The Power of Protest - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 100

All the protesters - from the women at India Gate and the Hazare crowds to politicians
and villagers who blocked industrial projects in West Bengal and Orissa - were demanding
something better from modern India after more than two decades of economic development
and six decades of post-independence democratic rule. The same message had been carried
in November 2007 when 25,000 landless workers marched 320 km to Delhi to highlight
their plight as real estate and other developments swept away their traditional agricultural
jobs, often forcibly acquiring their land. 5 Members of the Gujjar pastoral tribe from Ra-
jasthan, who had marched on Delhi a few months earlier, were asking for official tribal
status and public sector job reservations because they felt left out of the growing riches
around them. Such rural-based protests, however, rarely aroused more than passing interest
in Delhi unless they involved massive violence and killings, or Naxalite activity.
The November 2007 march coincided with a big Fortune magazine Global Forum con-
ference, in which a few hundred international businessmen were secluded in the old-style
elegance of Delhi's Imperial Hotel. This prompted Jo Johnson, then the FT' s South Asia
correspondent (later a Conservative member of parliament in the UK and policy adviser to
David Cameron, the prime minister), to write about what the top executives would have
seen if they had ventured out of their secluded surroundings: 'From the stunted and wasted
frames of the landless, they would have observed how malnutrition rates, already higher
than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are rising in many places, as wages lag behind soaring
food prices. They would have learnt how the 120m families, who depend on the land for
subsistence agriculture, generating no marketable surplus from one season to the next, live
in terror of expropriation by state governments operating land scams in the name of devel-
opment.' 6
The common thread in all these protests related to the fact that, while life has been
transformed in many ways for the elite and a growing middle class, many things have not
changed. Villagers are being left behind as urbanization sweeps through their fields, mak-
ing real estate profits for speculators, and tribals are losing out as mining companies dig
in their remote forest and mountain habitats. Society is still male dominated, defying the
economic and social changes of the past 20 years that have transformed many women's po-
tential careers and lifestyles. Women are also frequently treated with disdain - especially
by the police, as was evident with the gang rape and its aftermath.
In none of these instances had the government and other authorities performed ad-
equately. There had been a failure both to transform the police into well-trained and so-
cially responsible guardians of the law, and to revamp and speed up a legal system where
cases can last for 20 years or more. It was a mark of official indifference that six years after
the 2007 march, politicians were still squabbling about rewriting laws contained in a 1894
Act and curbing government powers to take over land compulsorily without adequate com-
pensation for existing landholders.