Irfan does not even have a house, his father and he live amid some broken walls in folding cots and a fan, thanks to a kind person. A few blocks away live his mother and sisters, hopefully in a room with a lockable door. He cannot write but has made full use of this reading ability, gained in an anganwadi. There are many others like him. Almost 80 years after independence, which again BJP and its parents and sympathisers actually sabotaged, Irfan and lakhs like him are still not free. Only the skin color of the rulers has changed. The poor, the lower castes, the dalits, the minorities, the tribals, the hill people, the disabled, even many women... have almost zero access to anything that this government has been squawking about. All this is such a criminal waste of potential and hope. If even half of them had achieved what the elites and those in power have in the last 75 years, India would have been close to, if not ahead of, China. (At least previous governments never said they had achieved everything.) Whatever is happening is long overdue. This is just a spark; when the fire starts, these fossils in the government will be left with only ashes.
Thanks for this, Paro. I did not know the circumstances of his life. Knowing them makes his eloquence more extraordinary, and the indictment he delivers far more profound.
A young man who has taken the reading ability he acquired at an anganwadi and educated himself into a more exact understanding of democracy than many of those who govern us? That is truly extraordinary.
You are absolutely right about the criminal waste of potential and hope. Manish works ten hours a day and studies at night. Irfan has made an education out of the sliver of opportunity he was given. Imagine the country we might have been had millions like them received not charity, but the secure home, education, nutrition, safety and opportunity that should be theirs by right; that, in fact, is enshrined in the fundamental rights of the Indian citizen?
Almost eighty years after political independence, far too many Indians remain free in theory but not in the material circumstances of their lives. I hope this protest shows them that they don't need to wait politely for freedom to trickle down. They should claim citizenship, in the fullest meaning of the word, now.
I share your anger. My own hope is that the spark lights not a fire that leaves ashes behind but something even harder for power to extinguish: the knowledge, spreading from citizen to citizen, that they matter, that they possess agency, that they have rights, and that a state that denies them those rights can and should be made to answer for it.
I don't want anyone or anything to turn to ashes but it will happen. The old must govern and be accountable, or yield to the new. The apathy has gone on too long. Politicians have taken India's citizens for granted, and the elites have helped them.
Oh I agree about it being time -- I would even argue it is late -- for a changing of the guard. In this day, this age, we need a governing philosophy that goes beyond caste-arithmetic and communal gaslighting and puts the focus where it belongs: on creating the country we want the next generation to inherit.
I hadn't seen this video before among the hundreds I have been poring over, for the last 7 days. This is one video that made me sob uncontrollably. For me, he represented the idea of India, constitutional India, the dream of Indians, especially the invisibilised. Yes, kudos to the young, the Gen Z, Gen Alpha or whatever moniker, for doing what no Opposition or anyone could do thus far and managed to get an arrogant and fascist Govt to kneel, even if on one knee. You did it - a thousand gun salute. But Irfan. I want my country to have a billion Irfans who are thinking of democracy like he. He said he didn't have formal education, but he had lived experience and an intrinsic and instinctive wisdom, that no amount of education can impart. For some reason watching him and writing this, I am reminded of Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talk where he asks, Do schools kill imagination and creativity? Yes, what this protest did was probably allow us to drop our masks of fear a wee bit and peep and think that I can raise my voice and blunt the dreaded forces of the State machinery with elan, poise, grace, glee and gumption. Thank you Gen Z, thank you CJI for being the trigger, thank you CJP and Dipke and Wangchuk for taking the fight to the regime and not backing down. Thank you to the Opposition too for having raised this for long and doing what you did. Daro mat, dutay raho. Sabi ka khoon shamil yahaah ke mitti main, kisi ke baap ka Hindustan thodi hi hai?! (had forgotten to ask without fear...now feels good).
Great writeup, really liked reading through each point. I'd add one thing thats slightly tangential to the protest. I think that a big part of the anger at this exam system comes from how inhumanly competitive it's become, and how little the payoff is compared to what my generation got for far less effort.
Life was much easier for me. I went through the SSC and HSC state exams, and yes, paper leaks happened even then, but the stakes were nowhere near this high. Even if I had a degree from some unknown college, I knew IT companies would be competing to hire me, often with the promise of working abroad for a few years. Students today are at the opposite extreme - relentless mental pressure and a struggle that never really ends.
No wonder this has erupted the way it has. It won't go away until people can opt out of superhuman effort and still have a shot at a decent, livable life - that should be a valid choice that someone makes without fear for the future.
