The series of unfortunate political events that have followed the student protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University on February 9 have exposed, with the penetrating clarity that tragedy brings, the bloody battlefield that is India’s political discourse at present. And as with tragedies, not to speak of battles, a grave sense of loss is at the heart of this tale.
It’s a loss that is felt most acutely in contemplating 25-year-old Rohith Vemula’s suicide. The PhD student at Hyderabad Central University hung himself with a political banner of the Dalit students group he was closely involved with. His decision to end his life came in the backdrop of alleged caste-based discrimination and a running feud with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. This loss, in turn, begot another tragedy, where his suicide itself has been reduced to a political weapon to pin down the BJP for pushing a young Dalit man to his death. The BJP’s response was to field an aggressive Smriti Irani, the minister for education. Her speech in Parliament on Vemula’s death, and the JNU row, deepened the ideological confrontation at a time when it was crucial to reach out.
Indians today live in an incredibly polarised environment, where different ideas of India, are in constant collision mode. It is difficult to imagine a civil conversation between these different Indian heads.
It is a loss of empathy which has brought India here, as also the inability to view something from another person’s point of view. In its place, we find hard ideological certainties, unheeding of the human being standing across, most often at the receiving end of one’s actions.
Imbalanced proclamations
Where there is no empathy, a loss of balance is to be expected. Unsurprisingly, the past fortnight or so has seen incidents of utter stupidity and high-handedness, like Kanhaiya Kumar’s arrest under the outlandish sedition law and the display of goondaism at the Patiala House courts when lawyers attacked journalists, protesters and Kumar, who was in police custody, even as law enforcers looked on.
But imbalanced too are the acts of those who make daily proclamations of India being under siege. This is the work of those who believe that it is not possible to be a free person under the rule of BJP’s Narendra Modi and his government. Much of this thinking is hyperbolic, and based on an equally rigid ideological position framed in opposition to Modi and the BJP.
Unfortunately, a substantial number of Indians on social media are picking up their cues about where to stand on many of these issues from the wider political arena and the media landscape. They shape the latter actively as they become producers and not just consumers of media content.
There have been moments in the history of India where politics has completely split society and forced one to be a member of one camp or another. But never before have these differences been magnified a hundred-fold like they are today in the age of social media. Traditional media, such as television, is merely playing a catch-up game with online platforms where action and reaction is instant.
Loss of freedom
In this there is a loss of objectivity and of critical distance between a political event and oneself, the party and oneself, or even the clique and oneself. There is a loss of perspective too in terms of where to leave politics behind.
There is neither freedom – the one slogan that has come to underpin the debates of the past few weeks – nor autonomy in signing up for things that come out of an unconscious, ideologically-driven support or rejection of things, or from mob-induced passions. Think about the JNU students shouting controversial slogans to exercise their freedom of expression or the goon-like lawyers who wanted to prove their patriotic credentials. This kind of thing happens in a matter of minutes online.
This is the loss that will fuel many more such tragic incidents. It is the loss of freedom in a deeper sense, in the sense of being able to know who one really is, and what one wants from oneself.
It is a question that each one needs to contemplate privately rather than farming it out to the party line, the 9o’clock debate or the Twitter timeline. Perhaps then one can be clearer about what one wants from politics. And the many Indian heads can go back to talking and arguing, and maybe even making music, even if discordant music.
