Agitations top the charts presently. From ex-servicemen to Patels to trade unions to small groups to families to some isolated individuals, the landscape is littered with agitationists of all hue. Suddenly, strikes, sit-ins, dharnas, fasts or some such sort of protest are all over the place.
Some seem legitimate. The OROP demand of military personnel beats my lay intellect, but intricacies apart it does strike an emotional chord owing to them being on the firing line first. Of course, similar demands may arise from other direct protectors of the people. Morale is vital for those who risk life and limb for the nation’s security and one way to ensure that is good compensation, while in service and after.
Armymen cannot just stop work, given the self-imposed and law ordained shackles of discipline and duty. Reason why retirees are in the ring. Still, the long drawn affair is falling in TRP, if you see what I mean. That being the case, do the people really have any more space or sensitivity for sundry other agitations, whatever the provocation or justification? Is the nation protest-fatigued?
For long, protests had been the sole preserve of Leftists, passed off as steps towards the proletariat revolution, but essentially survival tools to keep themselves in circulation. The trade unions, primarily those in the public sector, were the cutting edge. And cut, they did, into the country’s core, plunging many a sector into demanding depths instead of the commanding heights they were touted to touch. Apart from the familiar fights over wage, globalisation and privatisation proffered fresh alibis with NGOs flush with foreign funds and dubious agendas pitching their tents too.
Simulated strikes and orchestrated sloganeering by ‘secure-for-life’ PSU staff have since lost sheen and sympathy with both law and laymen. And why not? Unions’ collective bargaining actually means collective blackmail while the measure of a strike’s success is the disturbance and distress caused to the daily routines of denizens! When bankers scratch their itch to bunk, customers scream. When some other essential service staff stop, scoot or shirk work, the common man feels conned.
Even more tiring and terrible have been the string of agitations over quotas and reservations. The British planted these scissors in the nation’s stomach to divide it on communal and caste lines and rule happily. Independent India, by leaving it untouched, now lives unhappily with its insides torn to shreds. Competitive quota politics, based not on data banks but vote banks, have played havoc in society by pitting caste against caste, community against community and finally, citizen against citizen. That one can move forward only by ‘becoming’ backward is a tested thesis and there is a clamour for getting notified in that notorious schedule. Patels are the latest. But not the last since everyone can claim to belong to a minority or a depressed group under some logic.
But I would say agitations touched tipping point with Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and assorted activists. The last few years of the United Plunderers’ Association – UPA 2- regime were characterised by unprecedented protests over large scale corruption. Jantar Mantar and Primetime became the new Parliaments, sometimes putting the original in the shade in terms of noise and pandemonium. And by resorting to it in frustrating frequency, A.Hazare & Co blunted fast as a weapon of protest. Even otherwise, in a country where people go without food routinely, fasts are an incongruity as a protest mode. But today they are even more tokenist. Indeed, the glass of juice at the end is actually the news. It looks agitations and activism will have to seek new avenues and avatars to stay in the arena of public attention.
The Lokpal movement, for all its lofty projections and legal pretensions, was essentially an expression of mass grouse against grease. Both are still alive as also are a host of past baggage. Individual piques and plaints too are rising by the minute. And none can be redressed without upsetting something somewhere. The entire nation is under the grip of unreconcilable gripes.
Indeed, the Gross Domestic Grievance is all set to spike. As also protests despite losing their potency. So, what and who next? Aah, who cares!
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