The only word in your response I would quarrel with is "tangential" -- I don't think this is tangential at all. The paper leak was the immediate betrayal, but what made that betrayal combustible was the larger reality you describe: competition has become inhuman, while the reward for surviving it has steadily diminished.
I think there is a generational story here. When I was in school in the sixties and early to mid seventies, the universe of respectable middle-class aspiration was much narrower—engineer, doctor, government servant, perhaps lawyer or accountant.
The educational system was correspondingly narrow: memorize, reproduce, clear the examination, acquire the credential. (My dropping out of college was a rebellion against just this). The system was was hardly enlightened, but it bore some relationship, however passing, to the world it was preparing us to enter.
Your generation caught another kind of moment: economic liberalisation and the IT boom created a period in which a reasonably competent graduate, even from an uncelebrated college, could expect employers to come looking. Effort still mattered, obviously, but the result of one examination, or the prestige of the institution issuing you the certificate, did not necessarily become a referendum on the rest of your life, just as my dropping out did not disqualify me from productive occupation in an earlier age.
Today’s young face a strange inversion. The world of work has expanded and changed beyond recognition; careers are less linear, skills become obsolete quickly, and adaptability, curiosity and the capacity to learn repeatedly matter more than ever. To this existing disruption, add the emergence of AI, which is poised to accelerate that disruption enormously. Yet our educational system remains substantially the one I encountered nearly six decades ago: obedience, memory, standardised tests and a fanatical hunt for the single correct answer.
So yes, we need honest examinations. But beneath that lies a more fundamental question: what are we educating children for? To clear an ever-narrower gate, or to think, adapt, collaborate, create and make their way through a world that will change radically several times during their working lives?
Your final point is crucial. A decent society cannot reserve a livable life only for the exceptional, the indefatigable or the child capable of surviving years of extreme pressure. Ordinary effort, ordinary competence and an ordinary human desire for time, family and happiness must also provide a route to security and dignity. That is not an argument for rewarding mediocrity. It is the minimum social contract: people should not have to become superhuman merely to escape precarity.
Until we restore that contract, every examination will carry more weight than any young mind should be asked to bear, and every leak will feel, correctly, like the theft of an entire future.
(Oof, I inadvertently clambered onto my soapbox, apologies)
Brilliant conversation. A conversation that some of us have had in our minds, wondering,"why doesn't everyone feel this way, am I an anomaly, oh God should I open my mouth, will I lose that friendship, oh dear, am I judging, is it not ok to judge a bigot, a racist, a fascist?" Thank you Prem because this writing of yours triggered by the Protest Z in many ways has been cathartic for us Gen Xers or whichever suffix you want to attach. Many of us articulated, but it was subdued or in "like minded" circles which were shrinking. That fear has perhaps been diffused,(not been erased completely). It feels strangely calm and yet elated.
"What will people think of us" is a trap so many of us fall into (present company included). It was my dad who once showed me an alternate way of thinking. He said, asking yourself what you will think of yourself if you do/don't do something. The rest doesn't matter.
Yes Prem. Agree. Our republic is young, literally and figuratively. This is definitely a seminal moment in its history and some of us here have been cursed to see it sink frighteningly low (won't call it a nadir, because never say never, see how cynical I've become) and blessed to see an uprising in the resurgence of faith in "democracy" an abused idea in many countries around this world. Good way to start a weee eh? Uprising on Monday, result on Saturday, faith restored on the next Monday (today). Hallelujah! Onward ho. Girding our loins, rolling up our sleeves for the next summit to scale, but this pit stop was energising as hell.
Yeah, that last line is the summary the time deserves. It's the end of a beginning or the beginning of the end, I don't quite know which (that is for history to decide, decades later), but it was a week worth living through.
I am chocked and struggling for words. This poor man had such eloquence and yet simplicity -you could see the passion and hunger coming from his heart.
There is no magic bullet, unfortunately. But there is a way of thinking. We have blathered on about our demographic dividend without ever bothering to foreground it when it comes to governance. If we are in the happy position of having the largest working-age population in the world, then it follows that governance has to focus on two imperatives before all else: One, creating an education system that, firstly, is accessible to all who want to study and which prepares you for this rapidly changing world where technology (not merely AI, but all of it) is rethinking job definitions at warp speed and two, creating avenues to employ the talent and the energies of the young. This should in fact have been the focus for at least the last 15, if not 20, years -- the demographic dividend did not happen overnight -- but at the very least, we need to re-engineer our country now, before the dividend becomes a downright disaster. It is a short step from "world's largest young working population" to "world's largest old and unproductive population."
