Indian Spring or Monsoon Raga?

If Arab spring is blossoming flowers of protests on streets of Arab world, it has also caught Indian masses’ imagination. The seeds of discontentment with corruption in power corridors are common to these protests. But this spring looks more like a wild forest fire clearing the woods of the trees gone bad and inharmonious with their surroundings giving rise to a hope of a consequent spring in Arab world- a spring which would bear the flowers of harmony, comity and equitable progress!

The problem with the concept of ‘spring’ is that it gives way to fall. It isn’t permanent and is a nature’s way to recycle. What the protestors are looking for is a permanent burial of repression and corruption by the rulers. Recycling is long overdue. The ruling autocrats are akin to Eucalyptus- self serving repressing species. Nature hasn’t rooted them out, so the people have to do it.

But the Indian recipe for mass movement is different. It has non-violence as a core ingredient. Neither is the regime here repressive nor autocratic. Unlike Arab states, we didn’t have emergency imposed upon us and we have elected government. Unlike there, a volcano didn’t erupt due to a mishap; rather an underflow of simmering lava has just surfaced onto the streets. This has been flowing for six decades now, perhaps longer than that. An exponential increase in the educated working class led by a practicing Gandhian facilitated this uprising. The youths have been prima facie the face of the protests. There’s no doubt that the social networking web has played a huge part in creating indigestion in corrupt leaders’ pot bellies.

So how does the Arab Spring compare with its Indian counterpart and where does each spring lead to? The mood for one among the citizens is precisely the same- one of ache and agony upon seeing their own people repressing them for decades. Their wealth inflating at the cost of glaring socio-economic divides in a burgeoning population with increasing marginalization of poor and unfortunate ones. The patience of peoples both sides of the Red Sea is rapidly running out.

The media and social networking have acted as catalysts in these outbreaks and quite responsibly too. They have not only mustered global support for the agitators but also facilitated free and open debate bringing each and every citizen to the table. The opposition parties have acted with restraint and not jumped the guns with their copybook opportunism- be it Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or BJP and Left parties in India. This bodes well for strengthening of democracy.

The major difference to protests in Arab world and India is the character it holds unto itself. While the trigger was also different everywhere-from a teenager self-immolating in Tunisia to a septageneranian going to fast in India- the regimes’ reaction was also quite suppressive in the Middle East. Libya and Syria are glaring examples.

However different and disparate the protests may seem, the endgame must be the same and must usher in an era of deliverance and freedom to each individual. All the states engulfed had been freed from foreign domination at some point in the last century. But the ensuing freedom proved to be a mere illusion as their own people enacted the same hideous scenes in their lavish theatres with the masses as their puppets. It’s time that the rulers stopped playing Gods and became one with their people.

This must be the beginning of a journey to root out malpractices and empowerment of one and all. In India, this must now be coupled with electoral reforms. But the citizens must also ensure the catharsis of corruption from their selves and pledge not to bribe and break rules henceforth. After all, Gandhiji believed, “Be the change you want to see.”