Ringing in the era of people's power

I have never in all my life known a turn of the year that has not been marked by a gloom-and-doom syndrome in the outpourings in the media. If you want evidence, go to the section in the Madras University Library keeping old dailies and pick up at random issues of 1948, 1949 or 1950 — whatever comes to hand.

If you remove the allusions to contemporary names and read on, you will have the illusion that you are reading today's newspapers: The same alarm being sounded about things falling apart, the centre not being able to hold and mere anarchy and blood-dimmed tide being loosed upon the world — in the ready-to-order words from the poem The Second Coming , of William Butler Yeats.

They invariably sell, bringing both readership and ratings, whereas good news makes no news and is even viewed with scepticism and suspicion.

It has been no different at the passing of 2011. The dominant theme of conversations, write-ups and TV features is that things had never been so bad as in the year that just went past with worse trials and tribulations in store down the road in the one that is taking over.

CHEERY PICTURISATION

“India Inc sees full blown crisis in 2012”; “Fiscal deficit may swell up to 5.2 %”; “India's very own annus horribilis ” — are some headlines I casually picked up while thumbing through the pages.

The downbeat mood is evocatively captured by my friend Rasheeda Bhagat in this paper: “Even as it appeared that India had come through rather well from the pandemonium caused by the 2008 global meltdown, we seem to be on a much more slippery ground by end-2011. …Tens of millions of middle-class Indians will bid goodbye to 2011with a sigh of relief. For this was surely one of the most tumultuous years in a long time.”

Calm down, everybody. Let me move on from the rather febrile lines of Yeats to the somewhat more cheery picturisation: Standing on the sea shore, if you look down, you see nothing but chaos: The waves coming in tumultuously, breaking all over you, and leaving you drenched and covered with sand. But lift your sight and have a glimpse of the distant expanse of the dark, blue ocean: How deep and calm and serene it looks!

That's the future that is beckoning to us. And it lies in our hands. There was a time when we helplessly accepted whatever the future brought as our destined deserts.

To reproduce the poetic lines quoted by Jawaharlal Nehru in another context in his Discovery of India : Most went glumly through it/Dumbly doomed to rue it.

MONUMENTAL WATERSHED

But today the combined might of the knowledge, communications and technology revolutions has enabled us to assume vishwaroopa and dare to sculpt our own future in the manner and direction we want.

If we still moan and groan, quarrelling with our tools like execrably bad workmen, parading excuses for our passivity, and sinking into a state of paralysis by analysis, the fault is nobody's but that of ourselves.

And who are the ‘we' and ‘ourselves'? Don't wander off searching for the guys: The ‘we' I am talking of is composed of all of us, the makers and moulders, the movers and shakers, of India, the citizens of this country. If 2011 had shown us nothing else but what a determined civil society can do when it rouses itself for fighting for a cause as daunting as ridding government and public life of corruption and instilling honesty and integrity in all walks of life, I would call it a monumental watershed. It has made the people tell themselves with pride: “Yes, we can!”

Without any exaggeration, 2011 has indeed been a turning point, a cathartic experience, giving a foretaste of the invincible power people have for bringing about whatever change they want, if only they will take full charge, without giving in to despondency and despair or shying away from their responsibility.

This was the profound lesson to be learnt from the Arab Spring as well, sweeping across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and, in future, wherever governments, including those that call themselves democracies, treat the people whom they are pledged to serve with contempt.

‘NAMMAAL MUDIYUM'

Make no mistake: It was not any sudden reformist zeal for eradication of corruption that drove Team Manmohan Singh and the political class to feverishly work for the passage of the Lokpal legislation within the timeline set by Anna Hazare, after dodging it for well-nigh half-a-century by adopting various ruses and stratagems.

I, for one, am positive that the sense of urgency laced with a tinge of trepidation — unimaginable in the way the Government is habituated to work in India — was undoubtedly the result of the awesome groundswell of hundreds of thousands of people, igniting in the powers-that-be visions of a possible repetition of the Arab Spring in India itself.

It was M. S. Udayamurthi, the progenitor of the Makkal Shakthi Iyakkam (People's Power Movement) and (with Kamal Hasan acting the part) the hero of K. Balachander-directed film Unnal mudiyum, thambi ! (Yes, you can, brother!), and not Mr Barack Obama, who first put heart into the people in a series of exhortations widely disseminated in the Tamil media from the 1960s.

Both the Arab Spring and Anna Hazare have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing is impossible of achievement if only people gear themselves to face their oppressors and betrayers with fervour and passion on the one hand and on the other, with unswerving adherence to peaceful forms of agitation and the lofty heritage of high moral and ethical values for which India has always stood.

The collapse of the Lokpal Bill for the tenth time in the last 43 years in Parliament contrived by the Government and the political establishment is both an insult and a challenge hurled at the people at the start of the new year. Here's also a test of the people's power. They must make the coming spring and summer really hot for those who were behind this outrageously deceitful machination.

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