Events & Issues
New Delhi, 5 September 2011
Revolts’ New Mantra
YOUTH &
TECHNOLOGY POWER
By Proloy Bagchi
The current year has been a year of protests. The “Jasmine
Revolution” of Tunisia
was the beginning of it all. It was an intensive campaign of civil resistance,
including a series of street demonstrations and strikes by professionals that
culminated in the ousting of long-time President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in
January 2011. The demonstrations were precipitated by high unemployment, food
inflation, corruption, lack of fundamental freedoms and poor living conditions.
The Tunisian protests inspired similar revolts in the region
which went on to acquire the name “Arab Spring”. It was followed by the
Egyptian revolution that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, its president for
three decades. Uprisings also took place in Bahrain,
Syria and Yemen and major protests have taken place in Algeria, Jordan,
Morocco and Libya - where a
full-scale violent revolution has broken out and currently the tyrannical
Muammar Gaddafi is on the run. The “Arab Spring” was against despotic regimes
which inflicted miseries on the underclass.
Bobby Ghosh writing in Time
magazine reported that “all the revolts were led by young men and women, many
of whom are novices at political activism. All use modern tools, like social
networking sites on the internet and texting over mobile phones to organise
their protests”. Not only does Ghosh call them “The Class of 2011”, he also
feels they are the “the internet generation” who have felled two despots and
forced other inflexible rulers to make concessions. Confirming Ghosh’s thesis,
Fareed Zakaria, a senior journalist of Indian origin based in the United
States, said that “the tensions let loose” in the Middle East encompassed “two
of the most powerful forces changing the world today: youth and technology”.
A similar phenomenon overtook India recently during the movement
launched under the aegis of India Against Corruption (IAC) for establishment of
a strong and effective “Jan Lokpal”, an anti-corruption ombudsman. A few
concerned citizens led by a hitherto obscure elderly Gandhian social activist
from Maharashtra, 74-year-old Anna Hazare,
joined hands to form the non-governmental organisation. Associated with other
such organizations, it launched a massive movement right across the country,
the centre piece of which was Anna who, using Gandhian technique, launched a
fast and continued it for an incredible 12 days until Parliament unanimously
resolved to refer several of the issues mentioned by his team to its Standing
Committee to which the Government’s weak Lokpal bill already stood referred.
The protesters, mostly the youth of the country, novices at
political activism, have, like in the “Arab Spring”, used technology to telling
effect. Texting on mobile phones, the internet and its social networking sites
Facebook and Twitter, all were used for dissemination of appeals to their
compatriots. The backroom boys of the movement, some of them techies,
management and media experts, managed a veritable ‘war room’ using technology
so spectacularly that the crowds rolled in thousands wherever they wanted them
to roll in. Working incredibly long hours, these youngsters gave to the
movement all that they had.
This was true of Delhi,
where the people were induced to join in the protests from surrounding
countryside, as also elsewhere in the country where, too, the units of IAC were
being managed by similarly-equipped youngsters. Unlike “Arab Spring”, the
protests were not anti-regime but against widespread corruption in the polity
and were strictly within the Indian democratic framework. The general revulsion
against the largely corrupt political class was accentuated by their attempts
at cover-up of the recent series of scams involving mind-boggling sums.
Historically speaking, a Bill for establishment of a
“Lokpal” has been pending in Parliament for the past 43 years. It “wastes the
paper it was written on” said the respected journal, The Economist. Somehow it happened to survive only as a Bill, never
becoming an enactment. It has always been the pervasive feeling that the Bill
would never be passed as it would sever the very hands that are always in the
till, steeped in corruption as most politicians are. They would never
condescend to sign on their own “death warrant”.
The simmering ire against the self-preserving political
class seemingly exploded once Anna came along. He struck a chord and caught the
imagination of the people, more so of the youth. Protests, on the streets and
in designated spaces became the order of the day all across the country. The
universally derided Gandhi cap, a onetime preferred head-gear of corrupt
Congressmen, saw a sharp upswing in sales. All because it is always perched on
Anna’s head! A large number of youth and even children had “I am Anna” written
on the cap in bold letters in languages of their use indicating their
commitment to Anna and his anti-corruption movement. The venues of
demonstrations in Delhi
and elsewhere sported a sea of white caps interspersed by national flags.
Along with people’s ire against corruption, Anna has been
able to arouse a palpable patriotic sentiment, which is seldom witnessed in the
country in such a mass scale. Divisive factors such as caste, creed, region and
economic status had all been set aside. Some commentators see the blurring of
the line between Bharat and India
– the country’s well-known rural-urban divide, though detractors billed it as
an urban middleclass movement.
Indeed, the movement has infused a never-seen-before
political consciousness among the youngsters – whether urban or rural, rich or
poor, in the north or south or the east or west. Even the Indian diaspora took
up the “Anna Chant”. Protests were held from Los Angeles
to New York and from London
through European capitals to Melbourne,
with the protesters wearing what has now been christened the “Anna cap”.
And, yet the Indian youth, tech-savvy and others, have been
different in many ways from those of “Jasmine Revolution” and “Arab Spring”.
Their single-point agenda has been installation of an independent, powerful
"Jan Lokpal" who could deal effectively with the prevailing
widespread corruption. Led, as they were, by a Gandhian, they have been
peaceful, disciplined and, above all, non-violent.
The Washington Post
has called Anna’s movement an “awakening which could change the face of India’s
democracy...and change the national psyche and its tolerance for corrupt,
arrogant and unresponsive leaders.” There is much in what it has said. One
could discern a steely resolve not only among the leaders of the IAC but also
among the protesters. One, therefore, hopes that the political class does not
deviate from the resolution that it adopted. In case it does, surely, it
wouldn’t be taken kindly by the country’s youth. ---INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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