Understanding Contemporary Mass Uprisings

by Aditya Nigam

 

The recent mass uprisings in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and most recently Nepal, which followed closely on the heels of militant mass protests in Indonesia, continue a trend that began across the global South with the Arab Spring. Though the movement in Tunisia started towards the end of 2010, the year 2011 became a watershed and the effects of ‘Tahrir Square’ resonated rapidly in different parts of the world, including Europe (the Indignados in Spain and Aganaktismeni in Greece) and the Occupy Wall Street in United States.

This long chain of mass movements, often turning into uprisings that have forced rapid regime changes, could be said to be characteristic of our times in more ways than one, which we will return to in a moment. Before that a quick rewind is in order.

The ‘Post-Political’ Moment

One kind of mass uprisings had brought down the edifice of Soviet bloc socialism, some three and a half decades ago, leading to triumphant declarations of the ‘end of history’, celebrated in the Western world as the final triumph of ‘liberal democracy’ over Marxism and socialism. Very soon, it was to be supplemented by declarations of end of politics itself – and the arrival of a post-political condition.

In a sense, this ‘post-political’ condition was the creation of neoliberalism that had rapidly established the unquestioned sway of its economic theology worldwide. Defeated Leftists in the post-Soviet world had no argument left to counter this neoliberal orthodoxy and they all rapidly fell in line, from Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in Britain to the CPI(M) in West Bengal – not to speak of the remaining ‘socialist’ countries like China, which too had embarked on the path of privatization. Consequently, there was no challenge to the new orthodoxy.

Therefore, across the world, it became impossible to distinguish between parties of the Right and Left as they increasingly started looking like each other. This was as true of India, despite its profusion of political parties, as it was elsewhere. What we saw across the global South, as a consequence, was the frenetic pace of ‘neoliberal development’ that is predicated on the massive increase in inequality, accelerated dispossession of adivasi/tribal as well as peasant populations for clearing forests and land for mining, industry and luxury consumption of the rich. The exaltation of wealth and the ‘get rich quick’ mantra of neoliberalism also gave us, as collateral damage, the looting of public sector banks and other public resources. More than actual poverty, it is the starkness of the obscenity of the lives of the rich, flaunted and exalted day in and day out, vis-à-vis the utter irrelevance and powerlessness of the rest of the population that has led to massive seething discontent against the existing regimes.

The Uprisings

It is this accumulating discontent in different sections of the population that becomes the powder-keg waiting to be ignited at the appropriate moment by virtually anything at all. In Marxist and post-Marxist theory two possible ways of understanding such revolts have been proposed. The first, drawing on Lenin’s discussion of the Russian revolution, was proposed by Louis Althusser through his concept of ‘overdetermination’ – a situation of an accumulation of antagonisms whereby discontent in different sections of the populace comes together into an ‘explosive unity’ against the regime. The other, proposed by Ernesto Laclau, in the context of populist mobilizations is where a ‘chain of equivalence’ is established between the demands of different segments of the population, which leads to the division between a broadly, if temporarily, unified ‘people’ – the underdog – versus the corrupt political elite. While elements of both kinds can be identified in these uprisings (from the Arab Spring to the recent South Asian revolts), they do not exactly fall into the category of a populist mobilization that often presupposes a populist leader or organization who becomes the expression of popular will.

What we see instead is more of the first kind – overdetermination and accumulation of discontent that then breaks forth in characteristically spontaneous and leaderless self-mobilizations. Interestingly, in Sri Lanka, even though the discontent had been accumulating, there was no uprising to begin with. As a study of the Sri Lankan Centre for Policy Alternatives on the Aragalaya shows, it started with only a few people demonstrating near President Gotabaya Rajpaksa’s private residence in March 2022, but very soon thousands and thousands of people joined and decided to march towards his private residence. The report tells us that even prior to this, protests had been going on in different parts but it was this turn of events – people deciding to march to the President’s residence – that the decisive change happened. That became the point of articulation. In the case of Bangladesh too, we know that it was initially a much more limited movement against the freshly reintroduced job-quotas for descendants of so-called freedom fighters. This movement started snowballing into a bigger challenge to the government after 16 July as the government labeled the protesters s ‘Razakars’, i.e. those who collaborated with the Pakistan Army during the Liberation Struggle. From the very next day, Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government unleashed full on state repression in the universities leading to around 50 students being killed. The more the repression intensified, the more the spread and popular support for the movement grew.

