A protest like no other
Protests before this seem pale and lacklustre. Older formulas of protests and oppositional politics were shattered.
The fighting continued till late in the day. This might sound like a line in a report on a battle or a war situation. Not so fit for a protest movement.
And yet what happened in Delhi on 20 July will always contain a line like that.
Or even better: sporadic fighting continued, and so did the internet shutdown.
Indeed what Delhi saw yesterday was something unique. In the course of the day, the protest changed shape and acquired new forms. An amoeba-like formation with many heads, as streams of protestors swirled around in different directions even as they all somehow converged. One protestor talked about surfing in the crowd.
Not what it started with, but what it ended with, becomes crucial. The protest had a scheduled start time: 9 am. The ending was split into myriad fronts and threads. Right into the night, throngs of protestors were supposed to be still huddled in the backlanes and corners in a wide radius.
Nothing could have prepared the protestors for what was to unfold. The mass at every step and every passing hour revealed something new. Even jaded old Opposition MPs in Parliament later used the term “organic mass”.
The leaderless protest scenario here turned to be the best thing to have happened. For the gathering soon achieved its own inner momentum, energy and an unpredictable direction.
After these protests, GenZ will most likely not just focus on its education and “future” that are often just code words for “career”. They would instead go and watch the Battle of Algiers and change the meaning of binge-watching on Netflix What am I talking about? For those who do not already know, Lutyens Delhi saw pitched battles between police and protesters that recall scenes from that movie.
We are fed rehashed stories from the classics as Christopher Nolan is doing with Homer’s Odyssey. It is time to elevate yesterday’s brush with danger, reality and police to our wider thought-process, imagination and yes even the educated youth’s binge watching culture, consuming cultural artefacts in a daze. Swirling around here was the spectres of the pitched battles that the working classes fought recently in Noida.
Many thought that here was a crowd abandoned by the leaders. The dais had no galaxy of speakers keeping the throbbing crowd together. Chandrasekhar Azad appeared around 12 or so at the Parliament Street. He was constantly challenged by the crowd which wanted to break the barricades. Leaders, venerable MPs and Opposition leaders would pale in front of the swirling power of the crowd. So it had to happen that either leaders had to take an exit, like what Azad eventually did, or they had to join the swirl as Samajwadi leader Dimple Yadav so wisely did.
What was unfolding was much bigger than the CJP leaders or any of the other leaders like Chandrasekhar Azad who was on the spot. So much so that leaders and the police started coordinating efforts to manage and control. At the Parliament Street gathering around 1 pm, the crowd broke into a spontaneous, jab jab Modi darta hai, police ko aage karta hai(“whenever Modi is scared, he uses the police”). This slogan was now directed at Azad who was hosting the police officers on the makeshift dais to address the gathering. Azad realised his faux pas and quickly backtracked.
Someone at the spot told me that Azad played the role of a “safety-valve”. Without him playing manager and leveraging his popularity and trust, the crowd would have surely moved into the barricades one more time and pushed towards the Parliament. Earlier, during the time of the first lathi charge, a barricade or two had already fallen. Social media footage of this episode are widely circulating now, with most comments one-sidedly praising Azad. The footage one should look for however is the one where members of the crowd tried to boo Azad with the slogan above.
When things seemed to have quietened a bit at the original venue and at the Parliament Street, and even as one gathering formed in front of Kerala House, somewhere another scene was forming. This was slightly later, some say after the original protest venue with its camps and dais were brutally broken and smashed by the police and one girl came under the police boots on her chest.
A raw cat and mouse chase, a street battle broke out in Connaught Place, Janpath, till as far as Paharganj long after the protest officially ended and most people and the media thought they were done for the day. Lutyens Delhi was designed by British town planners to prevent such pitched battles, to prevent any break of law and order and peace. And yet that proved ineffective.
It also turned out that not everyone who sustained injuries went home or to the hospital. Right at the Panchuian Road T-point in Connaught Place, a man of some 35 years age put on display his back to the crowd showing the marks of police brutality on his body. Poorer youth and locals who had nothing to do with the protest also joined in. The main artery was blocked for almost two hours, creating huge traffic jams. For a good length of time, police were nowhere to be seen. People stuck in the traffic did not fight with the protestors to get the traffic going. They waited patiently, there again sending a silent message to the powers that be.
