Take a cue from the flattery-meisters

I’ll admit: I know next to nothing about Turkey. Though oddly enough, I’ll land there for the first time ever about the time this essay hits the stands. I would have been excited about visiting at any time — is there any new place in the world that would not stimulate that feeling? — but I’m particularly intrigued about going now. Obvious reason, of course: the weeks of protests in the heart of Istanbul.

The reason I pronounced my ignorance above is that when the protests started, I had no way to tell which “side”, if any, I would agree with. I didn’t know what kind of government Recep Tayyip Erdogan runs (I’m not even sure I knew his full name), I didn’t know what the protests were about, I didn’t know what, if anything, the protesters were asking for.

But like with most such recent protests, all across the world, things became clearer very quickly indeed. When we saw images of battalions of heavily armed policemen moving in to confront the protesters in Gezi Park and across the Taksim neighbourhood, when the news about all this began trickling out, I began to understand what this was about. Plus or minus particular uniforms and helmets, weapons and issues, the images and news could have been from Cairo or Delhi or Sao Paulo. Call me congenitally disposed to loathe police heavy-handedness, but from their very presence, I knew which “side” I was on.

Here’s a fundamental precept that I can’t see any way to set aside: When citizens of a country demonstrate and protest, no matter what they are protesting about, that country must listen. This is the very essence of democracy. It may be that their demands cannot immediately be met, for whatever reason. It may be that I don’t like, or my government doesn’t like, or you don’t like, what they are asking for. But it cannot be that their voice is met with waves of policemen geared for violence.

But when that is indeed what happens, guys like me on the outside, guys who know nothing about Turkey, start looking for other telling signs. Turns out, they are not difficult to find, and they set off echoes from our own country. You probably know what I’m talking about. But if you don’t, here’s a sample (from just one report I read, on the site OpenDemocracy, but they and many more have appeared multiple times in various places).

A police commander in Istanbul actually praised his men for acting against the demonstrators, saying they had “written a second Dardanelles Epic”. Now the phrase “Dardanelles Epic” usually refers to a 17th century Ottoman struggle with the Republic of Venice, over Crete. To equate the dispersion of a citizens’ rally to a heroic battle is breathtaking, but there you are. For as you will see shortly, these cops were not allowed to kneel. Metaphorically kneel, I mean.

Later, Erdogan’s party organised a massive rally of its supporters in Istanbul. Speaking to them, Erdogan called them “the real Turkey” (in contrast, evidently, to the protesters). In turn, one of his supporters proclaimed: “I want to be a hair on my prime minister’s bottom.” Offered without comment.

Erdogan blamed the protests on, no prizes for guessing, an “international conspiracy.” Every major foreign media house is apparently part of this conspiracy. To flesh out this point, a major newspaper actually published a fake interview with Christine Amanpour of CNN. They had her claiming that “CNN had covered the recent protests in Turkey on behalf of foreign business interests that wanted to hurt the country’s economy.”

Oh those foreign interests! That so familiar reference, to us in India, to foreign interests! That reference that even has to be faked!

Early on, Erdogan called the protesters “looters and hoodlums” and wanted to know if he and his government were “supposed to kneel before them.” (Not kneeling, of course, is one way to write a “Dardanelles Epic”). Think of India’s home minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, asking about the crowds protesting the gang rape in Delhi last December: “[T]omorrow Maoists will come here to demonstrate with weapons … Why should the government go anywhere [to meet them]?”

But possibly the supreme note in all this was struck by Erdogan’s Minister for EU Affairs, Egemen Bagis. In the middle of a rambling official statement about the protests and the European reaction, Bagis had this sentence: “Turkey has the most reformist and strongest government in Europe and the most charismatic and strongest leader in the world.”

As ever, repression brings along the flattery-meisters. Remember Congress president DK Borooah, who, during Indira Gandhi’s infamous Emergency of 1975-77, pronounced that “Indira is India and India is Indira”?

When ministers choose to flatter their bosses in government, and flatter to an extent that makes the rest of us cringe, that’s an alarm bell by itself. Every demagogue and autocrat in history has attracted half-men who crawl like this.

Trouble is, the crawling only generates snorts of derision, and plenty of questions. After all, if Erdogan is indeed the most charismatic leader in the world, how is it that close to half the electorate in his own country did not vote for him? After all, if Indira is India and vice versa, why did India fling her out of office after the Emergency?

Watching the wave of protest across the world over the last few years, many see the rise of a new middle-class consciousness. Perhaps it’s incoherent and disparate to start with, but clearly it carries the power to coalesce and become an irresistible force.

Is that a warning? I don’t know. But I look for the signs nevertheless. When I see them — flattery-meisters, abusive language — I know: governments are themselves getting wary.

The author lives in Bombay and writes so he can keep his cats Cleo and Aziz fed.