Review: The Anarchist Cookbook by Aakar Patel

What Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress inherited on 14 August 1947, says Aakar Patel in the second chapter of The Anarchist Cookbook, “was an aggressively expansionist imperialist State. It had taken, usually through annexation, deception and war, large parts of the subcontinent never previously under Delhi’s rule. The rights of this occupying colonial State were naturally more important than the rights of the occupied”.

Legislatures existed before 1947, laws were written by Indians, elections were held, people voted, and Indians had access to justice and to free expression, he points out. The laws and regulations under which Indians are governed today are essentially the same as those we had as a subject people. This is also true of Pakistan. The question he raises is: If the laws were the same, and not just in India but the subcontinent, what is the difference between the Republic of India and the Raj?

Patel’s answer is that the Fundamental Rights promised in the Indian Constitution are the essential difference that separate free India from India under the British Raj. He takes up these Fundamental Rights one by one to make the case that the average Indian citizen’s enjoyment of each of these Rights has been severely curtailed not just by poor delivery in practice, but also in law. Successive governments from 1951 to now have slowly whittled away the Fundamental Rights until some of them barely exist at all.

During the British Raj, the application of a law enabling preventive detention, the Rowlatt Act, provoked a protest at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar and the infamous massacre there. Independent India has had “Rowlatt Acts in each state which are used more frequently against Indians than during the Raj”, says Patel. India, he warns, is on the edge of autocracy. He makes this statement on the basis of the country’s ranking in multiple global freedom indices. For example, in 2019, India was ranked by Civicus, an organisation that monitors the state of civil liberties in 193 countries around the world, as a place where civic freedoms are “repressed”.

Civicus defines a repressed space as one where “Active individuals and civil society members who criticize power holders risk surveillance, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment, injury and death. Although some civil society organizations exist, their advocacy work is regularly impeded and they face threats of de-registration and closure by the authorities. People who organize or take part in peaceful protests are likely to be targeted by the authorities…The media typically reflects the position of the state, and any independent voices are routinely targeted through raids, physical attacks or protracted legal harassment. Websites and social media platforms are blocked and internet activism is heavily monitored”.

Much of this sounds uncomfortably familiar.

The author reckons there’s enough power to stop this slide to autocracy in the government itself, the political opposition, the judiciary, and the external world – but the first two are incapable or unwilling. The third moves slowly. The fourth may have some occasional impact, but governments put interests before values. The answer Patel proffers to the question of who will stop the slide, then, is: You. “The element that is required in our society is the one that most mature democracies have but is missing to a large extent in ours — the participation of individuals in democracy beyond the electoral process”.

The next section of the book is the “cookbook”. Like any cookbook, it contains recipes, in this case, for the budding activist, on how to go about cooking up a campaign to achieve change. It teaches concepts and techniques, and the use of campaign tools such as research, advocacy and mobilization. This is followed by a section on successful protests of our times, and one on “lawless laws” such as the amended Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act which gives the state power to designate, without conviction or trial, any individual as a “terrorist”. The amendment now defines a “terrorist act” as one that causes “injuries to any person, damage to any property, an attempt to over awe any public functionary by means of criminal force and any act to compel the government or any person to do or abstain from doing any act etc”. It also includes any act that is “likely to threaten” or “likely to strike terror in people”.

The book is at its strongest in these sections where it holds up to the clear light of day the extent to which governments have passed, often to popular acclaim, laws that would not have escaped protest even during the British Raj. His contention that the Fundamental Rights promised in the Indian constitution have been eroded is hard to refute.

His claim that the slide towards autocracy can be halted by activism is more doubtful.

Patel lists some examples of campaigns that worked. Perhaps he does not notice the common thread that runs through nearly all of those successful campaigns: an actual or expected impact on electoral politics. This crops up in the Black Lives Matter movement in USA, the Dalit protests in Gujarat in 2016, the Adivasi protests in Jharkhand, which began the same year and continued until 2019, and the farmer protests with their base in Punjab, Haryana and parts of Uttar Pradesh in 2020. The author doesn’t include electoral calculations as being part of the reason for the success of the anti-CAA movement, but it is likely that concerns about upcoming polls in the states of Northeast India – where the anti-CAA protests first started – played a role. In the related matter of National Register of Citizens, the BJP’s electoral flop show in West Bengal and the concerns of the Bangladesh government next door may have played a big role.

Patel notes the “intense hostility to the idea of the CAA” in Northeast India but ascribes the success of the anti-CAA-NRC-NPR movement to the peaceful sit-in at the Shaheen Bagh area in Delhi. Hindu nationalist propaganda that brands Muslims as “anti-nationals”, however, often plays a role in helping the BJP win elections.

The text is lucidly written, and illustrated by a number of brilliant cartoons by PenPencilDraw. Like many a cookbook, most of this one’s recipes too may remain untried by the average reader, but there is some pleasure to be had in leafing through, looking at the pictures, and fantasizing about cooking up great campaigns.

Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist. His most recent book is The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra.