The hunger strike—or fasting, as it gets called—has recently occupied centre-stage in Indian politics. Whether it was the Lokpal bill or the demand to monitor black money, the hunger strike has been the political weapon of the moment. Come August, and it might make its re-entry what with Anna Hazare having declared his intention to go on a fast if the government does not accept the recommendations of the drafting committee for the Lokpal bill. While the hunger strike has never receded from the political landscape of India, or world politics for that matter, recent events demand a fresh look at what we understand by this phenomenon. How do we assess the political nature of the hunger strike?
The hunger strike has an illustrious genealogy when it comes to Indian politics, Gandhi being one of its well-known proponents. Gandhi is known to have kept 20 ‘public’ fasts between 1915 and 1948. In an article that discusses the first ‘public’ fast by Gandhi in 1915, the scholar Tridip Suhrud talks about how by keeping a fast Gandhi fused a ‘public’ demand into his own bodily well-being. This embodying of a ‘public’ demand in the body of the person on strike, however, is fraught with difficulties. In its less illustrious avatar it often gets read as a publicity gimmick, much like the predicament of the “hunger artist” in Kafka’s story by the same name.
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Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist”, describes the slow wasting away of a performer who starves in a cage in order to entertain people. Yoking hunger with artistry highlights the predicament of the artist and his relation to a public/audience. That is indeed the predicament that haunts the hunger strike. A hunger strike has to attest to its public nature by being ‘staged’ in public places and invites a spectatorship. However, if unheeded by its addressee—be it a government or the public—the striker, like the artist, is destined to languish in the self-imposed solipsism of his own cause. We have only to think of Baba Nigamananda, who died recently, unheeded and unheard.
But how does one explain the fast as a tool of political intervention? From where does it acquire its political, moral and ethical charge? Many discourses feed into making starving oneself a form of ‘political’ intervention. The first of these has to do with the emergence of the idea of food as intrinsic to the well-being of the individual/citizen along with the emergence of state responsibility for providing its citizen with this basic necessity. While in modern ‘secular’ discourse we give primacy to the idea of the well-being of the citizen through basic bodily needs like food, in religious/spiritual traditions self-abnegation by denying food is a way of cultivating spiritual discipline. It is interesting how in the hunger strike, both these meanings get transfused in interesting ways. The ethical charge that derives from a hunger strike springs not only from denying oneself a “basic fact of survival” like food but also from the sacrificial aura generated by denying oneself precisely this basic fact. Politics resembles ritual in this self-abnegation. This becomes even more obvious when often the hunger strike comes coded in the ascetic, almost always celibate demeanour of its practitioners.
However, we cannot argue that fasting as a form of ‘secular’ political intervention mimics or borrows from religious or spiritual traditions. There is evidence to suggest that fasting drew on ethical/judicial codes prior to becoming a feature of religious practice. The scholar Fred Norris Robinson, who has researched the tradition of fasting in Medieval Ireland, suggests that the hunger strike or ‘fasting to distrain’ was not necessarily an act of self-abnegation and sacrifice as it later came to be practiced in Christian religious traditions. Often fasting at the doorstep of an aggressor was a hostile act meant to elicit a response by invoking medieval codes of justice.
It is precisely this act of invoking a notion of justice that requires further interrogation. Essential to the idea of the hunger strike is to contest and struggle over accountability. What separates the ‘private’ fast from the ‘public’ one is grounded on this fact. The ‘public’ fast constitutes the state as its addressee and it is in this way that it is ‘political’. Arguably the hunger strike is often undertaken against private institutions and people. However, even in these scenarios the hunger strike uses an idea of ‘public’ welfare and State sanctioned rights in order to gain legitimacy.
One can demonstrate this by showing the meanings that accrue to fasting in its ritual register .The karwa chauth fast is not political. The fast is premised on a certain demand, or one might say a wish—the long life of a husband. However, the mere presence of a demand does not make the fast political. The karwa chauth fast remains personal and ritualised and does not extend beyond each individual couple even though thousands of women might choose to keep the fast simultaneously. Moreover within the domain of the ritual women do not direct their actions to a responsible/responsive agent who has to provide tangible guarantees of fulfilling the wish imbued in the fast. The hunger strike has a clear adjudicator it addresses and calls into a position of responsibility. This example also highlights the complex gender relations that differentiate the ‘public’ fast from the more ritualised ones that are primarily observed by women. However, it is clear that what separates either pre-modern forms and/or ritualised forms of fast from the hunger strike is the fact that the State becomes the addressee. This is why a distinction between the hunger strike and the fast becomes essential.
The hunger strike is also tangentially related to other forms of the political relationship between food, the body and State responsibility. Starvation, malnutrition and the ingestion of harmful substances are such forms. However, here food functions in its literal sense and does not acquire the symbolic value that denying oneself food in a fast does. Moreover, the denial of food in a hunger strike can then only emerge in the event of a choice of having access to food which one denies oneself. It is no small irony that the starving cannot go on a hunger strike. In the fast what becomes important is the volition of the subject — the citizen chooses to starve himself/herself consciously and is not compelled by external circumstances. Here striking resembles another form of doing volitional ‘harm’ to the body — that of suicide.
The suicide, like the hunger strike, takes place through an act of volition, no matter how compromised we might think that volition is. However, suicide is perceived very differently in relation to the political. Only in particular cases can suicide directly implicate the state. Unarguably suicides are a social phenomenon but it is in particular conjunctures that they acquire a political resonance. We are familiar with the spate of farmer suicides across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa that made news in early 2009. These suicides highlighted a socio-economic condition engendered by state policies — but the suicide victims themselves never staked claimed to a political message in the act of choosing to die. It is in its peculiar relationship to the personal that the suicide often remains trapped in a personal predicament. It is here that the concept of volition takes on fascinating complexities. Attempted suicide remains a crime against the state though recently there has been talk of amending article 309 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that criminalizes suicide. While these attempts at humanizing the treatment of persons, who have attempted suicides, are largely suggested on the basis of a psychologised pathology of the individual in need of treatment, official discourses read the rights of the person on hunger strike very differently. The World Medical Association Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikes in (1991) in which India also participated, declared that:
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It is ethical to allow a determined hunger striker to die in dignity rather than submit that person to repeated interventions against his or her will.
Of course, this begs the question how the state adjudicates the difference between what it sees as wilful suicide needing intervention and which acts it sees fit to respect and negotiate with. The case of Irom Sharmila and her continued resistance to force-feeding is a case in example. The state cannot bear witness to the dissident who chooses to die by slowly starving herself to death. The ethical right to “die with dignity” can have explosive repercussions if Irom Sharmila does indeed die while on the hunger strike as it can always be read as state neglect. The hunger strike in this case is premised on a certain paradox. It critiques state rule (the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) but also invokes the responsibility of the state in protecting its citizens. It does this by making the state the direct addressee of its action. Which brings us to the question of what makes the hunger strike a persuasive tool for political ends in some cases and a total failure in others? What makes the demand of an Anna Hazare negotiable and that of an Irom Sharmila or a Narmada Bachao Andolan, non-negotiable?
One can argue that categories of ‘failure’ and ‘success’ might be misplaced or relative in this case. How can we say that continuing resistance, through a 10 year long hunger strike, against a draconian law, is a failure? Of course I do not suggest that it is any less ‘successful’. Arguably, the expression of such dissent is premised on fracturing a consensus and shows that the State has failed to dispense justice. I wish to ask, however, whether in invoking the intercession of the state the hunger strike does not tacitly accept the adjudicatory power of letting states decide which demands are to be met? Of course this remains the larger question of what we understand by politics as well.
