India is not alone. Be it in Bangladesh or Nepal, Indonesia or the Philippines, Iran or Italy, Gen Z protests have been the hallmark of the 2020s. These uprisings have been about raising issues of inequities, corruption, education, unemployment, poverty, authoritarianism, and seeking accountability from governments. They have led to state backlash and excesses, violence and killings of the young and, on the other hand, the toppling of the ruling class as well.
Most noticeably, the youth movements have been marked by the creative and inventive deployment of social media as a tool to—with due respect to Babasaheb Ambedkar—educate, organise and agitate. The youth ferment playing out on the streets has also been documented as forcefully on screen in several films. One such film is BBC Africa Eye’s remarkable investigative documentary, Blood Parliament.
It begins with the intriguing statement: “Sometimes to catch a killer in the crowd all it takes is a little click”. Then it goes on to diligently piece together available footage to establish the killings of three youngsters by the security forces, tracking down the specific cops guilty of the state-sanctioned crime. As is expected of the news documentary format, the strength is in substance rather than stylistic flourishes or narrative inventiveness. Hard facts, revealing footage and forthright interviews are pieced together to bring the viewer face to face with the savagery of the state.
Blood Parliament is both in-depth and riveting, and most timely and relevant for a better understanding of the identical political toolkits adopted by dictatorial regimes. The incident in focus pertains to 2024 when Kenyan President William Ruto proposed increasing taxes, ostensibly in the wake of mounting debt. “I can’t preside over a bankrupt nation,” he states arrogantly. What he chose to ignore was the rampant corruption in the political class that had created such a situation. No one was held accountable even as basic commodities became a luxury for the masses.
The public disapproval eventually paved the way for protesters in Nairobi to storm the Parliament building against the new Kenyan Finance Bill 2024 and the opposition staging a walkout to join them. The film shows the buildup to the moment and is a must-watch to understand how politicians build a negative narrative around those questioning them. What was a “legitimate expression of fundamental right of freedom” was said to have been “infiltrated and hijacked by criminals”. Sounds familiar? In a bid to quell the peaceful protests, the government took recourse to the usual means—bringing in the defence forces, teargas shelling, rubber bullets and heinous open fire on the crowd.
As one of the interviewees points out, the protests started as a Gen Z party, a beautiful carnival free of violence, anarchy and destruction. It was live-streamed on social media. It was a symbol of hope that the country had not seen before. Till the ruling class gatecrashed and ruined it. But the mandated pulling of the trigger and the deaths galvanised rather than scare the people, making them demand accountability and justice even more forcefully, even as they went about boldly asking the politicians: “How do you sleep at night? How do you live with yourself?”
This bloody struggle of the young ended on a good note. Ruto had to back down and withdraw the finance bill and promised to bring those who fired at the unarmed civilians to justice. “I run the government, but I also lead people. People have spoken. I concede.” However, what is still ringing in my head, long after having watched the film, is the assertion that “a single spark of defiance from Gen Z was able to change the trajectory of the nation, a generation that once it believes in something, will fight for it, will do anything for it”. Amen to that!
