Who says young India is protesting? They are merely in line to reclaim the idea of India

The India that those who are being born in, and those who are in their late teens to very early twenties, needs a redeemer.

It also seems that the long months of solitude and silence that a nation - or at least a significant section of it cumulatively felt, is nearing its end, giving rise to a redeemer who is neither a political leader, or a writer or a master story teller like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who moves millions or a poet, and a singer. There is no one voice, no one poem, or one song or one speech like Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream’, but a cumulative one.

The redeemer is the young Indian who is at one level at a personal war with herself, the war within, which has struggled to keep emotions, assumptions and conclusions about the manner in which her nation has conducted itself, not just with her, but with its own self. Fundamental to this dilemma is to deal with the reality of other-isation. The principal sufferers or victims have consistently been what the national government has identified as the ‘other’, be it the beef carrier, or the immigrant. The decision to welcome persecuted immigrants and make them our own, vide the Citizens Amendment Act (CAA), fundamentally can have no opposition in the larger altruistic humane narrative. But when there is ‘otherisation’ here too, if not in letter but in the fine print and spirit, then it is fundamentally divisive.

People cannot be put into silos within their states. It is not enough for Chief Ministers to say that CAA will not affect the people of that State, or even the country. The spontaneous outpouring on the campuses and the streets, in principle peaceful, is not a reflection of people in silos reacting to individual harm the State has caused them or even the perception of it.

The forest fire imagery of the spreading protests isn’t an orchestration of a political group or perceived international hand. It is both symptomatic as well as symbolic of generation of Indians who have taken the lid off their pressure cookers and giving vent to their emotions freely, in order to reclaim the nation. There was no Mumbaikar or Maharashtraian, or Delhi wallah or a UP Bhaiya or a Bengali babu, a Mia from Hyderabad, or a Punjabi or a Madrasi, in these protests. They were Indians and most importantly young Indians, trying to correct the construct of a country which was inclusive to all and not exclusive to some.

In their narrow response from the habitat of an enclosed silo, the government’s refrain has been that no Indian would be affected by the CAA. There is already a sense of defensiveness around the National Registrar of Citizens where it is apprehended that those in less privileged tiers of society would find it even more difficult to produce documents to certify them as citizens and with the macro perception that minorities will be more vulnerable to exclusion. So the math people have done in their minds is minorities will be stripped off citizenship and immigrants from other faiths, but Muslims, will be made citizens.

It takes a mindset which is beyond knee jerk, superficial or used to stereotypes to understand that this is actually a narrative which can’t be blamed only on the Congress or Pakistan or liberals and secularism. The idea of India can’t be bottled with ideas which are antithetical to the very idea of India and ridiculing the fundamentals of liberalism and secularism by reducing them to catchphrases meant to take pot-shots at the opposition.

The fanning protests are because a significant portion of India wants to reclaim these very principles and unshackle them from the negative confines of what was core to our constitution, becoming phrases for ridicule. This is not a nation against the government, but a nation pained and shocked and reaching out to the government they voted to see reason.

This isn’t about only 6 campuses put of the many hundreds protesting on the day or the night time police violence in Jamia Milia Islamia. This is about 6 premier institutions in the country reacting within minutes at what they felt was the last straw.

While this was being played out, a phenomenon which is common to most such events played out. There was a section on both ends of the political and religious divide, totally removed from what the students and the young were doing, who added fuel to try and convert the glow of protest into an ugly fire. And the torching of buses and the vandalism of public property needs to be isolated from the spirit of what was witnessed at the August Kranti Maidan on Friday.

Moreover, as the protests spread, the separation of the wheat from the chaff was done by those who cared to see the difference.

20,000 protesters at the August Kranti Maidan, the seat of the Quit India movement, 2000 policemen keeping vigil, peaceful to the very core, the only violence was an India struggling with its own self, or the narrow version of what this country set out to be. What a sight that was.

The alleged RSS person in police uniform or miscreants from sectarian groups burning vehicles near Jamia and dragging students into this act, were aberrations, albeit mischievous and planned ones. But do not mistake that to be the script.

The reason why the bridge between what the government is attempting to say and what the young of India are getting is increasing because there appears to be a critical absence of moderates or middle ground leaders, intellectuals and intelligentsia in the ruling dispensation who can break through the silo the government has put themselves in, equating spontaneous students’ protests with opposition sponsored political mayhem.

Prime Minister Modi is seeing what he wants to see. But those who are marching peacefully, giving roses to policemen, or protesting with posters of Gandhi in their hands like Ramchandra Guha are Indians too.

Sheer numbers do not make a government or a nation right. The narrative of the majority cannot be the ONLY narrative of the nation. The undercurrents and nuances of that generation of young Indians who are poised to contribute to the future of India from now on, need to be addressed with willingness and patience, and not with lathis and blows. And certainly not, by classifying them as pawns of an opposition, or of a foreign country. This is what has angered students. And when they are beaten up, their campuses and libraries ransacked, when there is blood in the temples of learning, the whole discourse is narrowed down to the might of the state against defenseless students and intellectuals whose public record of contributing and enriching the nation is evident.

After all, our nation has existed far longer than this ruling dispensation. This is India as we all know. It’s not a fictional place like Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

While many writers and journalists will see the movement within India from various shades and depth, one will try and nudge the discourse towards our patriarch Prime Minister and ask if he is really at peace with the decisions he has made and its fallout.

Without any specific resemblance to the current situation or leadership, let us step back and read this passage, a wonderful tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez by senior Editor S Prasannarajan after Gabo’s (as he was called) death. Referring to one of Marquez’s books aptly named Autumn of the Patriarch, a fictional story of a nameless dictator of a nameless nation, Prasannarajan wrote “..the Patriarch one day wakes up late in the afternoon and thinks it is morning, and his countrymen have to stand outside the palace window with cut-out suns to create an illusionary morning for the dictator. The possibilities of el realismo mágico are immense in a Márquez novel: they bring out the many variations of the relationship between solitude and power. The Autumn of the Patriarch is the story of a lone, nameless dictator in a nameless nation. In him we see the shades of every Latin American dictator, and in his country we see the geography of every South American country under a dictatorship, but what makes the book bigger than an allegory is the solitude of the Patriarch, whose monstrosity is matched by his melancholy.”

This is hopefully not a vision of India yet. The nation has to be led in manner where a dissenter who loves the nation gets the same seat on the high table as a blind supporter of the ruling party does. And without changing any decision made right now, it is important to, at the very least say, yes, we are listening and we want to make you listen too, not with force but as a member of a family of Indians. If this is done, the leadership will be India’s redeemer. If not, Indians are capable of steering this discourse to reclaim the idea of India that was enshrined in our constitution.