The promise of India has been betrayed

It’s easier to say what the current students’ protests are not than it is to say what they are.

Judging by the events of the last week, they are not a straight forward rerun of the so called India Against Corruption movement. They are not as well organised. There are no RSS -manufactured crowds.

 

Nobody at Jantar Mantar would welcome Sadhvi Rithambara in the way in which Anna Hazare and his puppet-masters did. There is no individual trying to use the movement as a personal promotional advertisement in the way that Arvind Kejriwal did with the IAC. And there is no elderly publicity-hound being used as a figurehead in the way that Anna Hazare was.

 

   Nor are the parallels with students’ movements in Nepal and Bangladesh valid. The aim there was regime change. The protesters were violent and determined to destroy government property and to let the blazing fires they had lit draw global attention to them. That is clearly not the intention of the Jantar Mantar protesters. They don’t want to bring down the government of India or burn parliament house.

 

   And of course they are not anti-nationals no matter what godi media tells you. They are not part of some vast ISI conspiracy. They have not been funded by the CIA. And the closest they have got to China is in the instant noodles that some of the protestors occasionally eat to sustain themselves.

 

   So what is an appropriate parallel for what we are seeing? It’s hard to say because the protests are not about strategy or grabbing political power. Nor do they follow a linear progression. The Cockroach Janata Party started out as a social media phenomenon inspired by anger over a judge calling youth ‘cockroaches’. It became a mass protest movement about the education system and the leak of exam papers. After Sonam Wangchuk merged his own cause with the exam protesters and went on a fast, it became something else. And now, in the face of the government’s lathis and pellet guns, it has shape shifted again.

 

   The protests, as they now exist, are less a movement and more an emotion. They are an expression of public anger and frustration. Though their demands keep being recalibrated (the last I heard Wangchuk is not demanding the Education Minister’s resignation any longer; he just wants it to be considered) the anger that the protests embody is not going away.

 

   In that sense, this stage of the protests reminds me more of the public anger over the Nirbhaya case than anything that the IAC did. Then too, young people felt that politicians had not done enough. They had failed to make India safe for women. And the anger spilled out onto the streets.

 

   This time too young people feel that the politicians have failed India. Students have to cope with an education system that stinks. Year after year, at exam after exam, question papers are leaked and then sold on the black market. As this rarely happens in most other countries, it must be possible to prevent it from happening here too. The fact that it continues to happen suggests that the government has not bothered to do enough to stop it. And that’s because it doesn’t care about India’s young people.

 

"The people who demonstrate at Jantar Mantar and public areas all over India are only the tip of the iceberg."

   That is the nub of the issue but of course it comes with deeper grievances. Young people find it harder to get jobs. They are not optimistic about the future. Ten or fifteen years ago the generation that preceded this one was genuinely hopeful about India’s future. Young people believed they would be able to earn more money than their parents did and enjoy a better standard of living. They believe now that this won’t happen. They believe that the promise of India has been betrayed. They will be lucky to get jobs at all. That’s why so many of them try to leave India - not to get great jobs abroad but to find any kind of employment at all.

 

   One Indian is apprehended at the border trying to enter the US illegally every 20 minutes. The largest number of illegal border crossers are Gujaratis. Given that Gujarat is a model state it tells you something about the pessimism that young people have about the future of India.

 

   I am not sure that the government recognises any of this. Its focus has been on encouraging defections to try and cobble together the numbers needed to pass unnecessary legislation through parliament while cloaking the changes with the coat of patriotism by focusing on the need to offer suitable respect to a nationalist song. It has been so encouraged by recent election victories and the sterling job that the Chief Election Commissioner is doing in reorganising the electoral rolls that it believed it was invulnerable.

 

   When the protests began, the regime thought that they were a tiresome irrelevance. When they gathered steam it fell back on its standard policy: it would never give in to protests. No minister would resign. The media would be instructed to play down the protests and to say that they were engineered by evil foreign forces.

 

   It needn’t have done that. There were other options. Yes it could not have met the underlying grievance of the protesters: it can’t create jobs because it has lost control of the economy. But it could have responded to the more immediate demands. The Education minister could have resigned from the cabinet to do organisational work. Wangchuk could have been given a face saver to end his fast. When the protesters began to demand that Rahul Gandhi should visit them alarm bells should have gone off; the government could have intervened before mainstream politicians got involved.

 

   It did none of things because ego and perceived firmness took precedence over strategy. The attitude was: we have seen off many such movements. We will easily handle these kids.

 

   And perhaps it will. When you start firing pellet guns at unarmed protesters you can disperse crowds.

 

   And young people with no real experience of protests can be intimidated by brutal and ruthless police and paramilitary forces.

 

   But what you can’t fight is an emotion. The people who demonstrate at Jantar Mantar and public areas all over India are only the tip of the iceberg. The anger and disillusionment they express is shared by young people who watch the protests on social media. Each time they watch a video of a policeman slap a young woman or shove a lathi near a female demonstrator’s private parts their anger grows.

 

   These are students with genuine grievances. Asking your police to dishonour their women or to break their bones may be an appropriate response in an authoritarian, dictatorial state. But it is the single worst thing this government can do —even tactically, given that it is not overly concerned with morality— in the centre of Delhi in front of hundreds of camera phones.

 

   Even if the government manages to quell these protests- which it might- it will never be able to wipe away the perception that when confronted with its failures to not just find jobs for young people but also to conduct exams properly, its response was not to listen but to attack, to assault and to dishonour women.

 

   There was a time when young people believed that Narendra Modi would change India for the better. Rest assured that this generation will not believe that. Nor will it ever forget how the government responded to genuine grievances.