The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday 4 June 2014

25TH ANNIVERSARY OF TIANANMEN MASSACRE: THE SPARK IS STILL THERE

It is the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre and whatever China is doing (and has been doing) to suppress the voices of protests demanding political reforms and more space to democracy, the visuals of the annual ‘protest’ event in Hong Kong are symbolically strong enough to tell the world the flame is still burning, and some day, it will find its way, when the tanks and the armed soldiers would not be able to crush the dissent.

And it is something – the dissent – that every subsequent Chinese dictator has worked on tirelessly - to push away, as far as it can be, to the abyss, from where it would not be able to question the authority of the rule of the communist party.

The China that we know today as the economic powerhouse of the globe was never free politically if we assess it today on the benchmark of the universal norms of political freedom in a democratic set-up.


In fact, the political freedom and the related individual rights died in the world’s most populous country of the day on the day it got its freedom from the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Since then, it has been an open secret how China has consistently killed the voices of political dissent and demands of enhanced democratic rights. The Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Massacre tell us how ruthless the Chinese communist regime has been.

Also, the opening of economy that China started in late 1970s was very cunningly leveraged to buy out and dry out the demands of political freedom. It, in fact, was practiced at a much enhanced pace after the Tiananmen Protests.

Today, China is an economic superpower and is on the way to become the world’s largest economy.

Today, the world order cannot be expected and imagined without China.

And still, China is the same repressive regime that it was, during the Cultural Revolution and during May-June 1989, when thousands were killed by the party’s order.  

China has done all to silence the pro-democracy voices and to erase the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese memory and history. Activists have been jailed. Many disappeared. Media is as free the ruling dispensation thinks to be. Masses have been forced to toe the line or have been co-opted.

But, with a large middle class, that is more educated, more connected to the world and professionally more aspiring, it is going to be difficult, once the dream of the ‘economic boom’ starts stagnating. That is bound to happen and then, it could be the ‘undoing’ of all that. It will take time but it is bound to come, because the spark is there and when it spreads to the millions of the voices, it will be unstoppable.

Reports say today was the strongest protest demonstration in terms of the number of protesters, around 1,80,000 (the New York Times says quoting the organizers), largest since 1989, a heartening sign for everyone except the Chinese ruling elite and its coterie.

What should be more worrying for the Chinese communist dictators is the youth participation, the youth born around and after the massacre of 1989. They are increasingly turning up in large numbers.

What should be more worrying for the Chinese communist party is a China that is more connected and more traceable in spite of the sophisticated monitoring machinery the government has. Had it not been so, we would have never known about the Wukan protests, about many self-immolations of Tibetan activists and about the Xinxiang riots.

The relatively free island of Hong Kong (in the People’s Republic of China) can become the symbolic beginning of the undoing as it has preserved the tradition of the vigil night revisiting the horror of the June 4, 1989 every year since 1989.

The protest visuals of vigil night today are strong enough to push us to think the spark is still there and ‘all was never lost’. In fact, it has always been there, protesting silently, with its spiral building up. And the Chinese government, its ‘dictators’ and the ruling Communist party realise it.

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com