Super interesting conversations here! I have been struggling to make sense of all that has happened over the past few weeks. I haven’t been able to feel the same kind of elation that so many others seem to be experiencing. Trying to figure out why. Partly because no amount of suffering of the people - demonetisation, Covid deaths, large scale unemployment and economic distress - and resistance - CAA, farmers protests, last election set back - appears to have diminished the power of this regime. Why should this be any different? And corruption at every level, absolute lack of humanity of the powerful seem to be so deeply rooted now that it’s unclear even if a regime change can make much difference to the Irfans and Manishes of this world. The immense potential for a more egalitarian and happy world is being sabotaged by the immense greed of a few! It all looks such an uphill task to bring change. Apologies for putting a spoke in the wheel of euphoria.
Don't apologize, Mohan -- a spoke in the wheel of euphoria is often useful, and I do share at least a part of your diagnosis. The suffering has been enormous, the cruelty and corruption are deeply embedded, and no single resignation, protest or even change of government will transform the lives of the Irfans and Manishes of this country. All of this is true.
Where I differ is in the yardstick.
An election, with or without regime change as the outcome, cannot be the sole measure of whether democracy is alive. Democracy also exists between elections (I would argue that its real health is measurable in that interstitial space): in the willingness of citizens to speak, organise, occupy public space, defy intimidation and compel power to retreat. Protest does not have to bring down a government before it can count as politically consequential.
If you think of the early days of the Modi regime, we lived in a time when voicing the mildest discomfort, not necessarily to Modi but to what was going wrong in the country, was treated as blasphemy. Take paper leaks. In 2014 itself, the CBSE Class 10 Mathematics and CBSE Class 12 Economics examinations leaked. In 2015 the AIPMT leaked forcing the Supreme Court to cancel the entire exam and order a retest for over 6.3 lakh candidates. In 2016, a NEET Phase II paper leaked. Medical entrance tests leaked in both 2015 and 2016. In 2018, the CBSE Class 10 Maths and Class 12 Economics papers were leaked and circulated on WhatsApp. In 2019, multiple recruitment examinations in states like Gujarat and Rajasthan leaked. None of this was allowed to fester, and hence none of these registered in our collective memory (I went to my Roam Research folder to pull these up.) Compare that with now. These protests are a quantum shift, not a minor aberration.
Nor would I say earlier resistance achieved nothing. The farmers forced the repeal of the farm laws (which I pointed to in this essay). The last election, despite industrial-scale manipulation, deprived the BJP of its majority. The students have now forced a concession from a government that has made refusing concessions into a demonstration of strength.
None of this has dismantled the regime or repaired the country. But power is not binary. It can remain formidable even as its aura of invincibility begins to crack. We have not changed the regime, but we have taught it to heed the voices of the disaffected.
That is the change I find significant. During Modi’s first term, the government’s great psychological victory was convincing people that resistance was futile. Today, farmers are again on the streets. Adivasis are resisting the seizure of their lands. People threatened by the Ken–Betwa project are protesting. The student agitation has paused, but the anger that powered it has plainly not disappeared. This does not prove that democracy is healthy. It proves that it has not been decimated.
So I would call what I feel not euphoria but hope grounded in evidence. The young have rediscovered that government can be challenged and made to yield. That is nowhere near sufficient. But without that recovery of citizen agency, none of the larger change we both want is even imaginable.
No disagreement with anything you said, Prem. I think when the gap between the “ought” and the “is” is so large, then the occasional sparks do not provide enough light to see the “ought.” It may not mean that we haven’t cleared the path a little bit but we may not have as well. It seems that the young, with so little baggage to bring from the past, have a greater ability to imagine a better alternative than the old, who seem to stuck in what is “practical” with no imagination of what could be. Between the elections, as you call it, is the space that should enable that alternative imagination to be operationalised.
The gap is large, no question, but increasingly, discrete groups of people have been shrinking it, a little bit at a time. The thing is that the path you refer to has been so overgrown that clearing it completely is a humongous task. (Reminds me of the old days, when the Sabarimala temple was only open for two months a year. Over the remaining ten months, the forest would grow back into the walking path, and it would take volunteers a month of hard labour to cut a path to the temple again.) But yes, if we are investing our hope that a group of citizens will finally clear that path, then the young is the only group worth investing in. The two, or even three, generations before GenZ have been brought up to believe in the invincibility of government and the futility of protest; the young alone have no such baggage, plus they have the energy and, if moved to protest, the determination to endure that the elder generations so obviously lack. Fingers crossed.
