Severance and Ascension at Jantar Mantar
Peak severance and ascension explains the immaculate power of the protests.
News is just in that the Education Minister has resigned. What explains the power of this protest which forced the government to give in? We said earlier that the CJP with its middle class ideology itself was parasitic on the power of the feral underclass which uplifted the entire movement.
As you move away from the main dais and the venue at Jantar Mantar, the nature of the protest changes. Closer to the barricades, the protestors are undergoing a severance and ascension.
Things have gone theological.
Indeed, the most crucial detachment of protesters have reached and are inhabiting fifth, sixth or perhaps ninth state of consciousness. Some insane ascension is at work. At the top they have dissolved all barriers and categories. Hindu-Muslim unity is now achieved without saying anything about communal harmony or preaching love and brotherhood. Here is “Hindu-Muslim unity” which seeks to dissolve each of the three terms, opening us towards an unknown.
One has not heard of the power of FOMO at such a peak: viral reels of friends from across the border saying that they cannot stop watching the protest reels and how they wish they could attend too.
How is that possible? What explains this power of the protests?
Recall the story in Sikh scriptures where Guru Nanak meets past gurus like Kabir and perhaps even Prophet Mohammad. What we might call time travel takes place through ascension (called merging of light with light, in the scriptures).
Protests are supposed to be about citizens demanding rights from the government, but here the protest is about expression. Not creative expression of, say, an artist. For the artist is also performing, “being creative”, putting his thoughts. It is a traversal through his mind.
But here, in the protests, it is about collectively expressing “who we are”.
Here the protesters are saying: We are everything, You are nothing.
In fact, it goes to the extent of actually challenging the very power of the government, treating the government as illegitimate. Government as illegitimate power. It did not start that way though.
First, there was a “normal” protest. We are speaking to you. You whom we trusted have betrayed us. You are a vested interest. We are talking to you. You must listen to us because we have put you there. You have violated the laws. You have violated the Constitution. You have violated the trust that we have reposed in you.
Such a protest is still going on inside, in the main venue and the dais where big leaders come and address.
Things changed after the 20th July.
From such a protest mostly led by the education pedigreed sections, now we have mostly the feral underclass not really addressing the powers that be, not really addressing the government, but declaring, we are here. “We are here”. And this is who we are. You are nothing. We are everything. This is the declaration without a demand which can be fulfilled and brought to a closure.
What stands out is the sheer non-reference to anything transactional or of the nature of even a demand for justice. No legal or constitutional or concrete economic demands are put out that can be fulfilled and see a closure.
The “demand”, if you can still use this already archaic protest language, shifts from the resignation of the education minister, to the resignation of Modi himself. And the highest representatives of the government are being pulled down. You, the government, came to power through legitimate elections, yes. But now we exercise a kind of “right to recall”.
What we find here is the penchant for the most maximalist demand, which, in being unamenable to any closure, points towards an unknown which can instil concern, fear, perturbation, but also jubilation and an adventurist streak. That “empty space” of the unknown is presently occupied by profuse and rambunctious articulations, memes or just plain gesticulations, dancing and “having fun”. Protest as having fun (“bakchodi”).
Thus the expression of “this is who we are”, “We are everything” has entered into a self-feeding, self-referential loop of extreme virality and levitation.
The protestors are not expressing fear of police brutality. They seem to have gone beyond the dimension of bodily precarity. They seem to be dissolving fear by almost inviting harm.
Police excess is already anticipated and miraculously neutralised. Real police violence itself has been treated as nothing more than a meme. Real violence served by the state itself is now relegated to nothing but images that the algorithms can be fed with.
A policeman runs to attack protestors. That scene on video becomes something which you will recall only as a subway surfer beat. Now police brutality cannot be seen except as a social media post. You cannot now unsee or un-hear subway surfer in a police action.
We all know of the protestor facing police batons, yelling “come beat me, come beat me”. A scholar commented that he wants to understand it as an example of a Gandhian Satyagrahi practising non-violence and suffering. Well why not. But then there is no role of truth here, unless the world of memes is where truth lies today. The protestor who declares that his is a “protest as bakchodi” will feel violated if he is pushed towards solemn ideas of truth. At most, we can say that this is satyagraha (grasping truth through inner churning, suffering) in an age of the post-truth alternative universe. How is that possible?
State power is intentionally “misread” as nothing and powerless. State surveillance itself is treated as powerless.
Autonomous of every real concern, beyond the fear of harm coming their way, we are forced to put the word real in inverted commas. “Real”. Hence what we find is the protest as a site of an ascension, urdagati, al-miraj.
Surely this is not Amartya Sen’s argumentative Indian, who is still to be found inside the main venue and dais. In a lot of senses, this is beyond reason, beyond dialogue. It is not a speaking self. It is a self in collective ascension. One need not however pathologise by calling it a delirious self.
In a way, they have aestheticized and algorithmicised the state and its power. Reduced it to images and material just for memes.
Modi himself has been taken and repurposed and regurgitated. As, for example, a woman looking for a 56-inch bra. His 56-inch chest bravado is just a meme trope.
This entire repurposing of everything into a crescendo of music and dance are kind of an upward levitational virality.
Here is something spotless, beyond blemish. So, unaware of the impending ultimate fall, which might, going forward, take place, and that unawareness itself is its power.
The real is turned into a viral image feeding the release of a collective mind ascending a crescendo of sorts at Jantar Mantar.