The protest against the NEET paper leaks and the demand for education reforms ended after the government accepted all of the Cockroach Janta Party’s demands, viz., the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, compensation of one crore rupees to the families whose children committed suicide, and the withdrawal of all actions against the students. However, not long after, the government tried to muddy the waters by tacitly encouraging certain BJP-ruled states to take action against the agitating students, e.g., Bihar. While it is expected that any cases will ultimately be dropped, before that happens it is likely that the students will be harassed for a while, e.g., by being called to the police station to be given a warning or detained for a few days. There are reports of both happening.
The legal action against the protestors is being taken to inflict punishment and deter them from participating in future movements. This is also being done in an attempt to create a divide between those against whom action is being taken and those, especially the more well-known leaders, who are not facing any legal action. Anticipating this, Kapil Sibal, a senior Supreme Court lawyer and senior Congress leader, has pledged one crore rupees to support legal aid for CJP protestors arrested by the Delhi Police. This is an important initiative to maintain the morale of the supporters by assuring them that the movement will continue to fight for them.
Another method of dividing the movement is by alleging that some protestors have a criminal background and therefore cases will proceed against them but not against others who do not. This is ironic considering that, according to reports by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), based on self-sworn election affidavits, 63 Lok Sabha MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) face serious criminal charges, with a total of 139 BJP lawmakers across both Houses of Parliament reporting pending criminal cases. So, people with criminal cases can become lawmakers but not protest against injustice.
For the protestors facing legal action, there are two ways to respond. The first is to become perturbed by it and treat their participation as a one-time “mistake,” swearing off participation in any future such movement. This is a completely reasonable reaction, given that for many, the only reason they joined the protest is because they wanted a normal life where the effort they put in gets a commensurate outcome, i.e., if you study hard, you will pass your exams and get a decent job in the future. Many young people came out to fight for that, but the burden of ensuring it cannot be carried by them forever. There is a life beyond all this as well. So, a choice to withdraw is perfectly understandable.
The second reaction, however, is to become more radical, realizing that they are now marked for life and may never be allowed to have a normal life in the future. If the same party stays in power, the government may come after the protestors when they apply for jobs or other opportunities by matching their credentials with the ones already in the database. It has been reported that the Delhi Police deployed photographers to photograph and film protesters, alongside AI-enabled CCTV cameras, AI-powered mobile surveillance vehicles, and smart glasses. So, even if the cases are ultimately dropped, the protestors’ details will remain in the database, and a vindictive government can use them in the future. But if the government changes, it can order the destruction of the database by citing privacy concerns. This is the surest guarantee that the protestors will ever have a normal life. So, if you are going to be hounded for your entire life, you might as well fight back.
The way to fight back in a democratic system, where you feel your vote will matter and you will not be cheated, is to join an existing political party or start a new one. Both are equally lucrative for different reasons. Before we discuss these options, we must first analyse the role of political parties in the protest. There were efforts made to keep political parties away from the protest for fear that it would tarnish the movement by portraying it as politically motivated. However, keeping political parties away is exactly what media houses friendly to the government, known as the Godi Media, want. If the protest succeeds, they will claim that it succeeded without any support from the opposition political parties and that they are, therefore, useless. But if it fails, they can blame the opposition parties for not supporting the protestors and failing them. A movement against the government is precisely a political movement where the role of political parties becomes indispensable. We should, in fact, be more worried if the political parties do not respond to such movements. Then we are living in a dictatorship, and democratic forms of protest are already dead. Luckily, that time has not yet come to pass. There is still some hope left in democratic political mobilization.
So, one route for the protestors to fight back is to join existing political parties that have already laid the groundwork, and this resource can be tapped into. But joining an already established organization would require patience to move through the ranks without bypassing senior workers. That would create dissent within those parties. Also, the party will have its own programme, and the new workers will have to adhere to it. So, joining a political party has its benefits but can put one in a very structured environment after having experienced a very spontaneous movement that was successful. But structure is important, and in the long run, organization will always win over short-term movements.
The other option is to start a new political party in the manner Arvind Kejriwal did with AAP after the Anna Hazare-led movement against corruption. This has the benefit of creating your own system which suits the movement. They could always invite senior leaders from other parties as advisers and many intellectual activists will support such an initiative. The two things that will be crucial here, apart from creating a grassroots organization, are the messaging and the leadership.
First, the message has to be part of a broader ideology that the party is going to present to the people, which includes the economic prescriptions for the country (e.g., socialist, neo-liberal, libertarian, etc., and the kind of social relations it wants in the country (e.g., on the issue of reservation, minority rights, etc. It has often been said that the BJP is everything that Congress is, plus the cow (i.e., Hindutva), which, put crudely, means that both parties are similar in their economic program but differ in their social program. I would make one distinction. Both parties believe in the neo-liberal agenda, but the BJP is more intent on creating a crony capitalist state, which Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian identified through the “two A’s”—referring to the mega-conglomerates Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani—as the main beneficiaries. So, what is going to be the economic and social program of this new political party? That has to be clearly spelt out.
The other danger is leadership becoming entrenched among a few individuals who then behave as supreme leaders, without whom no decisions can be made. When this happens, the movement becomes connected to the fortunes of its leaders who, as recently seen in the case of Raghav Chaddha, can betray the movement at any given time. Also, a dispersed leadership makes it much more difficult to crush the movement because new leaders can immediately take over if the existing ones are compromised or taken out. The best example of this right now is the inability of the US to defeat Iran’s decentralized military command, which gives regional commanders operational flexibility. This also means that even if the US wins the war militarily (which is not happening), it will have to endure decades of Iranian resistance. A movement, therefore, must never be tied to individuals. CJP seems to have had a good start in this regard. The movement did not end with Sonam Wangchuk breaking his fast; it intensified and finally secured its deserved victory.
CJP’s victory showed that winning elections does not mean that a political party can do whatever it wants. A mass movement can always bring about corrections, and this victory can be the starting point for a new chapter in Indian political history. Or it can be a paragraph that will be forgotten as one flips to the other pages. It will depend on what follows now that the street protests are over. “What now?” is the question everyone is waiting to have answered.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organisation or institution)