How to hold a dharna in the 21st century

How to hold a dharna in the 21st century
Chidanand Rajghatta

There have been plenty of invocations to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the Seattle sit-down that has stunned the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meet but civil rights protests - and crowd control - at the turn of the millennium is surely a different ball game from the 1920s or the 1960s.

Protestors have been using cell phones, laptops, and palm pilots to alert each other, pass messages, regroup and flummox the police. Internet and e-mail have been instruments of mobilisation. Video cameras have been used to gather evidence of brutality. Some groups have even hired a local television channel to beam their messages.

The cops, on their part, have geared up after some initial pussyfooting. Hi-tech communication gear, aerial helicopter surveys and hidden cameras are now being used to break up the protests. The National Guard with their hi-tech weapons, black armour, and ugly humvees, are a fearsome sight to behold.

This is civil disobedience in the age of technology.

Into Day Three of the WTOmeet in Seattle, Americans are still bellyaching over demonstrations that disrupted trade talks on the opening day. Television is full of commentary and analysis about the protests: who is orchestrating it; why it happened; and whether the police were too mild initially and now are too tough.

It now transpires that the Seattle police was totally caught napping - something that would be termed "intelligence failure" back home. The protestors were not only well prepared, but some groups have been working on the demonstrations for months.

In fact, one local organiser said there had been advertisements in newspapers calling for protest volunteers and anyone who cared to monitor the internet could have got a whiff of what was in the works.

The protestors now have plenty of sympathy from all quarters, starting from the President down, but they are angry and don't give a damn for lip sympathy. Clinton's motorcade on Wednesday was met with a raised middle finger in several places.

The common refrain is thatthere were a few vandals who deserved to be put in the clink, but the cops have now cracked down on even peaceful protestors.Still, protesters have been gathering in groups outside the sanitised downtown areas voicing their anger at a variety of issues. Incidentally, it's not child labour or environmental issues alone that they are demonstrating about.

Even Indian officials acknowledge that there are a whole range of issues on the NGO platter. "Many of them are sympathetic to the cause of India and other developing countries. They seem to be against US corporations exploiting Third World countries," said India's Ambassador to the United States Naresh Chandra, who had a run in with some of the protestors.

The Indian delegation meanwhile has not stopped snickering about the screw up. Some members of the delegation who are or were civil servants at the district level in India bragged about how they could easily handle demos of up to a lakh of people, leading commerce minister to boast about it in a speech toNRIs.

"Yeah right," one of them whispered sotto voce. "Some tear gassing, a lathi charge, and a few rounds of firing. 12 killed. You do that here and they will sue the city and everyone would have to pay."

In some ways, the demonstrations also offer lessons both for Indian NGOs and Indian officials on how the whole business of protests and crowd control has evolved. Many protestors had actually undergone training with an organisation called Direct Action Network to prepare themselves for jail.

They had merely expected to be taken away and put in the clink, not teargassed and pepper-sprayed.

When the cops did fire the shells, they had on hand first-aid nurses who helped those who had been gassed. Most of it was very civil despite the occasional loss of temper.

Some protestors were really well prepared with gas masks and wet rags to counter the tear gas. Some had even pepper-sprayed and vinegared their own eyes mildly to beat the police spray and said it worked. One group called Earth First hadorganised what they called a "lock in" - chaining themselves together so that the police could not disperse them with gas and it would take them time to cut them apart.

So well organised was the group DAN that they had divided the area around the convention center into 13 "pie slices", which scores of small tactical groups blockaded by locking themselves together. These stationary groups were supported by dozens of roving teams, both of protestors and sympathisers - medics, lawyers, communications squads, and even videographers who captured the movement for posterity.

In fact, three days into the protests, both protestors and law-enforcement authorities have been busy capturing the mayhem with the latest in video technology. Protestors doubtless will want to put the cops on the mat by suing them with evidence; the cops are set to retaliate with evidence of who caused the destruction.

It will all come back to bite Seattle and its people when the circus has left town.