There are reports that
Iran has not, as earlier thought, disbanded its ‘morality police’ in the face of mass protests against its theocratic regime. There are similar reports of protests in
China over the government’s ‘zero-Covid’ policy hanging in a stalemate – or confronted by
Beijing‘s usual ‘stick and carrot’ control measures. On the face of it, these mass agitations may or may not succeed in their primary objective – bringing about a more open society. Past protests such as the ‘
Arab Spring‘, after all, have clambered back, making many sceptical of the need for such protests at all. But such an understanding misses the protest’s real function: to register opposition to unpopular policy or governance behaviour. Such pushbacks in otherwise politically oppositionless spaces go beyond whether they ultimately succeed or not. They show up malignancy, even if they may not deliver a ‘cure’.
Protests are part and parcel of democracies. They must not automatically be seen as seditionary. They are one of the ways in which people seek to influence discourse, in most cases a desperate attempt. For autocratic governments, such protestation is conflated with existential threat. It doesn’t have to be. The protests in Iran and China reflect voices of two societies aware that a more amenable government-citizenry relationship is possible, desirable – but not inevitable. Relaxations or concessions, if any, by the governments are their ‘little victories’.
For democratic and open societies like the US or India, the demonstrations in China and Iran send out a valuable lesson: the serving political class must not view every protest as questioning its legitimacy but as views trying to affect policy that should be heard, even if not always agreed upon.
