Cabbages & Kings | Do Demonstrations Really Set Off Change? Look At History: Iran, Vietnam, Immigrants | Farrukh Dhondy

“To rely on a famous quotation

Is to indulge in literary rotation

Much better than to begin

And then get deeper in

To personal confession

About love and then dissension

What can I be thinking of

The regret of vanished love?”

— From Ek Baar Aur Baja Samir, by Bachchoo

Organisers claimed that half a million people marched in a demonstration in London against the Far Right. Several of my friends joined and said it was a heartening, but disparate demo. Several groups with their own gripes and agenda had come together under this umbrella.

There were the anti-Zionists chanting “from the river to the sea”! I’ve always wondered whether they mean all Israeli Jews should be packed off to America or whether they mean there should be a one-secular-state solution with Jews and Muslims living side by side under a democratic, elected government with constitutional safeguards for minorities? (Dream on fd --ed).

Back to the demonstrators. Very many were for an end to the Iran war, with no real position on how that was to be achieved. Others were “No Kings” demonstrators — by which they didn’t mean Charles but the dictator of the Turd Reich of America!

So, let me then, gentle reader, confess that I have been, through my short and happy life, a participant of perhaps more than a few hundred demonstrations.

I have consequently wondered what many or any of them achieved, apart from the public declaration of a personal dedication to noble principles — peace, justice, one humanity….

I can and will claim to be a veteran of the shouty march, from my teenage foray into the demonstrating columns in my college days in Mumbai shouting “hamara naam, tumara naam, Vietnam, Vietnam”, to London demos in the same cause chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” and dodging mounted police outside the American embassy at Grosvenor Square.

The American aggressors eventually withdrew from Vietnam, and I am now reconciled to the fact that history continues to attribute that defeat to the valiant guerilla war of the Vietnamese led by Ho Chi Minh, rather than to my anti-war protests. Oh well!

Some demonstrations, even with militant activity in the streets, have immediate triumphal or tragic effects. Think of the overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh, or of the murder of thousands of street protestors by the Iranian thug forces or the repressive actions of Orangeyboob Trump’s ICE gangs who’ve killed, so far, not thousands, but two protesting innocents.

Street protests are not just a democratic right and an exercise of opinion.

Throughout history, they have proved to be the pivotal weapon against tyranny, winning some and losing some.

And then I wish to claim to having been part of the cumulative effect of protest and activism on altering the culture and institutional bias of a country.

Erosion is never spectacular — never an avalanche but eventually evident as carving out cliffs of territory.

Regard in evidence the history of the UK from the 1950s to today. Activist protests, including street demos with a focus on a particular cause, have ensured that the generations that succeeded the Black and Asian labourers imported from ex-colonies to do the jobs vacated by the white working class, have risen spectacularly through Britain’s meritocratic mechanisms. London has a mayor who is the son of a Pakistani bus driver.

Westminster is very well represented with Black and Asian MPs in all parties.

Yes, OK, it was Ho Chi Minh and not my protest that won the Vietnam war, but I can certainly claim to have participated in the erosive activism that combatted racism within British institutions and led to the triumphant inclusion of the new communities in the progressing history of the last six decades.

In 1968 the Tory MP Enoch Powell made a bid for the leadership of the party with his infamous speech targeting immigrants, saying that admitting them into the country would result in “rivers of blood”. In the same year the Labour Party under James Callaghan passed a law denying the Asian holders of colonial British passports, who were being expelled from Eastern Africa, the right to permanent residence in Britain.

I was, at the time, a member of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) in Leicester. The IWAs of several cities decided to protest against Powell’s speech and Callaghan’s law. We marched, several thousand strong, through the streets of Birmingham shouting, in mainly Punjabi accents, “eenuk-a-pole hai hai” and “chulla-ghun hai hai!”

It was evident to me, from the expressions on the faces of the Brummies watching us from the pavements, shops and houses, that they had no idea what we were shouting about. There was no time or opportunity to correct the pronunciation of the slogans and bring them back to the pronunciation of discernible British names.

Soon after that demo, there was a change in the heart of Parliament and the Africa-expelled refugees were granted residential status. Again, I doubt if our demonstration in Birmingham had brought about this compassionate advance.

Indians from Africa were admitted — the offspring of three of them — Rishi Sunak, Pritti Patel and Suella Braverman — all one-time Tory ministers, boldly formulated heartless policies to expel asylum seekers and send them to Rwanda. No self-conscious?

Obviously because irony, of course, requires intelligence and perhaps even empathy.