“Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” French Revolution leader Georges Jacques Danton quoting Jacques Mallet du Pan during his trial.
The flaming flower of youth is anger. It blossoms bright and red with blood in the gardens of injustice, despotism and repression, while the evil of fanaticism hides like a Biblical serpent. What happened in Bangladesh is a Gen Z revolution reminiscent of other student revolts in other countries against corruption, police brutality and nepotism coming from a once-beloved leader.
It happened in Germany in the early 1940s: the White Rose movement. It happened in Mexico on October 2, 1968 at Tlatelolco. The anti-Vietnam War protests in Washington memorialised in the image of a young girl with a flower. The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The Arab Spring across the Middle East. The anti-CAA protests that divided minds and drawing rooms in India.
It happened to Sheikh Hasina last week.
Usually, it is an incidental or even unrelated event that culminates in a youth revolution. This time, student protests spread through Bangladesh initially as a quota rebellion. The serpent in this flaming eastern orchard could easily be China and Pakistan, since both see Bangladesh as the eastern gateway to India’s downfall. Revolutions have a mind of their own. December 17, 2010. A young Tunisian vegetable seller immolates himself to protest police harassment.
This act of defiance started the Arab Spring that would topple tyrants such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia—all once thought invincible. History is indulgent towards youth, with devastating consequences. In the 1970s, Iranian students and youth—many of them Communists—rebelled against the autocratic Shah Pahlavi, paving the way for Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Islamic regime to take over Tehran.
Now Iran’s youth, especially the girls, are protesting nationwide at great risk to their lives and liberty to oust the same Ayatollahs Iranian Boomers brought to power. The cause need not be domestic always; it can transcend borders to torchlight issues of mass rape, genocide and relentless retribution. Last year, immigrant and Black students in Ivy League universities, supported by their liberal friends, held sit-ins against Israel’s invasion of Gaza, revealing deep fissures in American society between the Right and the Left and Islamic vs Western values.
The unfortunate part is that student revolutions are discredited easily. The organised nature of global pro-Palestinian marches revealed an organised hand at work, just like the Bangladesh Gen Z revolution was penetrated by the Pak-China axis and theological elements. There is purity in idealism, making the young protestor a victim of his own deeds.
The agitation to overthrow Hasina became a riot against Hindus in Bangladesh, and their temples. Or, the nobility of hope was diluted by politics as happened to the Assam Movement between 1979 and 1985 that demanded the Government of India to detect, disenfranchise and deport illegal aliens aka Bangladeshis; the BJP is obliging three decades later. Its leader Prafulla Mohanta, who became the chief minister on the shoulders of students, is largely forgotten.
Take Rajeev Goswami, another forgotten agitator. The most famous photograph that defined the Mandal Agitation was of the young Congress worker setting himself afire. A large portion of credit for the fall of the VP Singh government goes to this young man who endured his five minutes of fame in agony. Power acts ruthlessly against its challengers, age no bar. But youth bore the brunt in 1970s’ Bengal where Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s Congress government unleashed state murder of Naxalite students and bhadralok alike.
The optimism of righteousness overcomes prudence to often end in disaster. The anti-CAA protests in 2019 exposed the secular divide in India and became a global liberal cause. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia brought down the Communist movement after students gathered in Prague to honour a protestor’s death during a demonstration against Nazi occupation in 1989. Symbolism marks change.
The tiny figure of an unknown student standing in the way of a Chinese tank at Tiananmen Square brought out the doomed defiance and hopelessness of the young. The famous moment when 17-year-old Jan Rose Kasmir offers a chrysanthemum flower to a line of bayonet-wielding National Guard soldiers symbolised youth power against War and Government; students would change America forever. In 2015, Kasmir told The Guardian newspaper: “It wasn’t until I saw the impact of this photograph that I realised it wasn’t only momentary folly—I was standing for something important.” Youth always stands up for something important. Important indeed, because youth agitations are anti-establishment in nature.
In 1960s’ racially segregated America, peaceful sit-ins by students at black-and-white lunch counters marked the Civil Rights movement; a sit-in by four Black students in North Carolina ‘trended’ in the media leading to more sit-ins. The Soweto uprising signalled the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, which today is a basket case of a country plagued by street violence, corruption and drugs.
Belief can be simplistic and blind, as well as idealistic. It can either usher in a new era or bring a disaster like the Arab Spring brought to the Middle East. Little did the students realise that the Muslim brotherhood had assumed control, which eventually threw shadow over idealism in West Asia. Nothing really changed. Dictators were replaced by other dictators or terrorist leaders. Youth-led climate change strikes form a common mosaic against corporate greed and government corruption.
Counter-culture is integral to youth activism; in 2020, Thai students protesting military influence in mass demonstrations adopted a three-fingered salute that originates from The Hunger Games franchise. The names stick too—the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, the Sunflower movement in Taiwan, the Aragalaya protests in Sri Lanka had specific identities with a common theme: youth.
Every protest has a specific nature that mirrors concerns of the time; America’s first student protest was the Great Butter Rebellion of September 1766, against poor food quality in Harvard Dining Halls. Students were suspended, but eventually won the day with the administrators caving in and giving students good butter.
Blood, fury, fire, flowers or butter; one thing is certain. Protest runs in the veins of the young. It decides the fate of nations and dictators, just as it is unfurling in Bangladesh next door.