starvation politics lost its sheen, and all of us went back to the business of eating as usual.

Now with Arvind Kejriwal planning a comeback, so is extreme undernourishment  Don’t worry, as Kejriwal assures us, this isn’t Grandpa Anna‘s hunger strike: “Those were anshans. We had certain demands from the government. This time, it is an upvaas. We don’t have any demand from the government. We are concerned only with the citizens.” He plans to hop from one supporter’s home to another to protest hikes in the prices of electricity and water. The starving just adds a little oomph to the proceedings.

Anorexia without a cause! When Bollywood starlets needlessly starve themselves, it’s a diet. When our leaders do the same, we call it satyagraha. Sorry, make that ‘upvaas.’ And when Irom Sharmila does it, our government calls it an “attempt to commit suicide.” Unlike Uma Bharti‘s intermittent —  now I eat, now I — ”indefinite fast,” Sharmila’s hunger strike has endured 12 years of force-feeding in police custody. She’s also facing charges in a Delhi court for declaring her intention fast unto death in 2006 during a protest in Jantar Mantar. Guess, that didn’t work out quite as well for her as Annaji, who was instead rewarded with a long line of UPA supplicants urging him to just eat something!

Hunger strikes are all about turnout — as Hazare well knows. Human rights violations in distant Manipur aren’t quite as popular as that big-C crowd-pleaser, Corruption. Anna tum sangharsh karo, Hum tumhare saath hain! Irom, not so much.

At the time, left-leaning intellectuals embraced the reverse double-standard. In a widely circulated essay, Shuddhabrata Sengupta thusly described Anna’s bourgeois ann-shan antics:

The current euphoria needs to be seen for what it is – a massive move towards legitimising a strategy of simple emotional blackmail – a (conveniently reversible) method of suicide bombing in slow motion. …The force of violence, whether it is inflicted on others, or on the self, or held out as a performance, can only act coercively. And coercion can never nourish democracy.

Other than rebuking middle class myopia for the absence of “a tele-visually orchestrated campaign against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act,” however, Sengupta remained wilfully silent as to whether Sharmila’s hunger strike qualifies as a “method of suicide bombing in slow motion.” In politics, satyagraha lies in the eyes of the beholder. It’s never about the fast, but the person fasting. And it’s always a person who matters.

Hunger strikes are the weapon of the important. They are less about suicide than wilfulness: I’m not going to eat! That kind of threat works only when it’s pulled by a toddler or a VIP.  It assumes the presence of an interested audience – be it of concerned parents, adoring supporters, or harried authorities — who care about when you had your last meal. Or in the case of Irom, a government that cares enough to feed you through a tube against your will. Lots of nameless people go hungry in India; a number of them even die. But no one cares about the death of statistics.

This is why ordinary people in dire circumstances rarely go on a hunger strike.  No one can summon up the interest to stand around watching them die, or rather threaten to maybe, possibly die — but only if everything goes terribly wrong, and as a very last resort. To merit any kind of attention, the common man has to go the whole hog and actually kill him or herself. Hence, while Kejriwal, Hazare et al threaten starve until death, a Tariq Ahmad Rather sets himself, his wife, two sons and mother on fire because his family is starving — and then is charged by the police for attempting suicide.

On the other hand, the mighty authorities can choose to ignore plebian suicides when required. Like those 19 farmers in the Cauvery Delta who — in the words of the Tamil Nadu government  — met an untimely death “due to a variety of reasons from old age, family problems to accidents.”

The good news for Kejriwal and his admirers is that his latest fast is unlikely to require such unseemly fudging of facts. While the hunger strike is “indefinite,” it is highly unlikely to prove fatal. The upvaas instead marks the birth of a new trend: fasting as political accoutrement, the must-have accessory to make your protest pop!