In praise of gentler means to protest
IN the run up to the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank scheduled for October 6-8 in Istanbul, a journalist and former student of the Bilgi University hurled a shoe at the IMF managing director Domonique Strauss-Kahn. The journalist was one of the twenty-some protesters among the audience, who were against the IMF's role in Turkey.
The incident has a strange similarity to the first such instance of throwing a shoe at a high profile foreign dignitary visiting a host country. Last year in December, the Iraqi reporter Muntadhar al Zaidi did the same thing to US President George W Bush in protest against American occupation of Iraq. Later in February a young man in his twenties threw a shoe at the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao when the latter was addressing an audience on the Cambridge University campus. The Indian premier Manmohan Singh, too, received similar treatment during his electioneering campaign in the eastern Indian city of Ahmedabad in April this year. We have again become a witness to such novel means of protest now aimed not at a politician, but at the chief executive of the global lending agency, IMF.
Strangely though, the shoe throwers were young people who performed their act to register protest against high profile people in politics and power.
It is a historical fact that young people from time to time burst into sudden protest against the establishment and those who represent it. As it happened in Iraq, a bloody war of resistance against American occupation had been going on in that country. Everyday countless numbers of people die there as a result of violence in the form of suicide bomb attacks against the establishment by insurgents on the streets of Baghdad and other cities of Iraq. Once such violent and bloody acts by rebellious groups leading to incalculable deaths and destruction became commonplace and the media carrying them in a monotonously repetitive, routine and predictable fashion, the Iraqi journalist showed a novel way to protest, which was like a respite in that it did not spill blood, but spread a lot of hatred against the visitor albeit in a symbolic form. Nevertheless, it did create more impact in the media across the world than the regular incidents of deaths and devastation.
So, it is not always the magnitude of violence that measures the force of a protest. A kind of protest that can touch the deeper chord of feeling in people can sometimes work miracles. Small wonder this unusual method of protest has been picked up by others for different reasons to vent their suppressed frustrations and resentment against the people speaking for some kind of authority.
In fact, throwing or showing of shoes as a mark of hatred against a person by any section of the population in any society is also not something new either. Neither has this method ever been used to achieve anything positive such as a popular cause. Showing contempt and disrespect is but a negative way to disagree with someone in authority. So, there is nothing much in this method to exult in or exalt out of proportions. What interests one about reinventing this old method of disrespectful protest against things repugnant to someone in the current global context is its content of 'less bloodiness,' but more potential for creating a splash in the media. For media attention as every modern-day schoolboy or girl is aware of is the core message of most of the senseless acts of violence like hijacking of planes, laying siege to schools or holding innocent people hostage by so-called champions of causes of every sort. More often than not, to the perpetrators of such macabre acts, it is more the media attention than the putative cause they are seeking to put across they are craving at heart. But what a price the victims as well as those involved in such wrong approach to seek their own brand of justice have to pay in the end!
On the other hand, peaceful ways to protest or seek justice often came with better dividends than violence.
The other day on October 2, the world remembered in great respect and with solemnity the 140th birth anniversary of a great man, who used non-violent means to fight the causes he stood for. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi (1869-1948), did the miracle with his Satyagraha (Holding firmly to truth) of freeing his country, India, from the clutches of the mighty British imperialism in the late forties of the last century.
The world needs souls like Gandhi now more than any time in the past.
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