The West Asia turmoil reminds me of a Satyajit Ray classic. Hirak Rajar Deshe was the story of a cruel, quirky despot who presided over a mythical country – Hirak Rajya — that had a big diamond mine that ran on slave workers whipped to death by the thuggish king’s men.
The magnificent singer-drummer duo Goopy and Bagha land up at Hirak Rajya and get a taste of the mad king’s evilness. Secretly, they use their magical powers to stoke the fires of dissent till it turns into a full blown people’s movement. The tyrant is overthrown. The film closes with hundreds of citizens tying long ropes to a gigantic statue of Hiraker Raja and pulling it down amid slogans of Dori dhorey maro taan, raja hobey khaan khaan (tug at the rope and the king would be in pieces).
Among the many tricks Hirak Raja uses to keep his subjects in check is mind control. He has in his court a scientist who is comical and diabolic at the same time. He runs a fearsome laboratory.
The lab is a terrifying place because it has a brainwashing machine – the mogoj prakhyalan yantra. A slew of rhyming slogans are loaded onto it and these invariably end with Hiraker Raja Bhogobaan (the king of Hirak is god). And no two mantras are identical. There is a set for students, another for teachers, yet another for poor peasants defaulting on taxes. The wandering minstrel who sings mellifluously on the sufferings of the Hirak people is brainwashed and shockingly he too ends his numbers with Hiraker Raja Bhogobaan.
It’s a gripping narrative of a teacher who refuses to get cowed down by the king’s arbitrary and draconian misrule. He leads an uprising from a hidden grotto in the hills far from the city after his tol is burnt down, parents assaulted and books burnt. In the end, the king – suitably brainwashed himself – rushes to his statue, picks up one end of the long rope and pulls his own statue down.
If the whole of West Asia has a likeness to Ray’s Hirak Rajya, I do not know. But the way governments have fallen like nine pins suggests one thing. The mogoj prakhyalan yantra (brain washer) has certainly run its course. Despots who have held sway over their people for decades have had to bite dust, their own people having turned against them.
When they seized power, almost all of them had symbolized hope, reform and change. Muammar Gaddafi, a young army officer in Libya, overthrew King Idris in 1969 at the head of what he insists on calling a revolution. In Egypt too, a monarch was ousted pretty much like in Iran. Presumably, all these overthrown kings were Hirak Rajas of their times and popular anger drove them out.
But the replacements these countries turned into were equally tyrannical, if not more. For years, the infamous brainwasher worked wonders. In Libya, Gaddafi’s Green Book was till recently religion. Iran, Egypt and others had their own opiates that dulled the collective pain of people. Systems were not put in place, governance remained a dictionary word and Big Brother America treated the region as one big filling station. Keep the oil tap running and they looked the other way.
In countries such as Egypt, once the swell of public opinion turned against the autocrat and millions swarmed Tahrir Square Hosni Mubarak was history. The one machinery he had built with some care and attention, the army, deserted him and sided with the people. That explained why tank turrets did not spew fire and people clambered on to them flashing victory signs with personnel of the armed forces.
Only the other day in Libya, where a tsunami of public protest is still racing through cities, a pilot tasked to bomb civilians bailed out of his craft and ensured his fighter jet crashed somewhere in the desert sands far from human habitation. He and other soldiers like him have refused to turn against their own.
At the cost of absolute power, the Arab dictators didn’t bother to build institutions and took for granted the unquestioning fealty of their people. Today, Gaddafi appears as a megalomaniac talking as if he personally owns the country he rules by divine sanction.
But like Hirak Rajya needed a Goopi-Bhagha to spark off a revolution, in the Arab world too there must have been a catalyst, a stimulant that gave the simmering subterranean discontent voice and muscle. I suspect information and technology teamed up to play Goopi-Bagha here. Egyptians, Libyans, Tunisians proliferate. You’ll find them all over the world. The internet has over the years streamed thousands and thousands of images of liberal democracies the world over where rights are respected and human life is precious. Dissent is not a bad word and dissenters are not picked up by secret police to be gunned down in some desolate corner of the country. Corruption is punished. Tainted ministers and functionaries are taken to task. Nobody gets a free run.The government is responsible and answerable to the public.
Still, the question one asks is what was about the timing of these conflagrations? Why did these demagogues have to tumble now? What set off the fire? Some experts say the spark was lit by a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010. He was protesting against the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation inflicted on him by a female municipal official. The humiliation part of this story is very critical here. It is when dignity takes a beating that people strike back. Human beings can’t be treated as cattle. They are born to live honourable lives.
This event, experts tracking the uprisings say, captured the nation’s mind and forced an outpouring of anger that swept away President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who held power from 1987 to 2011. The President, who till the other day looked so secure and unassailable, fled the country. The Jasmine Revolution had seen the end of his iron-fisted rule.
Tunisia, otherwise a nation that has clocked around 5% GDP growth, had for long suffered Ben Ali and his family against whom there were charges of corruption and nepotism. A survey recently ranked Tunisia 164th out of 178 on press freedom. It showed the country as one under an authoritarian government. Suppressed for far too long, popular anger erupted and forced a change in leadership. Hiraker Raja was ripped up from the pedestal he stood on and flung far into the Mediterranean.
Ditto for Egypt’s tinpot dictator Mubarak. He too ran a pressure cooked country where steam was never let out till one day the lid blew and everything flew off the handle. Mubarak, who had looked so handsome and proper till some days ago, cut a really sorry figure and had to fade away into the sunset.
I suspect secretly the Ben Alis and the Mubaraks of this world were secret worshippers of a demon called Adolf Hitler. They set out to control public minds, sway them with bombastic, blustery and blood-boiling speeches, swear in the name of the fatherland and carry out repression in the name of the good of the nation. The nation does get swayed. But only for a while. Then the thermostat snaps and the temperature races to boiling point and breaches tolerance levels. Revolution happens. Hiraker Raja is smashed.
