When Sonam Wangchuk stopped his struggle around the time the regime accepted the exit of Dharmendra Pradhan, I felt political life had come to a standstill. I also sensed a problem with the narrative of political movements—it was difficult to differentiate between the topical and the perennial. When a movement is on, there is urgency and immediacy about everything; but when it stops, politics becomes a kind of still life. I was struggling with this problem over the last week.
Political scientist Chandrika Parmar made a constructive suggestion. She suggested differentiating the narrative into three parts. One must emphasise that a new ethnography has to have the authenticity of narrative. Secondly, one must fit it within the logic of political discourse. And thirdly, one must capture the state of being—the phenomenology of emotion that haunted the movement. I decided to follow her suggestion.
Beginning with ethnography, I realised that the movement was tentative, open-ended and even anarchic in a decentralised way. People joined in because they felt there was problem with accountability. Accountability needed to be reworked and one had to do it in a decentralised way. Hence the movement’s plurality. Diversity of discussion was a fascinating part of the protest.
The second is the attitude of civil society towards it. It was open to joining the struggle. An outstanding example of this was the support Sikh langars gave to the movement. Hospitality became a source of legitimacy. Food and its distribution became a connecting part of the movement. People from all over India supplied food to the movement. It was a gift, an act of generosity and a source of support. It was an acclamation of democracy, not a mere agreement of ideas. It was sad that the regime saw such generosity as a problem of law and order.
The third point one must make is the movement’s non-violent nature. Non-violence is not just the absence of violence, but also about an openness to difference, to alternatives—it provides a certain tentativeness to the movement. Tentativeness, in turn, becomes a sign of inclusiveness and a sense of hospitality. It is this wider invitation to politics that we must consider. Politics here acquires a new turn, a new voice, a new body language as students take it in an open-ended way. The government emphasises law and order, as expressed in the use of lathis and electrified batons. The students turn it into a commons of protest and self-doubt.
One must also emphasise the nature of political discourse. The protest is part of the Gandhian imagination where the body becomes central to the imagination. The relation of the body and body politics creates a new kind of politics different from a social contract. The protest to the body emphasises the paradox of vulnerability and strength. Fasting becomes relevant in this context. It emphasises the vulnerability and the strength of the body.
It’s interesting to note that with people like Gandhi, fasting could bring down empires. It is important to emphasise three other observations, too. Many people found the struggle impressive because it both vernacularised politics and globalised it. The word ‘accountability’ was given a plurality of meanings—it became a blanket term to account for a thesaurus of negligence.
As one wag put it, NEET is an onomatopoeic term that refuses to recognise the local mess that the bureaucracy and media have created. The humour with which protest greeted the accusations of funding was sheer theatre. It was a swift political move to make the regime accept that the protest was organic—in fact, swadeshi. This in turn emphasises that the nature of democracy for the protest movement was decentralised, inventive, plural and open.
This contrasted with the formal democracy of the regime which emphasised law and order, and felt that lathi-charge was a linear answer to any kind of protest. The body become a site for two kinds of politics. On one side was protest movement which used the vulnerability of the body to emphasise the strength of citizenship. On the other side was the poeticisation of the regime, which turned even education into security and surveillance issues.
In civil society’s almost poetic response to the protest, one saw lawyers stepping up to protect the protestors. One witnessed people from all walks of life rushing to offer their solidarity. The issue was no longer accountability—it was the fate of democracy. There are other issues that come to mind.
The political protest might be insignificant in an historical sense, but it has the making of a fable, a parable, a new act of storytelling. As a memory, it invokes the resilience of the JP movement and acquires certain sanctity from it. The narrative now traces a metaphorical line between JP as a style of politics and the protest movement.
The one category that surfaces immediately is the power of youth and the parents. It is a two-generation battle fighting the regime for different reasons. The youth are fighting for the future, the parents are thinking of their children. There is a plethora of care and concern. This challenges the official idea of youth only as a progressive entity. Youth is not just a collection of aspirations, it also emphasises a sense of care, concern and responsibility. In this sense, youth has to be seen in more than a progressive sense. Well, the word ‘progressive’ sounds as if it needs new definitions.
Language itself became central to this protest by introducing a new vocabulary of politics, a new imagination of democracy and a differentiated idea of memory. Memory is not just textual and official. It is community-oriented, oral and digital. And it turns dialogue, gossip and conversation into actual dynamics for democracy.
It is the future that is at stake in this battle for democracy. The dream of an alternative democracy in the future—more tentative, more diverse, more inclusive. This protest movement, which began as a critique of educational governance, became a critique of official knowledge itself. Maybe a new kind of storytelling is essential for the democracy to come.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