Prem, in addition to the points you’ve made about monitoring whether the promises made are kept or not, it feels imperative that someone should keep an eye on the welfare of the individual students and their families. They could be attacked in a variety of ways once the attention of the media and the nation has moved on, especially those from minority communities. I hope to be proven wrong, but the government’s one irredeemable instinct is to use every power it can reach for to teach citizens never to question it and never to raise their voices. They are entirely capable of exacting retribution against all of these young protesters, and in the shadows, free of such annoyances as the attention of those bits of the media it has not already forced to its knees.
This is a valid concern for sure. (I woke up to news that in West Bengal, police are filing cases against "objectionable posters" held up during the protests there. This is a vengeful government -- they want to be feared, not mocked, and they have never been mocked as brutally as by GenZ. Modi and Shah are not the sort who will take it in their stride and move on, so yes, a major concern. That said, I am aware of people -- activists, lawyers, etc -- who are working to create an ecosystem that monitors any and all abuse and moves swiftly when any such instance is detected. (It should have been in place already, but better late than never.)
Absolutely valid concerns. It's going to happen. Apparently the Muslim man who, in the first few days of the protest, was supplying water and I think some food as well has been targeted back in UP. The FRS has been used for this very purpose. It's scary as hell.
I bow my head to Irfan and it was a revelation to me about the idealism of youth. Reciting poet Niraj's lines and the coconut water metaphor drove the message home.
The youth have shown spine and it is as if they have asked the adults of this country to stand aside while they take matters in hand.
Mother of democracy,Vishwaguru,Mann ki baat and what not was being bandied about. We were being taken for a ride.
By the way, it is time for the next foreign visit to countries not ticked off on the map.Had it happened a few days earlier it would have been the perfect escape.Bad luck.
Thank you, Bala. And yes, Irfan was extraordinary—the Neeraj poem, the coconut-water metaphor, the ease with which he moved between humor, pain and constitutional principle... As someone who fetishes writing and rhetoric, I was stunned.
I wonder, though, whether his idealism is a revelation about the young, or about how little attention the rest of us have been paying to them.
Young people have repeatedly placed themselves at the hinge points of our history. Students initiated the Nav Nirman agitation in Gujarat and the Bihar movement of 1974, from which Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for Sampoorna Kranti emerged.
They stood up during the Emergency. (In Kerala, Vajpayee and Advani, speaking in Hindi, did not cut much ice though they did add to the fervour -- it was the students who drove the anti-Congress campaign. I should know -- I was there.) More recently, students across the country put their bodies on the line against the CAA and NRC, often while police entered their campuses, beat them, arrested them and criminalized their dissent. There have been many other examples in between.
This does not mean that the young are a single bloc, or that youth automatically confers wisdom or virtue. It means that every generation produces young people who have not yet made their peace with what their elders have learned to call inevitable. They can still look at an injustice and say: this is intolerable. Too many of us look at the same thing and say: this is India.
Irfan and the others have not suddenly discovered idealism. They have given us evidence of it repeatedly; we have repeatedly chosen not to notice.
And I would alter your lovely formulation only slightly. They are not asking the adults to stand aside. They are asking us to stand up and stand alongside them, to recover some of the courage and democratic imagination that age, accommodation and repeated disappointment have worn out of us.
As for “Mother of Democracy”, “Vishwaguru” and the rest: slogans are what governments manufacture when they want the prestige of an idea without submitting to its demands. Irfan, Manish and the protesters did something far more substantial. They took democracy out of the slogan and put it back on the street.
The foreign-visit line did make me laugh. The timing really was inconsiderate -- but then, this is a man who did a Mann ki Baat on Sunday focussing on his "schemes", so expectations are not too high anyway.
This guy has received zilch from the system and yet retains such grace and humility. Just contrast this with the arrogance of the corrupt ministers. The confidence that they can and will get away with everything. no fear...
It is us, this generation, who have been taught for far too long to obey our seniors, the greyer the better. The elites kept people jobless so that they could recruit people to confuse, hate, and riot for money. Technology, for better or worse, has now taken away the old definition of skill and finally made child the father of man.
I'm reading, among other things, this book by Mark Kurlansky -- 1968. Which he positions as a hinge point in American (and world) history. The year of "Hey Jude", and also the year of the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the former fueling massive student protests. Apollo 11. The Black Power salute at the Olympics...
Makes me wonder if some day in the future, someone will see 2025-26 as a similar hinge in Indian history.
