Region: Awaiting the people’s move

All over Southasia, people suffer under autocracies and anarchies. Then they rise, in swellings called people's movements. Of course, these movements are not in themselves enough, as has become clear from the continuing confusion in Nepal a year and a half after the People's Movement of April 2006 overthrew King Gyanendra. But when a movement is real, as Nepal's was, it gives society the energy required to overcome the hopelessness and disillusionment that inevitably seep in on the long road to peace and democracy. A people's movement provides the mass base, the mandate of the people, which cows down extremists on both the right and left, and which provides energy for civil society and political parties to continue in the task of institutionalising peace, representation and pluralism. A people's movement does not kill its own children, as a revolution is liable to. It is a force that is much more moderate, but crucially mass-based.

Burma, Pakistan and West Bengal – different entities at various stages of democracy and un-democracy – have, over the last few months, provided examples of peoples attempting to rise as one, in order to wrest back control of their political affairs. For the most part, these hopes have been dashed, at least temporarily. The Burmese last rose up in 1988, when the people were subsequently crushed by the same junta that today wields power from the new capital of Naypyidaw. During the course of this past August and September, the country's monks led protests that were once again brutally crushed.