A saffron revolution in Mumbai

The recent popular uprising in Tunisia – dubbed the jasmine revolution – and the widespread protests against the authoritarian regime in Egypt have attracted worldwide attention. Ben Ali, the Tunisian dictator, has fled the country, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year old rule seems to head to a premature end. (Mr. Mubarak seems much like an Indian politician, wanting to install his son Gamel as a successor). Reports of protests are also emerging from Sudan and Albania, and as expected, China’s dictatorship has reacted in a way it knows best: by censoring the search term 'Egypt', it has prohibited Internet access to the reports of the uprising in Turkey and other Arabic countries.

In this season of hope, it is natural to aspire for a similar uprising in India. Imagine lakhs of protestors filling the streets of Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata, demanding an urgent attention to India’s pressing issues of inequality, escalating poverty, corrupting and a ‘governance deficit’, and asking for more accountability and transparency in governance. Imagine incompetent and vain politicians fleeing the country, and large scale structure changes – including electoral reform –are implemented.

This scenario, though romantic, would be difficult/impossible to occur in India. There are several reasons, though I’d like to mention the only three obvious ones:

•  No single enemy: The thugs and the mafia we elect to govern us are spread across several political parties: each party has its share of crooks and disgusting legislators. There is so much anger in the Indian public’s mind that it is difficult to target one single entity.
•  Elections as a pressure valve: Elections serve to periodically relieve the electorate’s angst. Unlike the Arabian countries, where elections are either stage-managed or don’t occur, Indian  elections are still largely free and fair. People still believe in a peaceful regime change
•  No guiding ideology: There’s no family of political ideas to channel the frustration and the angst into creating credible alternatives. As my co-blogger Vinay Hardikar has pointed out in an insightful op-ed in Sadhana, successful and clean politicians (like Nitish Kumar) are unaware of the role of ideology in shaping public opinion. Without the lighthouse of ideology to guide opinion and formulate political solutions, any uprising is bound to head into a vacuum and thus peter out: remember how the large protests in Mumbai after the 26/11 attacks fizzled out? (True to the Indian tradition, the incompetent rulers whose apathy was largely responsible for the events are rewarded: RR Patil is back as Maharashtra’s home minister, and Vilasrao Deshmukh, disaster-tour-guide cum protector of loan sharks, heads the plum rural development ministry at the center.)

That said, there’s no ban yet on dreaming, and I’ll continue to picture, in my mind’s eye, the protests in Mumbai.
(Note: I edited this post today to include more links and a brief explanation of the censorship of the uprising's reports in China).