A democratic country can be transformed into a dictatorship by different ways. Maybe the common way is if a elected politician himself turns into a dictator. One of its main example is Adolf Hitler.
Secondly, it may also happen if a democratically elected government is overthrown by a separate group of people. These separate groups of people may be a country's military, a terrorist organisation or a political party of opposite ideology. This second way of turning a country into dictatorship is called as coup. And if it is done by the military then it is called as military coup which we can see in Myanmar nowadays.
On 1st February, 2021, the Myanmar military overthrew their democratically elected government because of which the situation in Myanmar is unstable nowadays.
So let's understand this topic in our todays blog.
Coup d'état is a French word which literally means 'blow of state'. It means the removal and seizure of a government and its powers illegally and unconstitutionally. There must arise a question in your mind that then what is the difference between a revolution and a coup?, isn't?
In a revolution, we can see that civilians are involved too whereas this scenario can't be seen in a coup. Likewise you can see that the participation of civilians were great in the French revolution and Russian revolution. But on the other hand when you think about military coups that happened in Pakistan and that is going on in Myanmar nowadays, their is no role of civilians. Now the interesting fact is, a military coup does not always establish dictatorship instead it can also be seen that a military coup is used to overthrow the existing dictatorship and establish democracy. This type of coup we can see happened in Sudan in 2019 to overthrew the Sudanese dictator and it is now hoped that the military that is ruling in Sudan will establish democracy. Military coups are common worldwide but this never happened in India thankfully, maybe because our military always stay separated from politics. As per google data, more than 500 coups has been attempted after the World War II among which around 200 came out to be successful.
Let's talk about Myanmar, this country got independence in 1948, just one year after India. It was earlier called as Burma.
Let's directly get into the topic, so in 2020, elections happen in Myanmar and in this election Aung San Ssu Kyi's party NLD wins the election with even more seats. Alongside, last year Ssu Kyi proposed that she want to bring such constitutional changes by which she can curb the number of seats reserved for the military in Parliament. Gradually the military starts thinking about losing their powers in Myanmar after such win of NLD. They noticed that the support of civilians towards them was gradually decreasing. And exactly this is the reason behind Myanmar military coups in February 2021 and they seized power after detaining Aung San Ssu Kyi's and other democratically elected leaders.
After that they gave reason that in this elections there has been election frauds and that's why they conducted such military coup.
After the military coup it became very clear that in whose side the civilians are. A new flow of protest has been seen in Myanmar in last one month. Students, doctors, and all other sections of people, are seen organising peaceful protests against their military.
Many countries have tried to help Myanmar in different ways like Hong Kong protestors issued a toolkit to help the Myanmar protestors. In the toolkit there are various advices about how they can save themselves while protesting and many more.
Comments
Post a Comment