Brute power won’t fly

Let’s hear it for the people. That an influential MP from Kerala could be ordered off a flight by the pilot, for holding up departure, is a thumping endorsement of citizens’ awareness in this country. Abdul Wahab, for all his political and financial clout, was told that he had no business delaying the flight and inconveniencing those who had paid for their tickets. This was one of those courageous, long-overdue moments that distil the spirit of the times. It is these individual acts of gumption that signal deep changes — after all, even the civil rights movement in the United States found its defining moment when a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus.

The pilot’s action is deeply symbolic of our upwardly mobile times — if you can’t take us there, at least get out of the way is exactly what Indian citizens are telling their VIPs. Just compare this to the days when the asymmetries governing our relationship with the state were so absolute that they didn’t even have to be uttered. Contesting the oppressions of officialdom or even the petty tyrannies of those indirectly connected to state power was almost inconceivable.

The consumer rights movement in India only took hold in the ’80s but now, after two decades of reform and market-led success, it has finally become a full-blown, intuitively understood phenomenon. Our rights cannot be blatantly hijacked by money or power any more, because a healthy sense of outrage has now been inscribed into our minds. India’s ascendancy in the world was fuelled by the frustration and enterprise of ordinary citizens, for whom the state has only stood in the way. So if the government and its representatives still carry around that sense of entitlement from a time that is decisively past, they can expect to be firmly told to leave it behind before they board India Soaring. As for Wahab, he will gain no sympathy for his plans to move a privilege motion against the pilot.