Dr. A J M Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan, Professor and Founder Chair, Dept. of Television, Film and Photography, University of Dhaka : High School students have occupied the city streets to protest the death of two school children who were run over by a bus while waiting on the pavement for a bus. Dhaka streets had been in disarray for a long time because everyone tries to dodge traffic rules. Huge tailbacks of traffic is a common feature. Unlike modern cities, Dhaka still has a huge army of traffic police personnel to maintain discipline on the streets. The traffic police personnel control traffic  ignoring traffic lights. Inability, inefficiency, and malpractices of the traffic police suffocated the city streets.
For the last few days, schoolboys have taken over the job of the traffic police to bring discipline to traffic movement to ensure safe passage for people. They blocked traffic movement at many places to check licenses and required papers of the bus and car operators and stopped the cars which were speeding through the wrong sides of the streets. Every day many operators roll the driving wheel without proper driving training and valid driving licenses or with fake licenses. Through their mass inspection of drivers’ licenses, the youths have exposed that chauffeurs plying the private cars carrying political and bureaucratic high-ups do not bother about having valid driving licenses, and influential people including cabinet ministers bend traffic rules at whim.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has shown prudence by addressing the concerns of the youths for a safe street. They will leave the streets sooner or later although antigovernment elements in the administration, law enforcement agencies, and on the street will strive to create an environment to keep them on the street. This is already visible. My purpose of writing today is to talk about the invisible and the implicit what cannot be grasped by seeing the appearance of this youth movement. I read this movement along with the anti-job quota movement as symptoms of something new. These movements foreshadow an emerging trend in our political scene. They are symptoms of loss of faith in the mainstream political parties and politicians who claim to address the distress and deprivation of people in everyday life.
These movements were spontaneous and issue-based, and sprang up without any formal or established leadership and political party. French social thinker Alain Touraine defines such movements as new social movements. These movements are social, cultural and right based. They are different from conventional political movements waged either by the organized labor or political parties.
This kind of movements occurs when people feel neglected by the established political parties. They first appeared in North America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Civil rights movement, gay lesbian rights movement, and anti-war movement are included in this category. Recent manifestations of such movements were seen in Chiapas, Mexico in the 1980s, in Seattle in the 1990s, and in Egypt and Tunisia in the 2000s. The digital and social media worked as an important organizing tool. These movements fade away with the resolution of the problem or issue they wanted the authority to address.
However, the May 1968 movement in France organized by the students and workers against social inequality and workers’ exploitation stands as a milestone in the history of social movements. The established political parties in France including the Communist Party failed to understand the social milieu and the plight of the poor and the working class. They failed to grasp the strength of the youths and were clueless about how the university students could wage such a gigantic movement. This movement made students, intellectuals, and workers disenchanted with the established political parties, including the Communist Party which claimed to safeguard the interests of the oppressed.
Alain Touraine and many other social theorists claim that new social movements are the phenomena of the postindustrial/postmodern societies where mainstream political parties are a suspect in the eyes of the plebeians. In recent days, we have been experiencing sporadic occurrences of new social movements. The first of its kind was the Gonojagoron Moncho movement, a political movement initiated by a group of bloggers without the leadership of any political party, which showed the youths that they could be a force to be reckoned by the society. A question which pops up in mind is: Are we living in a post-industrial/ postmodern society? It is hard to fathom.
Certainly, we are living in an ambivalent time where features of pre-modernity, modernity, and postmodernity coexist. We have access to two postmodern technologies such as the global and social media. The global media, especially the global television, give us an inauthentic aura of a disciplined, peaceful and flawless life in the West and create desires among us to live that life. When we hit the street, our desires get ruptured by a pre-modern reality. We get angry and look for avenues to ventilate anger and demand the authorities immediately address the disorder.
The opposition political parties have lost their space because they failed to wage movements to resolve the problems that haunt people in their everyday life. Ordinary people tend to cut off their allegiance to the established political parties and may burst with anger more frequently in the coming days. Digital and social media help people ventilate their emotions and galvanize an emotional unity for action.
Governing a developing a country in the age of global and social media is an uphill task. In a mediated environment every gesture is monitored and counted. The ruling party leaders and Ministers need to study the context and equip themselves to read people’s pulse and react accordingly.