India, said The Economist famously some years ago, is a ‘continent-sized embarrassment’. The description, which attracted outrage from sections of India’s ruling establishment, is actually a mild one, if you go by the recently-published book ‘The Ferment: Youth Unrest in India’ (Macmillan, 2019) by Nikhila Henry. The book paints a picture of contemporary India that is at once both depressing and inspiring.
Depressing because it relentlessly and meticulously confirms the suspicion that must haunt every thinking Indian today: this country is just not working. Henry’s book interviews diverse young people across the country united by their involvement in protests of one kind or another, trying to find out just why they are angry. And, from almost all the vantage points she presents, the country resembles less a functioning republic and democracy than a disaster zone; a disaster zone in which millions of the weakest, poorest, most vulnerable of its citizens are trapped in poverty, violence, hierarchy, patriarchy, illiteracy, criminalisation, you name it, most of it based on caste, and with no freedom in sight.
Many of the protests Henry documents are not new. Who has not heard of student strikes or the ‘Kashmir problem’? But there was a huge upsurge in all these agitations in the 2nd decade of the twenty-first century, says Henry, and the big reason for this was education: increased enrolment of students from SC-ST-OBC-Minority backgrounds resulted in a sea-change in the socio-economic composition of the student communities everywhere, which till the 1980s, had been the monopoly of the dominant castes.
These students changed things – they challenged the rampant and overt Brahmanism in these institutions, formed new associations based on their background, and began to expect and demand respect and justice from a system saturated with opposing values. For, what India calls unity in diversity, says Henry, is actually the infinite internal divisions of caste. The dominant castes did not just monopolise education, they expected to do so indefinitely. The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 noted that, despite a growing enrolment ratio among all communities, among 21 to 30-year-olds, just 3.3 per cent of Adivasis and Dalits, 4.5 per cent of Muslims, and 6.5 per cent of OBCs were graduates, compared to 18.6 per cent of the General Category. The Universities thus not only failed to teach students from oppressed and marginalised communities, they provided a hostile and discriminatory environment which rusticated many and drove others to drop out, even commit suicide. All the while denying the very existence of caste.
‘Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide, was perhaps the first one to establish what student agitations in isolated colleges and universities had pointed out in the past; that educational institutions had turned into Khap panchayats; modern killing fields that repackaged age-old practices of deprivation and discrimination.’
The rest of the world sees India’s caste system as an affront to modernity, says Henry, when caste is actually embedded in India’s very modernisation process. It is nothing less than the backbone of India’s most modern institutions. And having faced and survived this system, what confronts many young adults, with hard-won degrees and diplomas in hand, is joblessness. The government’s economic planning should have focussed on manufacturing, says Henry, which creates more jobs, including skilled ones. Instead it has just allowed the service sector to grow and grow, leaving engineering-diploma-holders to drive Ola cabs in Cyberabad.
Another difference of the 21st century protests is their public visibility and therefore uncontainability by the establishment, not least thanks to the Internet and social media. Another important factor is the rise of alternate media like Dalit Camera and Round Table India web portal which have provided space for emerging voices. There is also the influence – thanks to the telecom revolution – of agitations elsewhere like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. The protests of today are thus confident, aggressive and in-your-face, to the beats of leather drums, takbir calls, Jai Bhim salutes, church bells and Buddhist chants, not to mention the celebration of suppressed cultures of food, music, religious practice and political behaviour, sometimes openly, sometimes otherwise.
At the end, Henry’s book is one of hope, or even inspiration. For what it chronicles are the lives and opinions of young people who are not just unhappy with India’s infinite failings, but want to do something about it. From the Indian universities with their vocal Ambedkar-Birsa-Phule-Periyar student associations, and their Beef and Asura festivals, to the Saharanpur-based and teenager-filled Bhim Army and its determination to fight back against ingrained social violence and deprivation, the Adivasi and other youth flocking towards Left Wing Extremism (as the Home Ministry puts it) that is found across almost half the country today, the students in the north-east States and Kashmir unbowed before the armed might of the Indian State, the women like Kerala’s Hadiya, fighting for the right to convert to Islam and to marry whom they want, the second decade of the 21st century finds young Indians expressing revulsion with the system and trying to ‘wake India out of its caste stupor’.
Is the ferment missing in Goa? Is that the reason why the establishment is able to invisibilise so many issues connected to young people, from the widely unimplemented reservations policy in education and jobs, to the anti-Bahujan Medium-of-Instruction policy, and the general lack of dignified employment?
The need of the hour might then be to unite across groups and issues, and build a new front that will also be an answer for the rotten politics of our times.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural historian & novelist)
