A famous phrase in a graphic representation used on an anarchy site tells us to forget yoga and smash the system. A girl, her hair tied back with a big bow holding it in, and a long gown, its arms puffed up, looks down at the lettering of the same on her dress that she holds up from two sides forming an inverted umbrella. The lettering is impolite and makes a specific reference to The State. The drawing is part of Montreal’s street art by an artist named Harpy.
The idea behind it is to get out of your comfortable non-questioning zone and start nibbling at the present unfair system/s in which we operate. Without the crashing of the existing system, a new system cannot be devised merely through gate-crashing it.
Anarchy in general literature is often referred to as chaos. While what it really means is “no government” it would do well to think how much chaos governments, political parties and mega ideologies have caused all over the world. The easiest instance of this existing chaos is war. Social customs, law, trade, religion—everything comes with a set of rules. So does war. Systems are designed around rules as these are felt necessary to human cooperation, which, in turn, is sought considering human beings will move ahead (in genetic makeup and time) much better than if they do so individually. Inherent in this idea of systems is violence—even deathly force is permitted by states to make people/s fall in line.
Democracy, wherever practiced, also comes with a (large) set of rules. India’s constitution lays out how the country must practice its democracy. It tells us how people, their body and property, need be respected in the correct manner if we are to live under this umbrella. And now, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) under Arvind Kejriwal has set out to follow the Constitution of India right down to its logical end. Strangely enough, Kejriwal likes to think that he has taken up the path of an anarchist—one that rejects the rule—to apply the rule.
Has he though?
What the AAP would like to see most is the application of Indian democracy in its pure form. Rules, instead of not working, should work and in the format that the script prescribes. Applying these rules to today’s world with its complex inter mixing of corporate and governments, leading to the further mixing of rules of the moral kind, inadvertently seems like it leads down the path of most resistance. It causes chaos, no doubt. It threatens, slightly, to bring down a part of the existing system. But it definitely is not anarchy.
For, anarchy, as an anarchist writes, could entail the moving of boundaries as rivers change course, or languages change, or if most people vote for a different state, of living or being. While AAP’s gusto to take on a part of the system is commendable and needs support to achieve, is AAP willing to make the move to anarchism?
Thoughts may be mailed to moitramail@yahoo.com