In contrast, the uprising of the student and youth (the so-called Gen Z) in Nepal, was a quick short affair that brought down the regime in less than two days. According to initial media reports, the uprising took place simply because the government had banned 26 social media platforms. However, it soon became clear that despite the fact that Nepal’s ruling elite, for the past fifteen years, comprised people of Left wing persuasion of different shades, rampant corruption and nepotism had been agitating the youth for quite some time. Obviously, their being on the Left was no inoculation against massive corruption of the kind we see elsewhere. The #NepoBaby hashtag targeting the nepotism of the political elite that began to trend on social media, according to journalist Pranaya Rana, was inspired by Indonesia where mass protests had been going on for months. The Indonesian revolt started with a massive protest against the $3000 housing allowance that the political elite was planning to give to itself, in a country where wages are extremely low. Even as the demonstrations erupted, a 21 year old food delivery man was run over and killed by a police vehicle. Thereafter, the protests simply escalated.

These are all instances of ‘leaderless’ movements in the sense that there is no prior and identifiable leadership organizing these protests and uprisings. Usually in these situations, new leadership is thrown up in the course of the movements. There is a huge element of spontaneity in their emergence, for even though the social media conversations may have been going on for a long time, giving a sense of community to the participants, the actual timing of the movements is always contingent on unpredictable factors.

The internet makes possible conversations across ideological divides and allows for broad based post-ideological mobilizations. They are also facilitated by the fact that we live in a world where the Left no longer counts as an ideological-political force with anything different to offer to the younger generation. The image of an all-powerful and intrusive state like the Soviet or the Chinese does not inspire the younger generation. Ever since the Soviet bloc's collapse we are dealing with this ‘blank in the crowded text’ of contemporary politics - an empty place where the Left once stood but whose remnants repeatedly reveal themselves to be too stultified to show any sign of any movement.

The ‘empty place’ opened up by the collapse of a certain kind of Left does not obliterate the need for a new kind of Left politics. Rather, it cries out for a new imagination of Left politics. Unfortunately, that is nowhere on the horizon – except in some faltering, though important efforts made in Latin America.

The Revolution/ Restoration Problem

It is true that there is a ‘problem’ with such movements, if it can be called a problem at all. Being largely leaderless and post-ideological, and not the work of professional politicians, they routinely shun the question of power. Marxists have criticized them for not having a programme and long-term vision of transformation but that is like saying that it is illegitimate to protest until and unless you have a blueprint for the future. Frankly, how can you hold people responsible for not wanting to 'take power'? Of course, this does mean that once they stir up things, the field becomes open for the forces of status quo or 'restoration' to intervene and take power – or worse, open the possibility of even more Right-wing protofascist forces to step in.

The dynamic between ‘revolution’ and ‘restoration’ is always complex and one cannot rule out the intervention of powerful reactionary forces to turn the scales in their favour. This has indeed happened in most of the countries of the Arab Spring. Tunisia too has finally succumbed to a one-person rule after some years of an electoral parliamentary regime. In Sri Lanka, the Aragalaya had had a powerful impact in helping the population overcome the deep Sinhala-Tamil divide to the extent that a new Left Wing formation could take power in the elections that followed in 2024. The impact of the Aragalaya seems to have enabled support of the Tamils and Muslims for the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance comprising the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), workers’ unions and women’s rights groups. Even though the NPP predates the Aragalaya, having been formed in 2019, the impact of the uprising certainly helped the supposedly Marxist, Sinhala nationalist (JVP) to tone down its earlier rhetoric and adopt a more inclusive stance. Given this, the situation in Sri Lanka did not spiral out of control and has seen broadly Left-wing forces take power – though the JVP and NPP are now eager to do their bit so as not to upset the neoliberal applecart.

