CAA-NRC protests: Looking ahead

The longevity of the NRC-CAA public protest is anyone’s guess right now. What is evident though is the remarkable spontaneity of meticulously organised daily protests in different parts of the country. Party-political leadership is conspicuously absent as young students, social activists and common people have claimed the streets.

Our past experience of similar energy spilling into the streets is inter alia from the AASU agitation in Assam that morphed into the AGP, the India Against Corruption movement of Arvind Kejriwal that was carefully steered to power under the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) banner.

Once in power, the protagonists quickly embraced the characteristics of traditional politicians from established political parties. It is for good reason that we are told that revolutions eat their own children.

Some years ago, Lutyens Delhi was stormed by indignant supporters of the tragic Nirbhaya who lost her life in a heinous criminal assault of unimaginable barbarity. The young who defied Delhi’s bitter winter and confused reactions of the political class disappeared just as suddenly as they had gathered. Many attempts to attract them back to revive the memories of their spontaneous empathy even to preserve a lasting statement regarding crime against women remained unsuccessful.

Is this a macabre version of innumerable young emerging in age for the US Presidential elections every four years only to disappear into routine existence once the celebrations are over? Should we indeed prepare for something similar this time in India?

Thus far, the movement remains leaderless but certainly not rudderless. Like wild geese flying in ‘V’ formation these protests across the length and breadth of India from Assam, West Bengal, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, to the NCT of Delhi, have an unspoken resonance and coordination.

But there are no leaders as we know. Traditional political leaders seem to be keeping away with a few exceptions like Yogendra Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, Brinda Karat and some new age icons like Chandrashekhar Azad, Kanhaiya Kumar, Hardik Patel et al. And yet the PM thinks this is all about the Congress party peddling lies and Urban Naxals provoking violence!

Will this too pass? If political parties remain perplexed and inevitable exhaustion takes a toll, not to mention the growing oppression unleashed by the State, will the storm pass? Despite the intensity of feeling about the matter, one would be blind to see only the NRC-CAA in the present upsurge of emotion.

There was certainly something happening for a while against the government despite the fact that they returned to power merely six months ago and believed to have pulled off several winning strokes including Triple Talaq and Article 370.

Whatever was happening had certainly something to do with the sense in the universities that the cherished freedom was being steadily cribbed and confined; outside the universities the marketplace was losing its sheen with the economy in decline and the job market in disarray.

Then again, the shabby treatment meted out to a top public figure, P. Chidambaram, would not have gone unnoticed amongst those who had flocked to hear him as the efficient Finance Minister.

The determination of the protesters has certainly caused some concern within the BJP. The PM says there has been no talk of NRC and the Union Home Minister, who just the other day was raring to go, has stepped back a bit. But, of course, they are going ahead with the NPR that sounds innocuous collation of population (birth and death registers) but will ultimately feed the NRC.

The NPR has no civil consequences for an individual but the NRC, as we saw in Assam, is like a death knell. It is a dishonest ploy to hark back to early 2000 to pin all this on the Congress. The unintended misery is there for all to see. We therefore need further public consultation and reflection to take the sting out of the process. Instead, the government has chosen to use force to kill the argument.

The Raj Ghat Satyagraha by the Congress party is the first such public gesture of solidarity by a political party. It looked significantly different from the gatherings that have been taking place across the land and certainly the ones at the Jamia campus as well as the India Gate and Rajiv Gandhi Chowk in the national capital.

Will someone be able to make these efforts converge? That is the need of the hour as has been underscored admirably by the success of the Jharkhand alliance of JMM-Congress-RJD. Yet the crowds that gathered had isolated individuals who seemed perturbed to see Congress leaders mingle unobtrusively.

There were taunts of ‘too little too late’ and the like as though these protests are about establishing pecking order of tomorrow’s politics. The people who are infiltrating the ranks of protesters to incite violence and provoke the security forces to violate restraint imposed by rule of law are certainly saboteurs of a noble cause.