Irfan does not even have a house, his father and he live amid some broken walls in folding cots and a fan, thanks to a kind person. A few blocks away live his mother and sisters, hopefully in a room with a lockable door. He cannot write but has made full use of this reading ability, gained in an anganwadi. There are many others like him. Almost 80 years after independence, which again BJP and its parents and sympathisers actually sabotaged, Irfan and lakhs like him are still not free. Only the skin color of the rulers has changed. The poor, the lower castes, the dalits, the minorities, the tribals, the hill people, the disabled, even many women... have almost zero access to anything that this government has been squawking about. All this is such a criminal waste of potential and hope. If even half of them had achieved what the elites and those in power have in the last 75 years, India would have been close to, if not ahead of, China. (At least previous governments never said they had achieved everything.) Whatever is happening is long overdue. This is just a spark; when the fire starts, these fossils in the government will be left with only ashes.
Thanks for this, Paro. I did not know the circumstances of his life. Knowing them makes his eloquence more extraordinary, and the indictment he delivers far more profound.
A young man who has taken the reading ability he acquired at an anganwadi and educated himself into a more exact understanding of democracy than many of those who govern us? That is truly extraordinary.
You are absolutely right about the criminal waste of potential and hope. Manish works ten hours a day and studies at night. Irfan has made an education out of the sliver of opportunity he was given. Imagine the country we might have been had millions like them received not charity, but the secure home, education, nutrition, safety and opportunity that should be theirs by right; that, in fact, is enshrined in the fundamental rights of the Indian citizen?
Almost eighty years after political independence, far too many Indians remain free in theory but not in the material circumstances of their lives. I hope this protest shows them that they don't need to wait politely for freedom to trickle down. They should claim citizenship, in the fullest meaning of the word, now.
I share your anger. My own hope is that the spark lights not a fire that leaves ashes behind but something even harder for power to extinguish: the knowledge, spreading from citizen to citizen, that they matter, that they possess agency, that they have rights, and that a state that denies them those rights can and should be made to answer for it.
I don't want anyone or anything to turn to ashes but it will happen. The old must govern and be accountable, or yield to the new. The apathy has gone on too long. Politicians have taken India's citizens for granted, and the elites have helped them.
Oh I agree about it being time -- I would even argue it is late -- for a changing of the guard. In this day, this age, we need a governing philosophy that goes beyond caste-arithmetic and communal gaslighting and puts the focus where it belongs: on creating the country we want the next generation to inherit.
Such beauty, such poetry, above all, such truth in Irfan's words.
The eloquence -- backed by knowledge and lived insight -- of the young is for me the most eye-opening aspect of these protests.
I hadn't seen this video before among the hundreds I have been poring over, for the last 7 days. This is one video that made me sob uncontrollably. For me, he represented the idea of India, constitutional India, the dream of Indians, especially the invisibilised. Yes, kudos to the young, the Gen Z, Gen Alpha or whatever moniker, for doing what no Opposition or anyone could do thus far and managed to get an arrogant and fascist Govt to kneel, even if on one knee. You did it - a thousand gun salute. But Irfan. I want my country to have a billion Irfans who are thinking of democracy like he. He said he didn't have formal education, but he had lived experience and an intrinsic and instinctive wisdom, that no amount of education can impart. For some reason watching him and writing this, I am reminded of Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talk where he asks, Do schools kill imagination and creativity? Yes, what this protest did was probably allow us to drop our masks of fear a wee bit and peep and think that I can raise my voice and blunt the dreaded forces of the State machinery with elan, poise, grace, glee and gumption. Thank you Gen Z, thank you CJI for being the trigger, thank you CJP and Dipke and Wangchuk for taking the fight to the regime and not backing down. Thank you to the Opposition too for having raised this for long and doing what you did. Daro mat, dutay raho. Sabi ka khoon shamil yahaah ke mitti main, kisi ke baap ka Hindustan thodi hi hai?! (had forgotten to ask without fear...now feels good).
Great writeup, really liked reading through each point. I'd add one thing thats slightly tangential to the protest. I think that a big part of the anger at this exam system comes from how inhumanly competitive it's become, and how little the payoff is compared to what my generation got for far less effort.
Life was much easier for me. I went through the SSC and HSC state exams, and yes, paper leaks happened even then, but the stakes were nowhere near this high. Even if I had a degree from some unknown college, I knew IT companies would be competing to hire me, often with the promise of working abroad for a few years. Students today are at the opposite extreme - relentless mental pressure and a struggle that never really ends.
No wonder this has erupted the way it has. It won't go away until people can opt out of superhuman effort and still have a shot at a decent, livable life - that should be a valid choice that someone makes without fear for the future.
Thank you, Kedar.
The only word in your response I would quarrel with is "tangential" -- I don't think this is tangential at all. The paper leak was the immediate betrayal, but what made that betrayal combustible was the larger reality you describe: competition has become inhuman, while the reward for surviving it has steadily diminished.
