Social media is exposing fault lines over issues that people were presumed to be inured to Though they are located on different continents,the distance between Tahrir Square and Shahbag Square could be insignificant. Both have articulated old anxieties and exasperations,about authoritarian government in Egypt and the failure to close the chapter on the violence and genocide that attended the birth of Bangladesh. Both reached critical mass by using new ways of organising via social media. Social media is exposing fault lines over issues that people were presumed to be inured to. Bangladesh seemed to have accepted that it would have to brood over its national tragedy alone,because it would never get the worlds attention in the manner that Vietnam and Cambodia have. Domestically,it was rewarding to delay closure of this emotive issue. The present Awami League government has displayed the determination to take war crimes trials to completion. But when a razakar,a collaborator with the Pakistan army in the 1971 conflict,escaped the noose,something snapped. Even Ba-ngladeshis who had never expected justice were ready to march on Shahbag,the quarter of Dhaka where the risings of Bangladesh often begin. A protest on such a scale is partly self-organising. It uses the internet like a decentralised command and control system and the media,traditional and social,as amplifiers. By bridging online and offline methods in a never-ending feedback loop,they are able to do a new kind of democratic politics in which the visible perception of numbers matters more than actual political leverage. The protesters in Shahbag are forcing a long-needed closure that politics and dilatory judicial process had held off. As the cost of internet communication falls,as the accessibility of social media rises,the tsunami of suppressed rage that had begun in Tunisia will move forward,leaving confused governments tossing in its wake.
