Talking about the Mumbai terror attacks two years down the line (and while not making this article perfunctorily and callously coincide with the anniversary) is a good idea. Serious issues need to be debated when passions don’t run high.
No, the idea is not to dwell on why Kasab has not been executed till now. The point is also not to thrash out the issue of terrorism. We need to go beyond the headlines.
If you can recollect the outburst of people, especially in the social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, even as the terrorists were being tackled in Mumbai, you can’t fail to remember the anger that was so palpable. There was also a perceptible desire for “change” in all these outbursts. A zillion groups sprang up on Facebook, for instance, calling for change and pledging to do the same practically overnight. The desire was there, and it was genuine too.
It was probably the last day of the siege of Mumbai when someone caught up with me on Facebook chat. “Something’s gonna happen, no? Everyone’s angry, everyone’s fed up with the way things are being run in the country, everyone wants a change,” he said. I only hmmm-ed.
Two winters later my apathetic “hmmm” sounds quite profound to me. India hasn’t changed. Nothing has. And if the daily news headlines mean anything, they bear testimony to the fact that things are worse than what they were. Between the time I finish this piece and you happen to read it, a number of new scams would have emerged. The same government which the people had seen as grossly inept in November 2008 was returned to power in 2009. It is the same government which is neck-deep in scams and scandals of all size and shape. It’s anarchy all around and the Centre, by any measure, cannot hold much.
So what went wrong? Why were the people’s innate desire for a change, for a better world, belied? And how, the way Theoden laments in The Lord of the Rings, did it come to this?
The explanation ought not to be that difficult to gauge and understand. First, this demand for change was sporadic. Second, there was no credible entity to tap into this anger and make a constructive yield of it all. The political alternatives available to the electorate in the summer of 2009 was not seemed to be any better than what the people already had at hand.
Marxists talk of something called a “revolutionary situation.” The premise is that every revolution needs a revolutionary situation, but every revolutionary situation does not necessarily result in a revolution. What we saw in the Mumbai aftermath was an example of the latter. Prima facie, we did have such a revolutionary situation, but nothing came out of it.
On the contrary look at what happened in Tunisia. The street protests there were not orchestrated by anyone. The anger was there and the protests were spontaneous. Yes, Tunisia is certainly much smaller in size than India, but that can be a matter of academic debate. But the protests were that of the people. Look even at the student protests in the United Kingdom. Those were student protests, and not stagemanaged by any political entity.
We don’t see such protests in our country. Things do happen here, but far too intermittently and sporadically to usher in any change. Unless the small crowds of twenties, or occasionally that of a few hundreds, cannot do anything unless they swell into crowds of lakhs.
All revolutions happen in the streets. History is witness to that. If you want change the affairs of the State and the state of affairs, be prepared to fight for it in the streets. You can tweet about the revolution, but tweeting in itself changes nothing.
[This was written in January and carried in the February issue.]
