Hardly an Indian Spring
.jpg?w=728)
By Alan Saldanha
"Indian Spring” is a term of recent origin. It may not be what has been depicted in the media though. It is claimed to be a mass uprising of the Indian middle class.
It comes as a sequel to the Facebook and Twitter storming Arab Spring. There were sporadic outbursts of calls for proper governance in the last two months of 2012. However, they do not justify the hype that U.S. based Indo-American T.V. journalist Fareed Zakaria has whipped up. To him goes the distinction of creating the "Indian Spring."
Zakaria had his childhood upbringing in India and university education at Harvard. He has been clever enough to sense that what America wants to hear most is the proliferation of democracy on their model. Having witnessed the widely popular Arab Spring the West yearns to hear more of such mass uprisings. The Indian Spring, however, is in the eye of the beholder and only that thus far.
Zakaria might however be out of touch with grassroots undercurrents in the world’s largest democracy. His claim that the Indian Spring is a movement prompted by a mass uprising from the burgeoning Indian middle class is debatable. His father, Dr. Rafiq Zakaria, was mayor of Bombay for several years and that hardly allows him to delve further than interacting with the intelligencia of Mumbai. But he knows how to whip up media interest. Hence his equating some vague Indian Spring with the widely successful Arab Spring that led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak.
Even otherwise Indian Spring is not quite apt as a phrase since there is little or no winter in the sub-continent and hence no spring so to speak. If anything, it is a summer of discontent. There have been sporadic protests, yes, but nothing like a large-scale revolt prompted by the middle class.
The Indian middle class is currently basking in the glory of recently attained wealth that allows them to splash money on eating out on weekends and crowding the roads with lightweight Hyundai and Suzuki cars which are never sure of a parking place when the return to base. The number of cars on the road has increased 50 percent in the last two years.
Recently I was on vacation for 40 days in India. Nothing of what I observed was on the scale Zakaria has suggested.
If one is to go by what has been documented in the mid-January Washington Post op-ed written by Zakaria one would imagine that there is a huge undercurrent of discontent that manifests itself in the form of a genuine uprising in the middle class. That is not the impression I got during my travel to Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Goa and Ahmedabad.
On the contrary people openly seemed to express horror and despair on the New Delhi bus rape. They whined about the inefficacy of the government but that is nothing new. But it is not as if they used social media to initiate an uprising.
That was not the case in the earlier uproar over the innocuous comments made by two college girls that landed them in the eye of a storm. At that time, Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in quelling the outrageously arbitrary action taken by the police in Mumbai in response to a perfectly legitimate post on Facebook made by Shaheen Dhada and supported by Rinu Srinivasan.
The problem relates to the concept of governance in the Indian sub-continent where politicians rule the roost.
The writer is the publisher of Daywatch newspaper in Surrey, British Columbia. He can be reached at daywatchnewspaper@gmail.com.