Students of India, be warned. Your fury is being hijacked. Your outrage, sweeping India from the Northeast to Kerala over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens, is giving jaded, discredited politicians a new lease of public life. Netas are emerging from the political woodwork like greedy termites feeding on youth anger to fatten their lost hopes.
Disgusting! Look at Kanhaiya Kumar, Marxist malapropism and revolutionary opportunist, hopping about defending liberty to young crowds. Or Brinda Karat, elitist comrade of Indian Communism, who parachuted into Jamia, demanding justice against the cops and Amit Shah. The ambitious Kamal Haasan resembled opportunism on steroids, his conscience bulked up with youth protein.
Priyanka Gandhi, the last white hope of the Congress party, found an opportunity for the party’s reincarnation with a sit-in at India Gate. Mr Modi and Mr Shah, relax. None of these jack-in-the-box leaders have the right or legitimacy to become faces of the agitation. The contagious protests, which are drawing empathy from other students, actors and governments worldwide, are doomed. Just like the Anna Hazare movement was doomed. The reason: cynical political avarice, which will soon discredit the students as agent provocateurs and just anti-Modi conspirators without a real plan.
The new nature of successful protest is defined by decentralised leadership, starting with the Arab Spring and now the Hong Kong pro-democracy agitation. They have set the paradigm of 21st-century rebellion. Never before has the world seen an age so young, so exuberant and politically sensitive. Leaders are questioned more than they are obeyed—“Lock him up!” Icons are made with a single woke phrase—“OK Boomer” or the single mom status of non-entitled debutante Sanna Mirella Marin, the 34-year-old Prime Minister of Finland.
Youth has the power to change the world and topple established order. The Russian revolution began with student idealism, not Lenin. The 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia on International Students Day inspired the domino effect that toppled Communism in Eastern Europe. Student protests against the Vietnam war upended American social conservatism.
True leaders are forged in the fire of challenge and defiance, driven by their vision for transformation. Some survive on the fear, despair and anger of the people. But the universal propellant of their rhetoric is the hope of youth who see them as messiahs or are angry at their betrayal of trust by authority. The tragedy of inevitability is the comfortable decline of youth into middle age and pension plans.
Che Guevara, the world’s most enduring romantic symbol of rebellion, was so bored with power that he left Cuba, seeking the exhilaration of violence. He paid for it, shot in a ditch in Bolivia. He now lives on in T-shirts for eternity. Young men and women in Indian universities, please don’t give Kanhaiya Kumar his T-shirt. He is an espresso guerrilla at best.