I think there is a generational story here. When I was in school in the sixties and early to mid seventies, the universe of respectable middle-class aspiration was much narrower—engineer, doctor, government servant, perhaps lawyer or accountant.
The educational system was correspondingly narrow: memorize, reproduce, clear the examination, acquire the credential. (My dropping out of college was a rebellion against just this). The system was was hardly enlightened, but it bore some relationship, however passing, to the world it was preparing us to enter.
Your generation caught another kind of moment: economic liberalisation and the IT boom created a period in which a reasonably competent graduate, even from an uncelebrated college, could expect employers to come looking. Effort still mattered, obviously, but the result of one examination, or the prestige of the institution issuing you the certificate, did not necessarily become a referendum on the rest of your life, just as my dropping out did not disqualify me from productive occupation in an earlier age.
Today’s young face a strange inversion. The world of work has expanded and changed beyond recognition; careers are less linear, skills become obsolete quickly, and adaptability, curiosity and the capacity to learn repeatedly matter more than ever. To this existing disruption, add the emergence of AI, which is poised to accelerate that disruption enormously. Yet our educational system remains substantially the one I encountered nearly six decades ago: obedience, memory, standardised tests and a fanatical hunt for the single correct answer.
So yes, we need honest examinations. But beneath that lies a more fundamental question: what are we educating children for? To clear an ever-narrower gate, or to think, adapt, collaborate, create and make their way through a world that will change radically several times during their working lives?
Your final point is crucial. A decent society cannot reserve a livable life only for the exceptional, the indefatigable or the child capable of surviving years of extreme pressure. Ordinary effort, ordinary competence and an ordinary human desire for time, family and happiness must also provide a route to security and dignity. That is not an argument for rewarding mediocrity. It is the minimum social contract: people should not have to become superhuman merely to escape precarity.
Until we restore that contract, every examination will carry more weight than any young mind should be asked to bear, and every leak will feel, correctly, like the theft of an entire future.
(Oof, I inadvertently clambered onto my soapbox, apologies)
> Oof, I inadvertently clambered onto my soapbox, apologies
No apology needed, that soapbox has a permanent reserved spot. This is exactly the kind of thing we want more of, so get on it anytime 🙂.
Brilliant conversation. A conversation that some of us have had in our minds, wondering,"why doesn't everyone feel this way, am I an anomaly, oh God should I open my mouth, will I lose that friendship, oh dear, am I judging, is it not ok to judge a bigot, a racist, a fascist?" Thank you Prem because this writing of yours triggered by the Protest Z in many ways has been cathartic for us Gen Xers or whichever suffix you want to attach. Many of us articulated, but it was subdued or in "like minded" circles which were shrinking. That fear has perhaps been diffused,(not been erased completely). It feels strangely calm and yet elated.
"What will people think of us" is a trap so many of us fall into (present company included). It was my dad who once showed me an alternate way of thinking. He said, asking yourself what you will think of yourself if you do/don't do something. The rest doesn't matter.
Yes Prem. Agree. Our republic is young, literally and figuratively. This is definitely a seminal moment in its history and some of us here have been cursed to see it sink frighteningly low (won't call it a nadir, because never say never, see how cynical I've become) and blessed to see an uprising in the resurgence of faith in "democracy" an abused idea in many countries around this world. Good way to start a weee eh? Uprising on Monday, result on Saturday, faith restored on the next Monday (today). Hallelujah! Onward ho. Girding our loins, rolling up our sleeves for the next summit to scale, but this pit stop was energising as hell.
Yeah, that last line is the summary the time deserves. It's the end of a beginning or the beginning of the end, I don't quite know which (that is for history to decide, decades later), but it was a week worth living through.
I am chocked and struggling for words. This poor man had such eloquence and yet simplicity -you could see the passion and hunger coming from his heart.
Sadly what is the solution to the problem.
There is no magic bullet, unfortunately. But there is a way of thinking. We have blathered on about our demographic dividend without ever bothering to foreground it when it comes to governance. If we are in the happy position of having the largest working-age population in the world, then it follows that governance has to focus on two imperatives before all else: One, creating an education system that, firstly, is accessible to all who want to study and which prepares you for this rapidly changing world where technology (not merely AI, but all of it) is rethinking job definitions at warp speed and two, creating avenues to employ the talent and the energies of the young. This should in fact have been the focus for at least the last 15, if not 20, years -- the demographic dividend did not happen overnight -- but at the very least, we need to re-engineer our country now, before the dividend becomes a downright disaster. It is a short step from "world's largest young working population" to "world's largest old and unproductive population."
