As 2020 unfolds today, it is rather distressing to reflect that the decade (2010-19) has ended as one of protest and robust action in large parts of the world. Pre-eminently in India, which now bears witness to an upsurge against an amendment to the citizenship law in what appears to be an essay towards firming up a definition of a citizen, 72 years after freedom was won and the country was partitioned.
In Hong Kong, the citizenry has been up in arms for the past six months, shrilling for the restoration of fundamental freedoms. And while being protector of the island nation, China has arrogated to itself the right to remote control the policing of HK, as often as not with the boots of the People’s Liberation Army on the ground. At another remove, the authorities in Beijing are engaged in a bout of relentless persecution of the Muslim minority Uighurs in the north-west of the country.
Overall, it has been a momentous decade for China with Xi Jinping elevated to the pedestal of President-for-life and the Third Plenum (October 2016) endorsing the capitalist concept of market economy which would have been anathema in the China of Mao Zedong. And while Russia testfires its most powerful missile since 1957, across the Atlantic, Donald Trump will have to countenance impeachment proceedings in yet another election year and once the seasonal jollity is over.
British and European history is poised to script yet another chapter with Brexit now a near certainty. Indeed, at the end of the decade, the striking feature around the world, even in the storm centres of Iraq and Iran, is the overwhelmingly anti-establishment tenor of the people’s movements. Specifically, the Arab Spring of January 2011 was one of the most powerful waves of anti-authoritarianism the world has ever seen.
Deeply critical too must be the emergence of the wave of feminism called #MeToo. Not that it was a sudden eruption out of nowhere; it was on closer reflection embedded. in the spirited upsurge of global feminism over the past decade, one that had spawned news-breaks, protests, hashtags and action that was driven by feminism long before #MeToo had hit the headlines.
The decade has been somewhat reminiscent of the 1980s that was marked by dramatic activism and with immediate consequences, notably the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines through people’s power in 1986, the ouster of the South Korean military dictatorship in 1987, the toppling of the entire eastern bloc of Soviet states in 1989 followed in its aftermath by the disintegration of the Soviet Union (August 1991), the beginning of the end of the apartheid era in South Africa and powerful but unsuccessful uprisings in Myanmar and China.
And the enormity of India’s tragedy, to summon the words of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, was exposed with the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (October 1984). The climate movement grew in power. It became a powerful force that needs to grow yet more in 2020 and needs to win in the next decade. Even a rapid-fire survey of the decade can be direly depressing. And yet one must hope that the next decade will inspire confidence.