The problem is the crowd. It is with the crowd. When a stage collapses, it is an embarrassing scene because it takes down a whole crowd that had positioned itself behind an influential political leader. It is only natural that the followers and supporters of a politician will always make it a point to come as close to a minister or any other powerful politician, physically that is, as possible.
But then, there is the question of the distance, physical distance, which ought to be maintained. Why must everyone climb on to a stage, stand behind and all around a powerful politician without any thought to the stability of the stage? More to the point, it is not quite the ethical thing for any person to decide that standing behind or close to a minister will be proof of his own influence in the corridors of power.
A stage can only take so many people on board. But, again, why must so many people climb on to it? Why must such unabashed ambition be on display in the company of the powerful, indeed must arise in those who mount that stage? Self-esteem is an important underpinning of human behaviour, be it political or social. And when this truth is forgotten or ignored by party loyalists, by those beholden to the powerful, a whole tranche of good politics goes missing.
The problem of crowds goes beyond a stage where a functionary of the state chooses to declaim on conditions in the country. There have been all those bizarre circumstances where important individuals, all the way from political leaders to showbiz people, have been taken to court by the police. Up to that point it is all right. But then consider the whole phalanx of police personnel who make their crowded presence -- and it is simply a single individual in custody who is being conducted to a magistrate's court -- on the scene.
Is that at all necessary?
Crowds are certainly welcome at public rallies, at book launches, and in movie houses. Anywhere else they are a strain on public patience, a sight which can only disturb those whose lives have revolved around a set of values. When parents and teachers alike dance for joy -- and this appears on television screens -- because their children and students, in that order, have come by something called Golden GPAs, it is again an image which upsets the rules of self-control. Examination results are supposed to be collected by the young, who will then go home. Why must all that carnival atmosphere be there at all?
There have been politicians, across the spectrum, who in particular literary seasons -- the Ekushey Boi Mela being an instance -- have chosen to go looking for books to buy. Nothing could be more heart-warming than the sight of such important individuals informing the nation by their act of the aesthetics working in them. But that entire expedition is marred by a huge crowd following the politician, in the process pushing good people touring such fairs out of the way.
The late French President Francois Mitterrand, even in his days at the Elysee, often took time out to visit the Paris bookshops, go into browsing and come away with a few treasures. No crowd ever followed him or for that matter any political leader seriously conscious of his need to be all by himself, away from the hurly burly of politics.
The crowds we come across in this country are all driven by a simple desire: They wish to be seen in the media by people they need to impress, at home and elsewhere. When senior lawyers appear before the media to brief them on the details of a legal case, they are literally pushed this way and that by others who simply have no business being there. It is not a happy scene when a lawyer's comments on the arrest or bail hearing of one who is in state custody is drowned in the noise of the crowd behind him.
Crowds in a good number of instances hold the power to be disruptive. The funeral procession of Ayatollah Khomeini had its solemnity marred by the pushing and jostling which marked the occasion, to a point where the cleric's remains nearly dropped to the ground. It was one instance among many of the religiosity so necessary to have the departed pass into the hereafter almost getting ruined by the unruly behaviour of a crowd.
Western history is replete with stories of crowds lining the streets to watch fallen monarchs on their way to the scaffold and, once the executions were done, cheer in a huge roar the murder just committed. The executions of Charles I, Mary Queen of Scots, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are a few tales of base human instincts, the instincts being of bloodthirsty crowds, we have observed in our passage through history.
Politicians in our times have whipped crowds into a frenzy through their demagoguery. Hitler and Mussolini are instances from the past, but observe the damage done to democratic institutions in the United States and Brazil by adherents of the anti-politics of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Both men lost their bid for a second term in power and having lost unleashed their rabid followers into assaulting the institutions of the state. Neither man has conceded defeat and neither has realised the enormity of the damage he has done by setting mobs against the established order of things.
When crowds march on the streets against bad governance, against the thousand maladies afflicting the lives of citizens -- as in Sri Lanka, as in Iran -- they speak for causes so vital in an assertion of democratic rights and for the rule of law. Crowds forced Ferdinand Marcos and the Shah of Iran into exile, which only reasserted one's belief in the power of the people to bring about positive change.
That is the creative nature of crowds. But when mobs set out to destroy homes and temples because those homes are not theirs but belong to people who worship different gods, it is the inherent ugliness of human behaviour which patently manifests itself. The crowds desperate to share a stage, creaking though the stage might be, are of course a different congregation of people. They have no ugliness about them per se. But they do have that worm of self-projection writ large across their souls.
That is the ugliness.
Reflect, if you can, on the many times when a traffic constable has detained the driver of a car or the rider of a motorcycle for perfectly valid reasons. Within minutes a crowd of onlookers, perfectly willing to watch such goings-on, gathers at the spot, speaks not a word but goes on taking in the conversation between the policeman and the errant driver with little inclination to move on and go about its own business.
Henceforth, let a stage, any stage anywhere, remain safe from crowds. It is a sorry sight when a stage, wobbly with the weight of men and women of diverse girth and size and weight and pomposity, goes down. One need not blame the men who cobbled that platform into shape. They had not been informed how many people would, in their campaign of self-promotion, place their corporeal beings on that stage.
And there's the pity of it all.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
