Anna Hazare, the erstwhile
Team Anna, the new Team Anna and the members of Arvind Kejriwal’s ‘Aam Aadmi Party’,
all have been in the news throughout the year for different reasons. The common
thread among them has been they have been consistently talking about ‘change’
and the ‘politics of change’. Yet, they don’t stir the imagination of the youth
anymore. The social media is almost not talking about them (except the routine
stuff and the existing support base).
Anna Hazare was the major
factor that led the youth to trust and accept the call. But once it was clear
that the movement was hijacked by the vested interests, they simply moved away
from it.
The vigourous activity on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media platforms that
was there during the April 2011 and September 2011 fasts flattened later on.
Many said social media as a
support medium for protests failed in India and the high trends during the Anna
Hazare fasts were just impulsive reactions.
But that was not to be an
obituary as some analysts were writing about.
The huge support to the
Delhi gangrape protests is a living testimony to it. While there was an
organized group working on to mobilize the youth base through proactive social
media use, the unorganized Delhi gangrape protests were organized by the youth
voicing the need to react and speak up against the government’s lackadaisical
attitude on the Delhi gangrape probe and related social concerns about women
security and independence.
Elements of spontaneity
were there in both the movements. But being a ‘reactive and unorganized’
movement with a leaderless leadership tells us the transition is happening in a
positive direction.
The reactive civil
movements with mass participations are the right kind of pressure tools for a
deviated government in a democracy to act proactively.
The youth mobilization in
the Delhi gangrape case has been largely based on use of social media to
connect the dots to form the line of protests. The movement has generated
support across the urban centres of the country, the places with possible dots having social media
users, discerning enough to take a call. The tools were used not only to
connect and promote but also to refute. The administration’s version in the controversial
death of the Delhi Police constable who was injured when the protests went
violent, aimed at the sensationalizing the issue and suppress the protests by
blaming the protesters, was strongly questioned on social media and was taken
up later by the mainstream media to raise pointers of relevant debate.
A Hindustan Times report
wrote: Protest pages on Facebook and
Twitter hashtags like #DelhiProtests, #DelhiGangRape and #StopThisShame acted
like pivotal platforms to help activists conveniently arouse sentiments,
announce protests and enlist demonstrators.
And in contrast, like then
in 2011, we cannot say that traditional media played and equally participating
role now. The day after the day when the perpetrators did it was 2nd phase of the Gujarat assembly election. Most of the media vehicles
chose to give the news related to the crime a passing treatment. The apathy was
even more on the show on December 20, the day of counting of votes. Meanwhile,
the youth had started reacting on the social media just after the crime
incident. The government apathy and media’s differential treatment only helped
the dots connect fast and bond more strongly.
By the time, when the
mainstream media took the issue ‘prominently’, the youth was already there in
the streets, raging, voicing and protesting. The mainstream media only
supplemented, and not ‘assisted’.
And the way the protests
went peacefully except one or two aberrations, it tells us the positive signs.
The protests were largely dominated by a mob-free mentality. No one was
instructing them but they felt let-down by the violence (by few anti-social
elements among the protesters), worked to rectify it and kept the movement
apolitical.
The protests were not
anti-government; they were anti-system.
When a protest movement
takes this orientation, it is a positive sign for democracy and warning to the
policymakers that they are on the wrong track.
And it was this
increasingly mature nature of the protest that made the government to come to
the talking terms.
After the huge, huge
mobilization, the sudden steep fall for the anti-corruption movement of 2011
and the ‘reactive, spontaneous, leaderless and growing’ support to the Delhi
gangrape protests just after a year tell us how wrong it was to write off the
potential of social media and the collective conscious of the youth.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
