Blooming revolution could lead to flowering of a new culture

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, quoth the bard many centuries ago. And he was no stranger to conflict with horticultural allusions, having devoted several plays to the Wars of the Roses.

With the Jasmine Revolution sweeping through North Africa into West Asia, however, the Chinese would have done well to hark back to Shakespeare’s wisdom before they blocked the Chinese characters for the flower in text messages.

As if blanking out clips of President Hu Jintao warbling Mo Li Hua, a traditional paean to the aromatic flower, and reportedly cancelling this year’s Jasmine Cultural Festival was not bad enough, cracking down on the wholesale sale of the flower by cultivators could backfire.

After all, otherwise loyal comrades thus deprived of their livelihood and pastimes could sniff the flower’s suddenly subversive fragrance in their morning cuppa and be seized of a desire to turn Tiananmen Square into Tahrir Square.

The Chinese may also want to bone up on Baroness Orczy’s fictional account of the effect of a single counter-revolutionary flower called the Scarlet Pimpernel on the people’s armies of 18th and 19th century France. The French famously sought him here and sought him there, but the ‘demmed elusive’ aristocrat who used the pimpernel as his nom de guerre remained at large.

Of course, the official shrivelling of the jasmine constituency in China could benefit India. For a while now, most of the cheap items being hawked on pavements and traffic junctions around India have been flooding in from China.

With democracy in no danger in India, we would welcome strings of jasmine, especially at rock-bottom prices. That would be one Chinese item whose short shelf life would not irk us.