In Bangladesh, on the other hand, the situation is far more complex. In the first place, with the army refusing to carry out Sheikh Hasina’s command, it emerged as an ally of sorts of the uprising. Nonetheless, when the question of constituting an interim government came up, though it was the student leadership that had proposed the name of Mohammed Yunus to head it, the initial rounds of meetings convened by the army invited only the traditional parties like the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jamat-i-Islami to the meetings. The student leadership had to appeal to the student and people not to vacate the streets till the leaders of the movement were included in the interim government. The struggle, in other words, was sharp. After the formation of the interim government there has been a clamour on the part of BNP and Jamat to immediately hold elections as they know that they will be able to reap the benefits of the deep anti-Awami League sentiments of the uprising. The student leadership, on the other hand, had been insisting on minimal political reforms before going into elections. In the meantime, they have set up the National Citizens Party in order to be able to intervene in the elections, rather than leave the field open for the traditional parties to ‘restore’ the old order with some minor cosmetic changes. The battle is still on.

In Nepal, the new interim prime minister Sushila Karki, whose name was proposed by the participants of the uprising, has promised to hold elections within six months. The big question in Nepal as well as in Bangladesh will continue to be the same: as long as the aftermath of such insurrections is going to be elections with the same old parties returning to power, there will have been little meaning to the uprisings.

In short, all these experiences underline the urgent need for a new kind of Left imagination which is flexible, open to popular initiative and has a bottom-up rather than a top-down organizational approach.

The Implosion of the Political

At another level however, contemporary movements point to a much deeper problem – that of modern politics itself, which becomes apparent if we examine two recurrent motifs in them.

First, they are not merely directed at existing regimes but in fact, exhibit a rejection of all political parties – indeed the entire ‘political class’. They have therefore often been characterized as ‘antipolitical’, which may be partially true but it is entirely different from the ‘post-political’ that we discussed above. Its meaning needs to be unpacked. Second, linked to this is the repeated appearance of massive anger against ‘corruption’ in these movements. The term ‘corruption’ functions like an ‘empty signifier’, to borrow Laclau’s term. It makes it possible for different sections of the people to understand ‘corruption’ in their own way. A closer look at these movements leaves one in no doubt that there are at least two predominant implications of this term: one, it is seen as defining an unholy nexus between the political class and the corporate capital, which is understood to be responsible for their continuing miseries. Two, linked to this is the larger sense of irrelevance and powerlessness that people experience because of this nexus. However, if one scans the larger global scenario, one can see that this is not just a feature of the Arab and South Asian movements but points towards a far more serious crisis of ‘the political’ (by which I mean simply, the formal domain of politics, parties, power struggles and elections). So much so that ‘democracy’ has been reduced to elections, usually manipulated and ‘managed’, while oligarchies continue to rule unperturbed by the vagaries of what elections might yield. In a 2014 study of the United States of America, two American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argued that the USA was at best an elected oligarchy and not a democracy. That this study was based on data for twenty years, years before Trump arrived on the scene, indicates that this is a deeper structural issue. Our own experience of electoral politics in the subcontinent affirms this claim that what we identify as ‘democracies’ are anything but that; they are simply electoral oligarchies.

 Therefore, we need to understand the ‘antipolitical’ stance of the movements against this backdrop as a rejection of ‘the political’ as the business of party-politics and power struggles. On the other hand, it is equally striking that all the movements stand unequivocally for ‘real democracy’. That is to say, they register a rupture between democracy (and politics in that sense) and ‘the political’ that is seen as the problem. It is not possible to go into an elaborate discussion of this question here but let me end with one final observation: One of the key instruments of modern politics, namely the political party, is at the centre of this storm because, as MN Roy repeatedly warned in his later writings, it fundamentally destroys any possibility of representation of the electors by the ‘representative’, who thenceforth becomes the representative of his/her party. Roy had also warned of the way in which the noise of propaganda takes over, scuttling any possibility of discussing and debating issues before decisions are taken. This mode of doing politics too, like so many other modern practices and institutions, was invented in Europe and transplanted in other parts of the world. That entire design has to be rethought if we want to get out of this global mess.

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Aditya Nigam, formerly with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is a political theorist based in Delhi.