Eviction will only revive the Occupy protest movement

There’s something about grassroots political movements that gets the law enforcement agencies hyperactive and truncheon-happy when darkness falls. Just ask Baba Ramdev . Overnight, Occupy Wall Street protestors in New York were forcibly evicted in the dead of the night from the park where they’d perched themselves for the past two months, to protest the venal greed of Wall Street bankers and the political ecosystem that allows them to flourish. The night-time action momentarily put an end to the free-wheeling “Woodstock of anti-capitalism” that had captured the imagination of protestors around the world – including, somewhat fleetingly, in India. Similar crackdowns were simultaneously initiated in cities and towns around the US and elsewhere around the world. [caption id=“attachment_132269” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=" The forced eviction under the cover of darkness, is perhaps the best possible outcome from the perspective of protestors. Reuters"]  [/caption] In New York, the dispersed protestors were allowed back into the park once it had been sanitised, but disallowed from bringing camping material and tents. The authorities perhaps reckon that the eviction, which took the protestors by surprise, will effectively crush the disparate movement that has meandered on, merely on the strength of a fluid but unfocussed anti-capitalist political vision. It’s far more likely, however, that for all its legitimacy from the point of view of urban management, the eviction will end up re-energising the Occupy Wall Street movement at a time when it was losing momentum and at risk of falling off the map. For one thing, the undisputed political will of the protestors was being seriously tested by the onset of winter, which was rendering the alfresco protests somewhat less romantic than had seemed in the balmy autumn of discontent. With the movement drawing less and less media attention in recent weeks, the protests had become somewhat self-serving in their doggedness. The protestors had also been under pressure to work out a negotiated end to the protests owing to considerations of hygiene at Zuccotti Park. That would have of course been a very tame ending for a movement that had set out to change the world as we know it. Which is why the forced eviction overnight under the cover of darkness — which invests them with the halo of martyrdom and allows them to retreat with honour — is perhaps the best possible outcome from the perspective of the protestors. In any case, the setting for the protest – Zuccotti Park – isn’t as integral to the Occupy movement as similar landmark public squares that have been associated in recent months with history-shaping events, such as Tahrir Square in Cairo. In fact, right from the start, the Occupy Wall Street movement had broken free of the limitations of geography by quickly going global. In that sense, the Occupy movement is a free-spirited, incendiary idea that resides largely in the minds of the self-proclaimed 99 percent. So long as the underlying inequities that the Occupy movement raises remain unaddressed, not even police truncheons can snuff out that idea from these inflamed minds.