The police had by now already used lathis and tear gas at the Janpath and Sansad Marg T-points. By the time it spread to the Panchkuian T-point, they had run out of tear gas shells. Then when the police finally arrived, they went after whoever looked poor. Well dressed onlookers were spared. A group of men were chased right into the huge H&M store in Connaught Place. Comments were heard that these are not the educated youth, that these are not legitimate protesters. Indeed, they looked like local working class youth from the Paharganj bylanes. Here the fissure had taken a general form of class and caste divides. The Real was cracking out into the open.
The demand for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation suddenly seemed to have hidden so many other fissures that are more enduring and constitutive of society. The “grievances” about NEET paper leak, NTA and the exam system now suddenly felt connected to more sedimented fissures. Class 12 students Sarthak Sidhant, Vedant Shrivastava, and Nisarga might find that the corruption they exposed in the CBSE is only the tip of the iceberg.
The police apparatus was in tatters. Delhi police never looked so downcast. The police administration was completely unnnerved, overwhelmed not as much by numbers or force but lack of a principle or insight into the behaviour and logic of the crowd. This explains why the police could not stop the regrouping at the original protest site, where the dharna has resumed itself. By late night on the 20th the dharna was back in full swing, and continues.
Yesterday was a master class on the logistics of undoing the control of the state apparatus, beginning with the most elementary space of appearance of a political gathering in a road or a street. Lutyens Delhi suddenly lost its in-built defences against a law and order breakdown embedded in its colonial DNA, architecture and planning. The wide and long streets and boulevards specifically designed to prevent the escalation of any break in law and order somehow served the battling protestors.
Someone rightly said, if you control the streets you control the system. Frederick Engels once wrote about the interrelationship between urban city planning and the power of the bourgeoisie and the state.
Or think of Aime Cesaire who regarded the Holocaust under Nazism as inseparable from the model of black slavery in the colonial plantation and city planning. Or recount Frantz Fanon’s comments on the city in Algeria divided between the colonial quarters and where the natives live.
Pitched battles by radical forces in the heart of the metropolis reminds us of the Bombay Textile Mill strike of 1983. Places like Parel and Dadar dotted with both textile mills as also at a slight distance the sprawling residences of the owner class and big industrialists, witnessed major urban class warfare. One can also recall Black Lives Matter protests in the big cities in the United States. I am reminded of the London Riots of 2011 with pitched battles between police and black youth. Mind you, very recently in April the capital saw worker riots in Noida.
Many have asked where are the workers and gig workers, the most oppressed, in yesterday’s protests. This question goes to the heart of the matter. And yet, as these protests morphed and changed shape throughout the day, those like the workers and the oppressed came to the fore in different ways. The middle class ideology of “students” and “youth” who want to simply acquire “education” for a secure “future” seemed to no longer explain the direction the protests took as the day progressed.
Spilling into Janpath and Connaught Place, we saw precisely that happening. The leaderless amoeba-like mass was in fact not leaderless, if you look at it from inside. This “resolves” the anarchist vs. vanguardist tension by leaving the possibilities in either direction open — not just formally open but in terms of the movement of subterranean forces.
The modern posh city loves over-exposing itself, with glittering shop facades of transparent glass, as though it is your own extension. Yesterday as the protests evolved and spread, the shutters went down, the high-street’s eagerness to over-expose and seduce suddenly vanished. Rusty iron shutters came down. The crowd was no longer binging on the fetish of commodities. The normalcy of a real battle was restored.
Till just a week back we were living in a different mindspace. That was a mindspace which made possible the following call from the dais of the Cockroach Janta Party. Sonam Wangchuk invited students and educational institutions to treat July 20 as a day of experiential political science under the National Education Policy (NEP). He asked schools, colleges, and universities to view the democratic march to Parliament as a live classroom for learning how democracy works.
Let us hope such thinking can be put in its rightful place and not allowed to resurface.
the single biggest criticism that this movement has, is that it considers itself exceptional. do you really think the students who have showed up have never protested before? this protest is a culmination of all the protests that came before it. if you look closely, it has so many gaps that it could learn from the Farmers Protest, Shaheen Bagh or even Wangchuk’s own Ladakh protest.
Trying to play the exception game and acting as if this is the only true cause that India that has been protested against in the last 12 years is pretty shallow. It will also never lead to real transformation on the ground, like Anna Hazare and his like.