The price we pay for protesting

When a few people get together to speak out about an issue, it’s first met with silence.

CHENNAI:  If the protests against National Population Register (NPR), National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) were to be considered the mothership, the ones in the past week against the clampdown on dissent, for the release of Bhim Army Chief Chandrasekar Azad, and against the recent violence in JNU are its baby battleships. It seems like dissent strategies are evolving and young people are quickly catching on to the next big idea, all the while sticking their ground for what they believe in and remaining unfazed by state violence unleashed upon them. The boo-ers, armchair critics, devil’s advocates, WhatsApp university professors, esteemed members of the ‘protection’ force, those stuck in traffic jams, and the likes of them though seem not to have moved an inch on their naysaying tactics, still using a dagger to fight drones. They are all glitter and gold, but because we still judge a book by its cover, the old tactics are bought into, to delegitimise protests — when women are at the forefront of the protest, it’s twice as worse.

When a few people get together to speak out about an issue, it’s first met with silence. Then it will be wished away, and waited on to blow over. When the noise gets too much to bear, it will be brushed off as an annoyance. When the protestors are seen, they will be seen as silly, jobless and influenced by peers. They will be treated like a baby high on sugar and asked to find ‘constructive ways’ to use their energy. When their way to work is obstructed, when the niece of a distant cousin’s friend makes it to the front page of a newspaper, when the only possible path ahead is that of control, they will demand that the ‘children’ be counselled, kept indoors and talked to.

When the infantilising does not work, the ‘children’ will be looked at as ‘other’s children’ or labels — left, sickular, libtard, feminist  — those that they would not let their kind mix with. When the problem finds itself on the plate, at the table, and there is an overdose of reality, i.e the daughter or the son is the ‘sickular libtard urban-naxal’, the father will take on the role of the philosopher, which is usually a stand-in for the conspiracy theorist. “It is a paid-protest”, he will claim, “another country’s agenda to derail India’s development”. Poor father who believed till the new decade arrived that 2020 will be the one with the vision realised. Poor rich father who speaks of paid protest that is only not paying his son or daughter for pocket money. From fathers to uncles it will travel as anti-national ideation, and by the time it reaches the fathers of the nation, head of state and those that have a lathi usually and a printed sheet of facts and figures handy once in a while will mark it ‘terror’.

Hereon, it is the person with the problem who will become the problem, the protest is the problem not what the protest is on for, and if not a problem, it is publicity. If nothing can get them, sexuality and the character, whether the protesters drink or kiss, how close they stand in photos will be talked about before the bullet enters the picture, and the protest literally dies.

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