Of Guns, Camera-phones and Democracy

"If God made men, I made them equal" - Samuel Colt

Probably this is the reason that US constitution-makers brought the second amendment and equalised power between the state and its citizens, between powerful and marginalised.

As you might be all-powerful but a single bullet can always change the power dynamics or rather balance the power dynamics. Gun balanced the power.

Be it the tyranny of the state, landlords or powerful, the marginals had the power restored through a barrel of a gun.

However, with the advent of automatics and in modern mature democracies, guns became more of a burden (anything with virality and massive scale always damage).

And it looks like what Guns were doing earlier, a Mobile camera phone is doing now. Be any incident - camera phones are out and equality is restored or justice is getting delivered. The marginals have finally found the voice without any dead-end violence.

Look at this

and this ..

and there are endless scenes like this. The moment something happens, 100s of camera phone come out of the pocket and whatever may be the scene, there is always some or other discreet camera with some citizen watching the incident very closely.

So if not for mobile camera phones, will the incident of George Floyd be visible to the world or the case of Palghar lynching or case of Phelu Khan ?

And this development has been happening now for a long time. In the last election campaign in UP hinterland, one could see the power shifting away from musclemen to masses.

Earlier whole village used to come to attend a meeting as some certain saheb ie muscleman with certain violent tendencies had said so! Now the whole village still come but the standard rate for attending such a political meeting is INR 500 per attendee.

And you may be Dawood Ibrahim, but the rate remains 500 bucks per person (probably a discount of 100 at max). And for any misdemeanour, there is always somebody somewhere either out in plain sight or hiding in a corner with a camera phone & access to social media with a high-speed internet connection. Anything stupid, and the anonymous video hots the masses. And there is no friendly editor/owner/publisher who will take care of the stuff. Once it is out, the video acquires a life of its own and acquires immortality.

So if the United States established equality and democracy through guns/second amendment, Indians have finally managed to reclaim democracy and allowed citizens to be at par with state/powerful through a mobile camera phone.

Mobile phone and Social media despite all its flaws, have finally become great equaliser and are unleashing real democracy all over the world. The only challenge is that one might not like the real version or authentic version of democracy as it happens with all things authentic - be it travel, food or democracy.

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