Wave of protests shows that Indian democracy’s greatest strength is its ‘million mutinies’
· Scroll
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In 1990, when VS Naipaul published India: A Million Mutinies Now, he gave India a phrase that has acquired an almost prophetic resonance: “a country of a million little mutinies.”
He was not predicting a revolution. He was describing something more consequential – the awakening of the individual.
Naipaul had returned to a country that had changed dramatically since his earlier, far darker journeys through India. He saw people emerging from the inherited certainties of caste, class, family, religion, region and tradition, demanding that they be allowed to decide for themselves who they were and what their lives ought to mean.
Emergence from dominant political thoughts was part of this process. His most important insight was that freedom does not necessarily arrive looking orderly.
“Independence was worked for by people more or less at the top; the freedom it brought has worked its way down,” he wrote. And then came the crucial observation: “People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves.”
That is the heart of Naipaul’s argument.
Freedom creates expectations. Expectations create demands. Demands create friction. And friction creates protest. Naipaul understood something that comfortable democracies, and especially governments confident of their own righteousness, can easily forget – a society becoming freer is not necessarily a society...