The revolution fever

The fever of revolution has been spreading from one country to the other for the last few months. First it was called as the Arab unrest since the issue was in the Arabian countries and Western Africa. I guess now it has spread much wider and the latest revolution is in India with a 74 year old Gandhian by the name of Anna Hazarae leading the charge.

I was trying to find whats common in all these revolution using my little knowledge of politics. First what I see is that in all cases a youth segment has rallied around these revolutions. Few years back youths and politics didn't have any connection, they were a segment which disconnected themselves from the decision making process. Although they were disconnected they did have a frustration about politics and politicians at large. This particular generation of youth were the people who were not from affluent backgrounds but mainly from middle income and low income families. But in most cases they were full of accumulated frustration about how their country was being ransacked by the elected (in some cases self elected) representatives. This generation had a majority that was dependent on private sector hence automatically they start thinking on the lines of transparency, good governance and professionalism. So this youth segment just needed a rallying point and in most cases the governments out of sheer arrogance and without knowing the gravity of actions tried to curb a protest in an unethical way and ended up in converting them into revolutions.

Crucially at the same point of time this generation of youth got tools which helped to fuel the fire within them, one the social networks, through which news could spread like wild fire and secondly the news hungry 24X7 news channels which easily sensationalize a protest and project it as a revolution.

What worries me is the end result of such unsustainable revolutions, in most cases they do the revolution and then they do not have an alternative. Take the case of Egypt, its probably the only instance in the history of the planet where people did a revolution over threw a dictator and handed the governance to military! Military else where try hard on coup to capture the chair, but in this case people did everything and presented the crown in a plate! I hope revolutions also give better alternatives and do not become a fad which replaces one devil with another.