Protests suppressed by Covid-19 can shake the post-pandemic world

While the Covid-19 outbreak this year may make us feel like 2020 is the worst possible year to live in, the years before were not much peaceful either.

In the year 2019, the world witnessed uproar of protests by citizens who were grievously angered at their governments and policymakers.

Take our neighbouring country India as an example. The controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) enacted by the Indian government on December 12 last year sparked a nationwide protest that soon crossed the political border of the country.

The pandemic has suppressed the protests. PHOTO: REUTERS

It is never possible to determine when a protest will really end. But by analyzing the news articles published in March, it can be said that the protest was hit hard by the pandemic.

On March 19, the anti-CAA protest organiser in Delhi went in quarantine after his sister tested positive for Covid-19, according to a report published on The Print that day.

In Madurai, a city in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the protest was suspended on March 21 due to Covid-19, according to a Times of India article.

The countrywide "Janata curfew" to curb the spread of Covid-19 on March 22 also played a significant role in suppressing the movement.

On March 22, petrol bombs were hurled by unidentified persons at the Shaheen Bagh protest site in Delhi when the country was observing the curfew.

While the protesters blamed outsiders behind it, police sources said that they were probing the possibility of an internal feud between the protesters over calling off the protest that eventually escalated, according to The India Express report.

On March 24, police requested the protestors to vacate the site as lockdown was imposed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

However, when they refused, action was taken and they were vacated, reported news agency PTI.

According to an article published by The Economic Times, the "Mumbai Bagh" protest in Mumbai, which was modelled on Shaheen Bagh, was put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic on March 23.

And that's how the CAA protest went into a sudden halt due to Covid-19.

In Hong Kong, the protest, triggered by the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill by the government, was an even larger one. The bill would "allow extradition to jurisdictions with which Hong Kong did not have extradition agreements, including mainland China and Taiwan."

In case you are not familiar with these events, "extradition" means an act where the jurisdiction of one country can deliver an accused or convict to another country's jurisdiction. In even simpler terms, with this bill being passed, China will be able to arrest the activists and journalists staying in Hong Kong.

The bill was withdrawn in September last year, but the protest did not stop. It evolved into another series of protests.

The Hong Kong protest was hit by the pandemic long before it hit the CAA protest. The country reported the first cases of Covid-19 on January 23. But the protest took a quite interesting turn in Hong Kong amid Covid-19.

The protestors did not put the protest on hold due to Covid-19, what they did instead was focus on the government's failures in handling the pandemic.

A Bloomberg report published on February 9 shows more than enough reasons to believe that the Hong Kong protesters will come back, and they will come back hard.

The Bloomberg report quoted prominent activist Ventus Lau, who organised some of the biggest anti-government protests since June, 2019. According to him, the demonstrations were on hold as fear of coronavirus in neighbouring China kept the city's 7.4 million avoiding large crowds.

But he also said that frustration over the government's handling of the public health crisis will fuel even more support for the protest movement after the virus scare subsides.

"The battle against the virus has helped us see the government's incompetence and the failures of our system," he told Bloomberg.

And he was right. Only three months later, Hong Kong police had to use pepper spray to disperse over a hundred protesters in a shopping mall who were singing and chanting pro-democracy slogans, according to a report published by Diplomat on May 2.

On May 22, Hong Kong activists called on for people to rise up against Beijing's plans to impose national security legislation in the city, prompting alarm that the new laws could erode its freedoms through "force and fear".

And the protest continued on a smaller scale.

The "Black Lives Matter" movement in the US began in July, 2013, when George Zimmerman, who shot an African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin, while walking to a family friend's house on February 26, 2012, was acquitted of all charges by the court.

George Zimmerman was the neighbourhood watch coordinator in a community in Florida. The neighbourhood watch programme, that Zimmerman was in, was administered by the local police department.

The campaign was co-founded by three Black women - Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi - as a response to the police killings of Black people, according to a Cosmopolitan report.

Throughout the years, the movement gathered more momentum every time a Black person was killed in an altercation with police. It continued for more than seven years. But in 2020, there was not much of it until another unfortunate incident occurred.

On May 25, the movement escalated even further when George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man was killed in police custody.

A video of the final moment of Floyd life showed him saying more than 20 times that he could not breathe as a police officer kept his knee on Floyd's neck for seven minutes and 46 seconds while the officers pinned Floyd to the floor, reports BBC, quoting the prosecutors' report.

Floyd was not convicted for murder or anything. It was only a report of a fake $20 bill that he used to buy a pack of cigarettes.

When the fire of a movement against police brutality is burning hot, and another person's death follows a containable tragedy, and the video of him dying goes viral, the incident throws a gallon of kerosine into that fire.

Floyd's death did the exact same thing. By this time, the protestors didn't care about Covid-19 anymore.

The protest refueled just a day after Floyd's death on May 26 and it was so strong that the Secret Service agents had to rush the US President Donald Trump to the underground bunker in the White House, which was used in the past during terrorist attacks, on May 31.

The protest did not end or went into pause due to the pandemic. But one can only assume how much bigger it can get once the pandemic goes away.

But that might not be the only thing for the governments and policymakers to worry about in the post-pandemic world. The Hong Kong protest gives more than enough reasons to believe that most of these protests will come back even stronger, getting more fuel from many new issues such as job loss and the governments' handling of Covid-19.

But to understand the whole picture, we have to first know why people protest.

Researchers in the Netherlands looked at the already existing published papers on why people protest and came up with five theories - grievances, emotions, efficacy, identity, and social embeddedness.

Popular website Insider described all five of these theories.

Grievances theory suggests that the citizens must be angry about something, which creates a demand for change.

Emotions, especially anger, also gives people a more adversarial relationship with authorities. With the job loss, pay cut and other economic burdens put by the Covid-19 pandemic, people are in no way happy at the moment.

Efficacy is an individual's belief that they can change their conditions or policies through protest.

As for identity, the more you identify with a group, the more likely you are to participate in protests benefiting that identity. Even if you're not a part of that group, identifying with others creates an awareness of your shared fate in your political system, which can spur you into action.

The only theory that's left is the social embeddedness theory. Throughout history, people came together to make protests happen. Talking to others about what's wrong in your society creates shared grievances and emotions instead of personal ones.

The pandemic hit everyone regardless of their financial and social status - rich, poor, employed, unemployed, job holders, businessmen. This pandemic brought everyone under the same umbrella while reducing the differences between each individual. The more people identify themselves within the same group, the stronger any protest gets.

American human rights and international policy advisor Nicole Fisher described protests as old as a human collective action. Collective action means action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their condition and achieve a common objective.

In a Forbes article, she also wrote about some other reasons behind protest such as lack of trust in government or authority, geographic proximity, anonymity and survival triggers.

Protests are a really old human action to express dissatisfaction over the governance or fight for what seems right. And with a pandemic going on, and people staying separated from each other for a long time, all of these theories are in play and the outburst of all these at once will surely shake the post-pandemic world.