Super interesting conversations here! I have been struggling to make sense of all that has happened over the past few weeks. I haven’t been able to feel the same kind of elation that so many others seem to be experiencing. Trying to figure out why. Partly because no amount of suffering of the people - demonetisation, Covid deaths, large scale unemployment and economic distress - and resistance - CAA, farmers protests, last election set back - appears to have diminished the power of this regime. Why should this be any different? And corruption at every level, absolute lack of humanity of the powerful seem to be so deeply rooted now that it’s unclear even if a regime change can make much difference to the Irfans and Manishes of this world. The immense potential for a more egalitarian and happy world is being sabotaged by the immense greed of a few! It all looks such an uphill task to bring change. Apologies for putting a spoke in the wheel of euphoria.
Don't apologize, Mohan -- a spoke in the wheel of euphoria is often useful, and I do share at least a part of your diagnosis. The suffering has been enormous, the cruelty and corruption are deeply embedded, and no single resignation, protest or even change of government will transform the lives of the Irfans and Manishes of this country. All of this is true.
Where I differ is in the yardstick.
An election, with or without regime change as the outcome, cannot be the sole measure of whether democracy is alive. Democracy also exists between elections (I would argue that its real health is measurable in that interstitial space): in the willingness of citizens to speak, organise, occupy public space, defy intimidation and compel power to retreat. Protest does not have to bring down a government before it can count as politically consequential.
If you think of the early days of the Modi regime, we lived in a time when voicing the mildest discomfort, not necessarily to Modi but to what was going wrong in the country, was treated as blasphemy. Take paper leaks. In 2014 itself, the CBSE Class 10 Mathematics and CBSE Class 12 Economics examinations leaked. In 2015 the AIPMT leaked forcing the Supreme Court to cancel the entire exam and order a retest for over 6.3 lakh candidates. In 2016, a NEET Phase II paper leaked. Medical entrance tests leaked in both 2015 and 2016. In 2018, the CBSE Class 10 Maths and Class 12 Economics papers were leaked and circulated on WhatsApp. In 2019, multiple recruitment examinations in states like Gujarat and Rajasthan leaked. None of this was allowed to fester, and hence none of these registered in our collective memory (I went to my Roam Research folder to pull these up.) Compare that with now. These protests are a quantum shift, not a minor aberration.
Nor would I say earlier resistance achieved nothing. The farmers forced the repeal of the farm laws (which I pointed to in this essay). The last election, despite industrial-scale manipulation, deprived the BJP of its majority. The students have now forced a concession from a government that has made refusing concessions into a demonstration of strength.
None of this has dismantled the regime or repaired the country. But power is not binary. It can remain formidable even as its aura of invincibility begins to crack. We have not changed the regime, but we have taught it to heed the voices of the disaffected.
That is the change I find significant. During Modi’s first term, the government’s great psychological victory was convincing people that resistance was futile. Today, farmers are again on the streets. Adivasis are resisting the seizure of their lands. People threatened by the Ken–Betwa project are protesting. The student agitation has paused, but the anger that powered it has plainly not disappeared. This does not prove that democracy is healthy. It proves that it has not been decimated.
So I would call what I feel not euphoria but hope grounded in evidence. The young have rediscovered that government can be challenged and made to yield. That is nowhere near sufficient. But without that recovery of citizen agency, none of the larger change we both want is even imaginable.
Thanks for reading.
No disagreement with anything you said, Prem. I think when the gap between the “ought” and the “is” is so large, then the occasional sparks do not provide enough light to see the “ought.” It may not mean that we haven’t cleared the path a little bit but we may not have as well. It seems that the young, with so little baggage to bring from the past, have a greater ability to imagine a better alternative than the old, who seem to stuck in what is “practical” with no imagination of what could be. Between the elections, as you call it, is the space that should enable that alternative imagination to be operationalised.
The gap is large, no question, but increasingly, discrete groups of people have been shrinking it, a little bit at a time. The thing is that the path you refer to has been so overgrown that clearing it completely is a humongous task. (Reminds me of the old days, when the Sabarimala temple was only open for two months a year. Over the remaining ten months, the forest would grow back into the walking path, and it would take volunteers a month of hard labour to cut a path to the temple again.) But yes, if we are investing our hope that a group of citizens will finally clear that path, then the young is the only group worth investing in. The two, or even three, generations before GenZ have been brought up to believe in the invincibility of government and the futility of protest; the young alone have no such baggage, plus they have the energy and, if moved to protest, the determination to endure that the elder generations so obviously lack. Fingers crossed.
