Chennai Express to Kejriwal: Celebrating year of aam aadmi

By Sandip Roy and Lakshmi Chaudhry December is the month of anticipation, of waiting for the new year to begin as the old comes slowly to an end. In many ways, all of 2013 was a “waiting room” year. The UPA government continued to fall apart, while Rahul Gandhi flailed (and failed) upwards, even as Narendra Modi made his inevitable way to the top of his party. The stage was slowly set for the watershed year that will bring us a high stakes national election. It is easy then to note only the moments of deja vu, events that confirmed what we already knew, the seemingly earthshaking developments that led to the same of dead ends: rape, riots, and political wrongdoing. The great anti-rape protests led to a brand new rape law but did little to stem the tide of sexual violence in a year that witnessed the brutalizing of a 5 year old in Delhi, the gang rape of a young journalist in Mumbai, and the mob attacks on Muslim women  in Muzzaffarnagar. The last also affirming the age-old politics of communal violence, and the ingrained indifference of the political class. [caption id=“attachment_130938” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP[/caption] We were no less indifferent in our own way. TV viewers may have been entranced by the unfolding human drama in Uttarakhand but remained equally unmoved by its underlying message about the environmental costs of uncontrolled development. Even Snoopgate and its attendant revelations of the abuse of power failed to move us. As one Modi fan remarked to us, “Meh, everyone does it. So what.” All this is true, and yet this was also a year of bombshells, of eye-popping revelations. The greatest of them all being the astonishing discovery of the power of We. This was the year of the little guy who found incredible strength in numbers, and was not afraid to use it. Far more so than 2011, this has been the year of the aam aadmi, and not just because of a guy called Arvind Kejriwal. Here is a quick reminder of all the ways how the ordinary citizen reminded the powers that be – world leaders, homegrown politicians, the mighty media, and yes, even movie critics – just who is boss. Pehle AAP. He’s coming up so we’d better get the party started. Arvind Kejriwal is, of course, the poster boy for the power of the aam aadmi. He literally capitalized on the concept and made it AAP. The party shocked the political establishment, pollsters and pundits in Delhi by blowing apart the complacency of the status quo. Kejriwal played a high-stakes game by being the tugboat that took down Battleship Sheila. Even the man selling the Aam Aadmi Party its caps was not convinced they would amount to much. “When he (Kejriwal) started his door-to-door campaigns with just five people tailing him in Connaught Place against Sheila Dikshit, I thought he was wasting his time,” Delhi trader Mohammad Chaman told The Telegraph. Their first order was for just 2,000 caps. That number stands at three lakh now and counting. Inauguration Day isn’t here yet. While Kejriwal was the nondescript bureaucrat turned political star, his larger message has always been: it’s not about me, it’s about the little guy. The one who has to pay a rishwat to get anything done, the one whose opinion is dismissed, the one who keeps getting shoved to the back of the line. That person struck back this year in unexpected ways. And not just politically. Jhoot Boley Kauwa Kaatey. Who would have thought a young reporter would achieve what governments failed to do? Tarun Tejpal, like his magazine’s symbol, the common crow, was the great survivor. After Tehelka stings brought down the mighty George Fernandes, Tejpal had powerful enemies in high places. And yet he endured and thrived. Presiding over the glitzy Think festival, schmoozing with the who’s who of the global elite, he looked untouchable. That’s until the accusation of a lowly young staff reporter ultimately blindsided Tejpal and took him down – and during Think, no less. Within days managing editor Shoma Chowdhury had also resigned, and the magazine now totters on the brink of oblivion – much like Tejpal who remains incarcerated in a Goa cell. The accusations themselves were not that shocking. Stories about sexual harassment are run of the mill in India. It was just that this young woman, like the young journalist raped in Mumbai’s Shakti mills, decided not to keep quiet and just move on. And social media created a storm of Twitter outrage that eventually ensured the issue could not be swept under the carpet and managed as a “ghar ka mamla”. Masses trump the classes: Movie critics made mincemeat of Shah Rukh Khan’s Chennai Express. Everything about the film was slammed from Deepika Padukone’s “South Indian” accent – as if such a thing exists – to the hokey North-South integration messaging to the trainloads of Tamil stereotypes. But the aam aadmi powered it to 100 crores in just over three days. The movie eventually made Rs 3.95 billion proving that while critics can wax hopeful about the rise of the thinking person’s cinema (remember Kahaani and Gangs of Wasseypur?), and wring their hands over mindless masala flicks, when it comes to sheer entertainment, the aam aadmi has a mind of his own. And sometimes the more mindless the better. Hello Dhoom: 3. Rainbow nation: The Section 377 verdict was stunning, taking off-guard everyone who celebrated the earlier High Court ruling as the sign of a more liberal time. What was, however, more stunning was the reaction it provoked. The protests were loud and spontaneous and not just from the LGBT community dismissed as a “miniscule fraction” by the Supreme Court judges. While an unshaven Vikram Seth posed on an instantly iconic cover of India Today, India’s Attorney General GE Vahnavati penned an angry newspaper editorial slamming the judgement. Who could have imagined a rainbow coalition of outrage that included Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sonia Gandhi and Chetan Bhagat, aligning them, if uneasily, with hijra sex workers in a battle over that supposed “non-issue”: sexuality. When it snows: If the Mango Man in India had a good year, so did Average Joe in America. The United States found out that its Enemy Number One was not some Al Qaeda operative but a bespectacled, mild-looking, former CIA employee called Edward Snowden. Last week, a judge in the United States ruled that the government had “almost certainly” violated the US constitution by collecting data on nearly every single phone call to and from the United States. On December 25th, invited to give the “alternative Christmas broadcast” on the heels of the Queen’s traditional message from Buckingham Palace on UK’s Channel 4, he ended with a clarion call to the “we”: “Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.” The Snowden story isn’t over yet – opinions are still divided about whether he is a patriot or a traitor – but he certainly gave Big Brother a very bloody nose. Earlier this year, Snowden had told the Washington Pos_t_, “In terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won." He could have been speaking for his fellow aam aadmis on the other side of the world, as well. Of course social media outrage, a barrage of newspaper editorials and the public’s disgust with the entitlement class does not mean that the aam aadmi revolution is nigh. Old entitlements die hard. As the year ends, after all that strum and drang over corruption in cricket, BCCI president N. Srinivasan is right back where he started. This is, after all, mera Bharat mahaan.