Real pushback needs a political grammar

Where there is power, there is resistance…Resistance has no single locus, no one great refusal. [It] is…dispersed across society, appearing wherever power is exercised.’ That’s Michel Foucault, French philosopher and political scientist, in his 1978 work on the history of sexuality.

Perhaps this is a useful way of looking at the resistance movements mushrooming in India today.

Over most of June and July, Delhi’s Jantar Mantar became a grand theatre of protest. A movement initially focused on exam paper leaks, and broadly categorised as a Gen Z protest, soon became a magnet for citizens young and old, offering their sympathy and support to possibly the most credible pushback against this authoritarian regime.

Before long, it had inspired protests in other parts of the country, in state capitals and small towns, its echoes heard far and wide. Jantar Mantar drew people from all over. They weren’t all examination aspirants, their grievances not the same but the anger was directed without exception at a government they associate with hubris, cronyism and institutional capture.

Jantar Mantar has a storied history. Farmers, students, industrial workers, government employees, environmentalists, Adivasis, women, informal workers, minorities worried about their citizenship have all brought their demands and grievances to this hallowed protest venue. They have come here under different banners at different times. At this very moment in our history, we have a multiplicity of protests across the country.

What we don’t have at this moment, though, is a common political grammar, a shared vocabulary that binds these disparate movements.

This is not necessarily a sign that resistance is weak. Maybe it is the new shape of power, possibly the crony capitalist nexus that has become its defining feature, that has altered the common citizen’s equation with power.

For much of the twentieth century, resistance was imagined vertically. The State was the principal adversary. Our freedom struggle had a national objective — Gandhi spoke of swadeshi. Ambedkar saw national liberation in the annihilation of caste through a constitutional democracy. The Left organised workers and peasants around a theory of class. The JP movement was a national confrontation with authoritarian rule. All these movements pivoted on a national imaginary.

The economic liberalisation of the 1990s changed the landscape. It did not make the State disappear, but it radically altered the relationship between State, capital and society. From this new equation emerged the new ecology of civil society. NGOs became prominently engaged in myriad sectors — from education to farming to environmental activism. International funding opened up new possibilities for policy advocacy and mobilisation. As liberalisation deepened, rights-based movements became an important feature of public life.

The 1990s produced a new kind of politics: professionalised, networked, issue-based and organised around particular constituencies and demands. The anti-globalisation movements of that period challenged the terms on which India entered the global economy. Environmental activism questioned the State and critiqued its development paradigm. Rights-based campaigns sought to make the State more accountable to citizens.

Civil society came to occupy space between the common citizen and the State. And sometimes the movements they led resulted in course corrections and rights-based statutes for information, forest governance and more.

Three decades later, the nature of the confrontation has changed again. It’s not simply local versus global or State versus civil society. A farmer encounters the State and the market together — in the price his crop can fetch, the cost of inputs, access to credit, procurement and land ownership. A student too encounters them simultaneously — in the cost of education, the credibility of examinations and public institutions and the prospects of employment.

A worker encounters them in precarious employment, migration and the absence of social security. An Adivasi encounters them in displacement. Environmental movements encounter them wherever ‘development’ and greed collide with long-term ecological viability.

The question at the root of their resistance is: whose interests are the laws and rules of the land meant to serve? Is there any shared ground between landed farmers, farm labourers, students, industrial workers, environmentalists, displaced Adivasi tribes, informal labour and precarious minorities trapped in a majoritarian maelstrom? A hundred movements can co-exist and still fail to alter the structure of power if each remains trapped in its own vocabulary.

There are some important lessons in the student protests and the farmers’ movement earlier. These two peaceful agitations on the streets brought together people and organisations with different interests, histories and political affiliations. They found some common ground: possibly in their insistence that the terms of engagement with the market and the State cannot simply be thrust upon them.

A young and anxious India seems to have a new vocabulary to express its angst and aspirations. This generation feels connected to the world and is alert to local, national and global spirals. It is simultaneously a witness to and a victim of great change being wrought by new technology and other forces way too powerful.

The headiness of making the State buckle and concede some demands is understandable but a larger question looms. Can India’s variously disaffected millions find and articulate a common democratic project? As we celebrate another Independence Day, can We, the People of India, commit ourselves to a rediscovery of a shared democratic project?

Jaideep Hardikar is a senior Nagpur-based journalist and author of Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis. More by him here