Henry David Thoreau remarked, “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Defiance is also a form of protest. Perhaps Adam and Eve were the first humans who defied God and ventured into the forbidden garden with vast consequence for the mankind. Our thriving human civilisation would have been inconceivable without their act of disobedience, which was nothing but a mild protest against Almighty’s diktat. There must be many mythological characters in all cultural groupings who were great protesters against the ills of their age. In recorded history as well, bravehearts like Socrates, John de Arc and several others took upon themselves to stand for their beliefs and paid by their life. There are instances of Guru Arjan Dev during Jahangir’s reign and Sarmad during Aurangzeb’s period who did not hesitate to make the ultimate sacrifice by defying the royal might.
Protest as an instrument to raise voice against a wrong has thus been with the human race for centuries. Many a protest began with one person and with passage of time gained in strength as more and more people joined to make it a movement or struggle or even an armed rebellion. They may be shortlived or long drawn, bitter or very violent. In a sense, the home-grown Buddhism, Jainism, Bhakti cult and the Sufi silsilah were all protests against the dogmatic beliefs of their era and arrayed against endless emphasis on outward manifestations of religious practices than its real spirit. The ultimate protest though surfaced in ecclesiastical field in Europe where a group, now probably largest in number as belonging to a religion, actually came to be known in the 16th Protestants because they protested against the Roman Catholic Church and its excesses, and are called as such even today.
The French Revolution started with the popular protest about shortage of bread and the Queen Mary Antoinette wondered aloud why they were not eating cake if bread was not available. The American Revolution was about their right to have a say in the taxes. Thus many small beginnings led to developments that totally transformed the political and socio-economic lives of those countries and impacted the world as much. In recent times, the Arab Spring readily comes to century as our mind, many of these also ending up in violence. But the bloodiest record in recent history is perhaps of Tiananmen Square Massacre (1989) in Beijing, which was scene of massive repression on public protesters.
“There may be times when we are powerless, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest” — remarked Elie Wiesel, how profound! Freedom struggles and movements of nationalities for self-determination have been most burning examples of early protests, gradually transmuting into movements. Our own protest against the colonial rule passed through different phases and finally got consolidated into a unique form and content that left the world gasping in wonder, a largely non-violent struggle that shook the foundation of the mightiest power of the age and forced her to leave. The Civil Disobedience and the Non-Cooperation Movements of Gandhi were nothing but huge protest against the British policies in India that occupy a very distinct position in the arena of protest movements the world over. His protest against tyranny was on moral grounds and based on ethical principles. It was most remarkable to say that “it is a crime against man and God to submit any more...” Mahatma’s contemporary, Albert Einstein, German physicist who later settled in USA, in another context echoed similar opinion, “If I were to remain silent, I would be guilty of complicity.”
The protests by students and industrial workers were once very rampant in the country but have since subsided. They often turned ugly leading to loss of life and property, often fanned by political parties who divided these voices amongst themselves and instigated their owners to indulge in activities that went beyond the realm of protest. Some recent protests that caught the imagination of the people were those launched by Anna Hazare, spontaneous protests in Delhi over a horrendous rape case, some related to sit-ins by Aam Aadmi Party etc. These were shortlived and did not fructify into any substantial development or transformed into permanent gains.
So perhaps like many other attributes of humans, protest is also unique to them. On a lighter side, animals and plants apparently would not take the protest route, otherwise the beasts of burden would drop their burden every other day, buffaloes would stop giving milk or trees would stop giving us fruits. luckily it does not happen like that. So humans are happy going around exploiting these poor creatures without appreciating their plight or realising how quickly we humans react to lodge a protest against the slightest perception of a wrong against our own self. Charity in this case does not begin at home, neither outside.