The big myth about revolutions is that they’re all organic

In the first hours of any modern uprising, it always looks like this. The young, Gen-something, some late alphabet, rise violently against injustice, apparently risking their own lives. State forces, despite their weapons and power, are surprisingly unable to quell the insurgency.

Later, it becomes clear that there was a power behind it, one that does not seem to be made up of ordinary people. Or perhaps it is true that in Nepal the uprising occurred exactly the way we have been told. Just that revolts do not happen that way, without the intent, funding or co-option of some part of the elite.

At the heart of all revolutions is the second rung of power, aristocracy, wealth or clergy, attempting to bring down those above them. For this, they recruit a moral reason and the youth and poor.

The French Revolution, which is remembered as the poor beheading the rich, is in reality and substance aristocrats taking down the monarchy and other aristocrats who were in the royalty’s inner circle.

The doomed German peasant revolution that preceded it in the 16th century, which is framed in history as peasants waging a heroic war against the nobility, was also about knights and lords of the lower nobility exploiting the rage of peasants to plot the downfall of the higher nobility.

In Summer of Fire and Blood, Lyndal Roper points out that some of the second-rung elites of the 1520s even dressed like peasants and pantomimed illiteracy to manipulate serfs into attacking the top rungs. (Her book’s point, though, is not the argument I am making.)

The Indian Naxal movement is framed as an armed struggle of the poor against the state, but its founding father Charu Mazumdar was from a feudal zamindari family, a class that was diminished by the state. The Arab Spring, remembered as an anti-corruption movement against the political class, was an urban middle-class movement against traditional power.

The term ‘middle class’ is one of the most misleading words in English. These are rarely people in the ‘middle.’ The public figures among them are probably in the top 5% of their population, who naturally have a grievance against the top 1%. When the anti-corruption movement began in India, it was called an ‘Indian Spring,’ even though India doesn’t have a spring.

The day Anna Hazare came to Delhi and sat on the pavement to fast until he died or India ended corruption (both are alive), it was in reality an anti-rich movement. It flopped. I know this because I was there. There were just a handful of people and no media. His meagre followers who sat watching him were rural activists and they were saying that India was making beautiful roads and airports for the rich, and nothing for the poor.

The movement gathered political momentum when news anchors and the Bharatiya Janata Party spun it as an ‘organic’ middle-class uprising against the Congress.

In the recent uprising in Bangladesh too, the middle class had a role. The bureaucracy despised the regime of Sheikh Hasina.

Almost all revolutions are framed as the rage of the poor. As though there is a place and time where they are not angry.

The idea that the poor can topple the rich without any help from the rich themselves does not come from history, but from an assumption that at first seems commonsensical. Surely, people living in wretchedness must eventually strike back? This is how, say, the popular myth of the French Revolution hardened into legend. Karl Marx’s writings are the most popular medium of this notion.

He himself, though, is an example of someone from the second-rung in economic terms with a grievance against the top rung. He hailed, after all, from a wealthy German family; that he found ways to go broke is not as important as the class he came from. His later-life penury makes complete sense in his war against those who were not broke but a lot like him. It is not surprising that he did not look at revolution as something that emerges from a man like him, but as a more moral force that emanates from the misery of the poor.

Long after his death, the many assumptions of what he said became weapons in the hands of elites to fight other elites.

People underestimate how much organization is needed for a revolution, and how that can only come from influential people. The myth of organic uprisings persists because those who pull the strings usually remain in the shadows. Reputed journalists, bound by standards of credibility, report only what is visible. They can only go in search of facts, not the truth. Facts and truth need not be the same thing, especially over a long arc of time.

In Nepal, a fact is that thousands of angry young people overthrew a government. This was followed by odd behaviour. Those same youth, after risking their lives, are now handing power to people who were not on the streets, people who are negotiating with the army, which had an outsized role in the success of the movement because it chose not to crush it with force. Yet, we are told no institutions were behind the uprising.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’