Prem, in addition to the points you’ve made about monitoring whether the promises made are kept or not, it feels imperative that someone should keep an eye on the welfare of the individual students and their families. They could be attacked in a variety of ways once the attention of the media and the nation has moved on, especially those from minority communities. I hope to be proven wrong, but the government’s one irredeemable instinct is to use every power it can reach for to teach citizens never to question it and never to raise their voices. They are entirely capable of exacting retribution against all of these young protesters, and in the shadows, free of such annoyances as the attention of those bits of the media it has not already forced to its knees.
This is a valid concern for sure. (I woke up to news that in West Bengal, police are filing cases against "objectionable posters" held up during the protests there. This is a vengeful government -- they want to be feared, not mocked, and they have never been mocked as brutally as by GenZ. Modi and Shah are not the sort who will take it in their stride and move on, so yes, a major concern. That said, I am aware of people -- activists, lawyers, etc -- who are working to create an ecosystem that monitors any and all abuse and moves swiftly when any such instance is detected. (It should have been in place already, but better late than never.)
Absolutely valid concerns. It's going to happen. Apparently the Muslim man who, in the first few days of the protest, was supplying water and I think some food as well has been targeted back in UP. The FRS has been used for this very purpose. It's scary as hell.
Yes, true. See my response above
https://youtu.be/pl2JmiiLvC8?si=kAVq5n7MRrccKxgy
Thanks for this timely writeup.
I bow my head to Irfan and it was a revelation to me about the idealism of youth. Reciting poet Niraj's lines and the coconut water metaphor drove the message home.
The youth have shown spine and it is as if they have asked the adults of this country to stand aside while they take matters in hand.
Mother of democracy,Vishwaguru,Mann ki baat and what not was being bandied about. We were being taken for a ride.
By the way, it is time for the next foreign visit to countries not ticked off on the map.Had it happened a few days earlier it would have been the perfect escape.Bad luck.
Thank you, Bala. And yes, Irfan was extraordinary—the Neeraj poem, the coconut-water metaphor, the ease with which he moved between humor, pain and constitutional principle... As someone who fetishes writing and rhetoric, I was stunned.
I wonder, though, whether his idealism is a revelation about the young, or about how little attention the rest of us have been paying to them.
Young people have repeatedly placed themselves at the hinge points of our history. Students initiated the Nav Nirman agitation in Gujarat and the Bihar movement of 1974, from which Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for Sampoorna Kranti emerged.
They stood up during the Emergency. (In Kerala, Vajpayee and Advani, speaking in Hindi, did not cut much ice though they did add to the fervour -- it was the students who drove the anti-Congress campaign. I should know -- I was there.) More recently, students across the country put their bodies on the line against the CAA and NRC, often while police entered their campuses, beat them, arrested them and criminalized their dissent. There have been many other examples in between.
This does not mean that the young are a single bloc, or that youth automatically confers wisdom or virtue. It means that every generation produces young people who have not yet made their peace with what their elders have learned to call inevitable. They can still look at an injustice and say: this is intolerable. Too many of us look at the same thing and say: this is India.
Irfan and the others have not suddenly discovered idealism. They have given us evidence of it repeatedly; we have repeatedly chosen not to notice.
And I would alter your lovely formulation only slightly. They are not asking the adults to stand aside. They are asking us to stand up and stand alongside them, to recover some of the courage and democratic imagination that age, accommodation and repeated disappointment have worn out of us.
As for “Mother of Democracy”, “Vishwaguru” and the rest: slogans are what governments manufacture when they want the prestige of an idea without submitting to its demands. Irfan, Manish and the protesters did something far more substantial. They took democracy out of the slogan and put it back on the street.
The foreign-visit line did make me laugh. The timing really was inconsiderate -- but then, this is a man who did a Mann ki Baat on Sunday focussing on his "schemes", so expectations are not too high anyway.
This guy has received zilch from the system and yet retains such grace and humility. Just contrast this with the arrogance of the corrupt ministers. The confidence that they can and will get away with everything. no fear...
I'd only push this same point one notch further, Paro, and ask: What gives these superannuated pols that confidence?
The short answer is, the collective apathy of all of us.
It is us, this generation, who have been taught for far too long to obey our seniors, the greyer the better. The elites kept people jobless so that they could recruit people to confuse, hate, and riot for money. Technology, for better or worse, has now taken away the old definition of skill and finally made child the father of man.
I'm reading, among other things, this book by Mark Kurlansky -- 1968. Which he positions as a hinge point in American (and world) history. The year of "Hey Jude", and also the year of the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the former fueling massive student protests. Apollo 11. The Black Power salute at the Olympics...
Makes me wonder if some day in the future, someone will see 2025-26 as a similar hinge in Indian history.