The Power of Protest - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 107

A 'Rosa Parks Moment'
At various times when the protests against rape and corruption were at their height, it
seemed that life in India might never be quite the same again because the young and newly
aspirational middle class had found its voice. Corruption had, of course, not stopped, and
new rapes were being reported daily, but people had come out in protest, not pulled by
organized campaigners, vested interests or political parties but by a demand from varied
classes for India to change.
As someone said in one of the many television discussion programmes that ran for sev-
eral weeks, 'the days when gradualism was acceptable are over.' To put it another way, the
government could no longer rely on the quick fix of jugaad or the laid-back acceptance
of the inevitable to avoid, or at least stem, social protest and unrest. The statement prob-
ably was over-optimistic but it did illustrate a growing belief that the economic and social
changes that had begun in 1991 now needed to be reflected in government, the law, and the
operations of the police - and that the domination of women by men needed to end.
Was this 'a Rosa Parks moment', wondered Nandan Nilekani. 'This is just like that mo-
ment in the US, when one woman's refusal to give up her seat in the bus sparked off the
civil rights movement,' he suggested at the Jaipur Literature Festival at the end of January
2013. Rosa Parks was a black woman whose rebellion against oppression in Montgomery,
Alabama, in December 1955 29 triggered, as Nilekani put it to me later, 'a whole set of
events - the rise of Martin Luther King, Kennedy and his support for Civil Rights, MLK's
famous speech “I have a dream” and, after Kennedy's assassination, LBJ [Lyndon B. John-
son] fulfilling his intent by passing the Civil Rights Act in 1965.'
Nilekani was suggesting that 'one seminal event that causes national outrage can have a
string of positive consequences in terms of reforms'. 30 Tied with that, he believed that 'the
aspiration of millions of young Indians would drive the change' in governance and other
areas. He saw both Hazare and the outrage on the rape case as a demand for better 'public
goods' such as safer cities, better women's rights and cleaner governance, and said this was
'very different from agitations that demand some quota or entitlements for some category
of people'.
Rosa Parks' protest caught a potent moment in American history, when a spark was
needed to generate change in race relations. That point may not have been reached in India.
Unlike in the case of Egypt's Tahrir Square and the other Arab Spring uprisings that began
late in 2010, 31 India's middle class is not yet ready to be a cohesive force, separate from
political parties and other established organisations. A start was however made between
2011 and 2013 in Delhi and across the country. Middle-class opinion became a force that