Revolutions: Discerning the Blueprint

            A few days ago the hot news on every form of Media was Anna Hazare’s fast against the government policies, corruption and the lokpal bill. I thought this would be a failure as India’s middle class is always passive of corrupt politics unless their own interests are getting affected but the mass protests against the GOI shattered my belief. Recent Libian,Egyptian and ivory coast uprisings left me wondering how  a stable society can instantly be interrupted by revolution .It compelled me to look for the patterns all successful revolutions or uprisings had..

Types

When you look at the type of events shaping the Modern history the social movements can be categorized into two majors-(a) Reformative (b) Revolutionary. None of them are eternal; they have a life cycle of creation, growth, success/failures and eventual dissolution.

Dissatisfaction

You must be thinking poverty could be the reason because it is root cause of all the problems in the world, if this could be the reason then there would be revolutions all the time because most people in the world are poor. The main reason behind every revolution is the accumulating dissatisfaction among people over a period of time because of the bad socio-economic policies of the authoritarian or liberal societies.

Initiating Event

Every revolution needs a fueling moment; a spark to turn a million’s people discontent into a crowd on streets; an electrifying event that can fire up a public already deeply disillusioned with the system like the one Anna Hazare orchestrated in India, like the one Wael Ghonim pulled up in Egypt, the Tiananmen square for china, death of two students for Prague, mass incineration for Iran.

Participation

One of the major problems is to generate the spark and convince the people/ mass to the cause of revolution as everyone has a mentality of risk aversion. The rising popularity and widespread reach of social networking websites have played a big role in spreading & convincing the people to join a social movement but has also prompted governments like of China and Iran to enforce censorship of web and social networking sites.

Hijacking Important Places

Every revolution has gained momentum after hijacking of important places by mass protestors such as Tehrir Square in Egypt, Tiananmen Square in China,Jantar Mantar in India (Anna Baba’s fast).The ideology of movement gets associated with that particular place and has always helped in spreading the movement.

Success or failure

Every revolution comes to a point where either uprising topples the regime (success) or regime suppresses the uprising (failure) or the third way-negotiations, used in democracies where the movements are reformative and calls for a settlement. What collapses a regime is when insiders and men with guns turn against it, when the external pressure is in favour of change.

The recent "people power" revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and demonstrations led by Anna Hazare in India have shown complete or partial success. These revolutions followed large support of citizens, reflecting deep dissatisfaction with their governments.
 

It’s not easy to find a common pattern among all the revolutions but it can be noted that wherever the security forces and high profile citizens have shifted their loyalty to the mass movements the possibility of success has increased else if the senior officials and security forces think they have more to lose from the revolution than by defending the regime, then even the large scale protests have been crushed, Tiananmen square being the best example.