CHENNAI: At a recent event in a city-based college, a 14-year-old boy told a roomful of students that we need large-scale protests to scare the government into action. In another room and with a different audience, his remark would have been shut down — swiftly — by adults. Yet, in universities and colleges, at door-fronts and public squares, in poetry and rhetoric, thousands of people across the country seem to have found resonance with this sentiment. While 2019 for most of the country was peppered with protests against several pertinent issues, Chennai recently caught up with its neighbours to voice out against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the series of violence against college students in New Delhi. Amid slapstick posters, calls of ‘aazadi’ and renditions of Bharathiyar songs, these protests quietly bore the stories of its people.
United front
Apoorva Mohan’s story was that of putting an end to her armchair activism. The 27-year-old, who has been an active part of the demonstrations in Bengaluru and Chennai, says there’s only so long you can tweet and repost dissent from the comforts of your home. For Vaishnavi C, it was the need to express dissent that had her postpone her return to her hometown Kumbakonam and participate in the protests at Valluvar Kottam this past week. “In Kumbakonam, we tried to organise and protest but they (authorities) don’t give permission for gatherings,” she explains. Kiran Keshav (25) thinks it is important to add to the numbers, show a united front. With the protests only being allowed in small areas with limited capacity, this is vital to sustain the effort, he says.
While this conviction had helped fuel the protests, it was deep-seated frustration shared by many of the participants that seemed to be sustaining the agitation. Sethulakshmi, pursuing a doctorate at the Madras University, would have stopped after showing up for a token protest on the campus. It was the government’s refusal to engage that had her going back to the gatherings, day after day, she says. Vaishnavi opines that the government clamping down on any form of dissent has left them with little choice but to take to the streets. And this, more than anything, has helped the students rally behind the cause in huge numbers. “Only certain issues draw them out and these (CAA, violence at universities) are important issues. And it is reaffirming to know that people our age care,” she says.
At the forefront
Athher Ahmed (52) believes that the issues at hand have tested the tolerance threshold of the people; it had tested his too. This is why the protests have seen the participation of many ‘first-timers’, he says. “Nearly 98% of the protesters are new to this; 13 of the 17 people courting arrest a few days ago are students facing it for the first time. They see this (adding their voice to the dissent) as a service to the country, akin to voting,” he narrates.
While students and youngsters have made up a large number of the protesting population, in Chennai, too, the women seem to have taken the lead. Athher credits the students of girls’ colleges for keeping up their part of the agitation. Vaishnavi talks about meeting women who had stories like hers — having to wage protests on several fronts, especially within the family — and finding solidarity with them. “I have been to protests in Bengaluru and Chennai. In both instances, it has been women who’ve led the protesters. They’ve been fearless in organising, talking with the police, sloganeering and being detained for it too,” says Apoorva. Saying that women and trans people have been at the forefront of it all, she borrows from the Twitter archives to remark that it is because they “know how it feels to have their autonomy and voice taken from them”.
Work-protest balance
Amid these high-octave motivations, there’s the element of curiosity too. When a city like Chennai, which usually waits till a disaster hits close to home to speak up, joins the national discourse, you have to find out what it has to say, declares Kiran. Vaishnavi was pleasantly surprised to show up and find that the protests seem to have drawn many like her.
More importantly, there is no looking past this, says Kiran. “It’s absurd that we’re having to go about our jobs and make a living when there are so many things happening around us. I wake up every morning and I’m overwhelmed by what’s happening in my state, my country. On the other side, there’s a country’s forests going up in flames. Yet we’re having to act like it’s a normal day. Otherwise, my work doesn’t get done and my bills don’t get paid. We’re stuck in this circle but we have to break the perception that a protest is made up of lawyers, activists and law college students. We need the commoners, most of whom are stuck in the corporate sector,” he suggests. A part of the sector himself, he hopes others like him would strive to step out of their cocoon too.
The protests were not without its uninformed collective. It did have children showing up for the money promised by political parties. Youngsters were pitching in, with varying degrees of conviction, to stand by their student organisations. There were policemen and women just doing their job. Athher remarks that many of the protesters were also uniting over grievances of the past, in the hope that it will get the attention it deserves. Paraphrasing Dave Grohl, you call a protest with 80,000 people and they join you for 80,000 different reasons.