On 18 December 2010, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself. The wheels of time grind slow, but they grind fine, or so they say. The immediate cause of this act of protest in Tunisia was undue harassment by officials yet its underlying causes aptly symbolise the ills of 21st century civilisation. A civilisation of tremendous discrimination and limited class mobility, whether the classes are economic, racial, religious, sectarian or otherwise. Bouazizi’s symbolic death in early January set in motion a chain of events that has seen the following year 2011 to be a year of the man on the street. It inspired the fall of governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; it also sparked protests and similar self-immolation bids in scores of countries in the Arab World. Later in the year, the First World tired of a prolonged recession. Thus came Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street which quickly turned international with protestors in nearly a thousand cities across the globe venting anger against corporate greed and economic mismanagement in their respective countries. Indeed, 2011 turned out to be a year of popular uprisings across the world: varying in ideological colour, modus operandi and aims yet synchronised such that each uprising inspired the next in a network of dissent across the globe.
Parallelly in India
Almost in parallel, in India the 2G scam had seen the public exchequer cheated of an estimated trillion rupees. In one go, this mother-of-all-scams had put all its predecessors in Indian democracy’s “chequered” history to shame.
Enter Anna Hazare. Most Indians hadn’t heard of him back on April 4. A day later, he began a fast at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi in protest against governmental lethargy in passing the Jan Lokpal Bill to create an ombudsman that would check corruption in the corridors of power. Continue reading
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