The Jasmine Revolution that did not reach Tiananmen Square

There was one brief period in my life, in my early life, when I understood what it means not to have the freedom of expression.  I was barely into my teenage and I knew I hated the very idea of government clamping down on that glorious freedom.

It was when federal rule was imposed as a result of a declaration of national emergency.  The prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and her minions--especially her second son, Sanjay Gandhi--turned India into a police state.  One of my favorite magazines, Thuglak, carried blank spaces in its pages--the blank resulting from the government censors axing out paragraphs that, one would assume, were critical of the government.

A fearful life was not worth it even though trains ran on time and workers actually worked.  It became the beginnings of the doubts about the communist ideas that so much fascinated me, though it took me a few more years to completely rid myself of the red within.

A little more than a decade later, I, like hundreds of millions of others on this planet, watched transfixed the protests at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.  Pro-democracy protests by students who were in my age cohort.  The rawness of the emotions!

Recalling the protests, Nicholas Kristof writes:

A quarter-century has passed. The bullet holes in the buildings along the Avenue of Eternal Peace have been patched, and history similarly sanitized....
The great Chinese writer Lu Xun once wrote, about an earlier massacre: “Lies written in ink cannot disguise facts written in blood.”

I have to remind myself that it has been 25 years since those protests.  Twenty-five years!

Individual freedom is way too valuable for me to give up.  I empathize with those who yearn for it.  When the Arab Spring spread, I hoped that the protests in Tunisia and others in the Arab world would reach China and trigger a Jasmine Revolution.  It never happened, of course.

If you can read this blog post, tweet, update your status on Facebook, or even yell out loud that your government is fucked up, those are all evidence that you--and I--have freedoms that did not come easily.  A great many made this possible for us, and often they paid for it by suffering torturous deaths.  For now, it might seem as if the deaths of the Tiananmen protesters was all in vain.  Not by any means.  For one, it reminded millions like me that freedom is precious.  Further, as Kristof writes:

As China prospers and builds an educated middle class, demands for participation will grow. I’ve covered democracy movements around the world, from Poland to South Korea, and I’m confident that someday, at Tiananmen Square, I’ll be able to pay my respects at a memorial to those men and women killed that night.

I can only hope that we are not far from that day in the future.

Here is the late poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Way back, I mean way back, in the ninth or tenth grade when we covered world history, we learnt about the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille.  Suddenly the phrase "liberty, equality, fraternity" became familiar.

However much I might complain about the contemporary world, I am equally convinced that humans have never had freedom at the individual level as we do now.  With more and more countries transitioning to liberal democracy, the number of people with liberty will only increase.  We owe a huge thanks to the Magna Carta, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, that got this liberty ball rolling.

The turmoil in the Arab world or Myanmar or Tibet are all nothing but examples of people fighting for their freedoms.  Whether it is societies like those where liberty is highly restricted, or here in the US or in France, the rally for liberty depends on we the people. It depends on us.  We worry about the NSA snooping around, for instance, because we understand how much the liberation of individuals could be easily reversed.  The quieter we become, the odds of freedom getting restricted rise, and rise rapidly.

Here is the late poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the urgency of it all:

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Indi(r)a taught me about free speech

As I noted earlier, 25 years ago, I was getting ready to leave for the US.

August 15th will mark the anniversary of my own "tryst with destiny"

In 1987, the Singapore Airlines flight that I was on took off from Madras (as Chennai was known then) a little before the midnight that made made the transition from the 14th to the 15th--similar to India's birth at midnight.  Quite dramatic, eh!

As the US immigration stamp from that old passport shows, I landed in Los Angeles on August 15th, 1987 and since then have only been a tourist in the old country where I had my wonderful formative years.

To borrow from Salman Rushdie, I, too, am one of "midnight's children."

Living here, and having grown up in an independent India, I have not experienced anything other free speech--but for a brief two-year period from the summer of 1975, when the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, decided that she had had enough with the opposition to her views. Well, with the exception of my awful colleagues who prefer that I shut up!

In particular, Gandhi disagreed with the court’s ruling that voided her election victory.  To add salt to her political wounds, the court further declared her ineligible for elections for an additional six years.

Instead of resigning from office, a la Richard "I'm not a crook" Nixon, Indira Gandhi blazed her own ignominious trail.  In June 1975, Gandhi cited national security concerns and essentially suspended the constitution itself.

One of the chilling effects it had was on free speech.

Prior to this declaration of Emergency, for instance, the open grounds—the  “maidan”—close to our home was the site of political meetings almost every other day.  The loudspeakers provided us with a fantastic political theatre of sorts—after all, this was before television reached all far corners of India. 

However, under Emergency, there was an eerie silence everywhere.  It was almost as if people’s tongues had been cut off.  Newspapers and magazines, especially those that were critical of Gandhi even prior to Emergency, often had blank columns because the government’s censors had axed out paragraphs that were considered a threat to internal stability.  Many dissenting journalists were imprisoned as well.  If five or more people wanted to meet and talk, special permission had to be obtained from the government beforehand—otherwise, they faced jail time for unlawful assembly! 

Even as a kid I was a political junkie, and this was the worst kind of withdrawal I could have then imagined! 

Fortunately, this Emergency did not last long.  It was lifted in March 1977, and soon after, Indira Gandhi and her party were voted out of office by overwhelming margins.  It was convincing proof that Indians—the educated and the illiterate alike—could not be silenced forever. 

Of course, this brief interlude is nothing compared to the story of India’s sibling-neighbor, Pakistan.  Democracy has always been fragile there, with military coups and other anti-democratic events occurring at regular intervals. 

One of the many victims of such political machinations was the poet-intellectual Faiz Ahmed Faiz.  Faiz was born a hundred years ago, in 1911, in the undivided India, and lived in the newly created Pakistan after the horrible partition in 1947.  However, his “speech” and political activities, like those of many Latin American literary-intellectuals, quickly landed him in trouble.

In 1951, Faiz was sentenced to four years in prison for his participation in a failed conspiracy to oust the government. Decades later, he was yet again on the wrong political side, after democracy yielded to military law in 1977.  Faiz was forced into exile.  He did return to Pakistan in 1982, and died two years later.

One of Faiz’s poems was about the importance of speaking out, which my immediate neighborhood knows all too well.  Here is the final verse from his poem, titled “Speak”:

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Faiz provides me one more reason to speak via this blog--my own maidan.

"Speak" is the poem for the Egypt moment.

Won't you agree with me that Faiz describes well the value and importance of free expression?

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

More about Faiz here

Poem of the day: Speak

In an earlier posting, I had quoted Tony Judt who worries about "no speak."  Today, I read this piece on Google, China, and the First Amendment by James Fallows where he writes about a site called "1 for All."  An interesting site that is, devoted to the right to free speech.

To add to all that, here is a wonderful poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in translation from its original in Urdu ...

A quick note on Faiz first.  Known for his poetry, Faiz was imprisoned for four years in the early days of Pakistan as a country for his role in a failed attempt at a coup.  It is even more unfortunate that in the post-Bhutto (the father, not the daughter) Pakistan, Faiz was forced into exile to Lebanon where he lived for a decade.

As far as I am concerned, these unfortunate events may not even have happened if the nasty partition had never occurred in the first place. 

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

I knew of the following "film song" but had no idea it was a Faiz poem (Mujh se pehli si mohabbat) to which Noor Jehan (the singer here) had added the music