THERE is a risk in writing about what is still unfolding. If such writing is evaluative and carries a judgment, as it should, it will not only describe the reality but also analyse the tendencies and project a vision. The trouble is that such visions are often disappointing in reality, especially when the reality is dark and emitting signals of danger. Still, danger is what brings to mind the desire in turn for the crystal of an extraordinary moment that stands out. That moment is pregnant with the tensions and possibilities of another time, a resistance that will be forgotten and lost to us unless we report and reflect on it right away. In so doing one runs the risk of a hasty reading, but such moments illuminate more often the directions for moving towards a better society. I find the ongoing student unrest worth engaging for this larger reason, apart from three others that follow.

One, what we are witnessing in the successive waves of student protest for the past couple of years in this country have come to create new forms of political practice on the ground. This is all the more significant because it is taking place in the background of a seeming exhaustion of the available forms used by the party system and much of the left-liberal spectrum in India. Two, the student unrest is witness to a fascinating battle for ideological hegemony and realignment between the traditional left, Dalit activism and feminist interventions. As a result, a new configuration is unfolding, which seeks to radicalize Indian democracy in quite new ways. It is vital to understand the contours of this configuration that is seen by the right wing as a serious threat. Three, certain junctures in this wave of unrest reveal a fairly complicated relationship with the question of violence, especially with regard to the state. As we shall see in what follows, this offers a new possibility of theorizing about the character of the state today as well as how student politics is trying to negotiate this character in their practical response.

The observations that follow understandably remain preliminary and tentative. However, they are not shy of arguments here, which are made about the form of student politics, the nature of its ideological roots, and the state character at this juncture. In the process we reflect on the wider implications for democracy in India. Let me admit that I will be selective with the discussion, touching upon different cases and aspects, but devoting most of my attention to what took place at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in the spring and summer of 2016. Apart from the limited scope of this essay, the reason is that I have already written in Kafila on the student unrest at Jadavpur University.¹ I focus only on some aspects of that episode here, and there are more than a few thoughtful commentaries on what took place in Hyderabad after Rohith Vemula’s suicide. As a part of the resident faculty in the campus, I have witnessed the events unfolding at JNU closely, which is the basis of my narrative and arguments here.

The essay has three brief sections: we begin with a discussion on the new forms of political practice inaugurated by the student’s movement. This will stay with us as a broad theme throughout the essay. The second section will try to identify and disentangle the different ideological camps and streams involved in the process, especially the fierce debates that characterize the current student mobilizations. It will serve as a background to the third section that highlights certain political acts and strategic gestures exchanged in the events, especially as they unfolded in JNU. I hope this will be sufficient at the moment to pose the formulations on the relationship with violence.

 

The 2014 protest in the wake of an incident of gender violence in Jadavpur University came to provoke many, both critics and supporters, with what I will describe as a new language of politics. While critics found it arrogant with superficial and elitist overtones, the supporters including me found elements of strategy and humour, creativity and an avant-garde sensibility. I think this sensibility was best expressed in the highly artistic, literary and performative modes of the students’ protest, which kept up a trickle of riveting events before and after a historic procession in the city. However, standing before this profusion of discourse, I found the most interesting element in the idea of making ‘noise’ or ‘clamour’ as resistance, as the name #hokkolorob (‘let there be clamour’) suggests, which Jadavpur gave to its movement. To me it meant the abandonment of a traditional language of protest, heavily molded in the leftist idiom. It did not signal a new language in its place, but the churning for a new language of politics, by a new set of political actors, who I term ‘noisy bodies’. When I presented the idea, Satish Deshpande pointed out that ‘noisy bodies’ remains too under-theorized for the purpose – what makes them different from the loudmouths that hector and harangue in television shows? Though unable to rework the category fully, I may be allowed to make the point differently here.

 

I think the most important change in the language of politics in the case of Jadavpur is the relationship between sound and protesting bodies. It will be important to recall here the citizens’ procession in Bengal protesting police violence on the peasantry towards the end of the Left Front regime in 2008. Staging a powerful civic protest against the rulers, which exposed their declining support, one of the most remarkable features of the procession was its complete silence. It was an articulation that distanced itself from dramatic speeches and slogans in chorus which make up the usual protest repertoire. That no familiar expression of outrage felt appropriate any longer, the silence became the very expression of maximum outrage in the process. I think the ‘clamour’ of Jadavpur did something similar to that silent outrage, creating a different relationship with speech and sound in their mode of agitation. If there was a sense of cacophony, it was not people red in the face screaming insults on camera; it was the sound of several currents at a crossroads. It was a gathering of troubled and angry expressions, fragmentary ideas and intense images of freedom, rock lyrics and vernacular poetry, lampooning of authority and use of urban wit, coloured, above all, by a critical visibility of bodies. We need to see these fragments as the provocation for a new kind of language game in politics, if we want to understand where the azaadi slogan came from to JNU.

 

By the time the azaadi slogan went viral from JNU, inspiring dub-smash remixes on the web, it became clear that a different language of politics was at play. It can lucidly string together patriarchy, feudalism, casteism and capitalism as the main enemies of freedom and democracy. It can make a passage from gender rights to social justice and socialism without getting tied up in knots. It can expose the authority’s silence and persistently demand a debate on nationalism and sedition. You could see the slogan as a long train of thought running from Kashmir to Hyderabad, from feminist activism in urban spaces to the constitutional legacy of Ambedkar. The slogan realigned apparently discreet issues in a plural constellation that suddenly began to make sense together. It may have appeared to some commentators, including Amna Majeed who reminded me, a dilution of the most immediate question – azaadi for Kashmir. There was of course a tactical diffusion of azaadi in the slogan and the preceding speech. But to see that only as retreat is to miss the momentum it created for the plurality of oppressions to force their way into our field of visibility. Who can forget Rohith Vemula’s face today? How does one subtract Bastar from the urgency? The tactical diffusion may well turn out to be a strategic distribution and political reshuffle of marginal movements, which are beginning to inhabit an increasingly heterogeneous terrain and language.

 

The recent movement triggered by the flogging of Dalits in Una, led by Jignesh Mevani, has refused to continue services like cleaning cow carcasses and demanded land for cultivation instead of only reservations. In protest, they have left parts of dead cows in public offices and spaces in Gujarat. Here is another instance of a new language taking shape in different parts of the country, which has refused to be ideologically localized. There is, of course, an umbilical connection with the left tradition in this language, along with its powerful internal critiques, which we shall explore later in the essay. Besides the weighty matter of the content, however, it is important to appreciate what made the slogan catch everybody’s attention right away – an infectious rhythmic loop and a slightly rustic intonation of simple words in Hindi spoken by common people. Raised together with the azaadi refrain in chorus, the slogan created a sense of duration when the activists could find an affective immersion in the articulation, where in total contrast to the military style and thanks to the dalit interventions, one discovered they were playing drums and dancing and swaying their bodies as a new kind of political act.

Besides speech acts, one key aspect of the modes in which such language finds expression involves performative bodies and the political use of theatre and performance art. The azaadi chant is in some sense a distillation of these aspects, like a musical fragment from an agitprop play coming soon. To my mind it recalls the work of some visual artists and performance and theatre practitioners supporting the #hokkolorob movement, like Ronny, Taufiq, Tamoghno and Joyraj. They underline two interesting sets of elements that deserve further consideration. Their works, which there is no scope to discuss in detail here, foreground two main concerns. First, they reveal an urgency of recasting the question of class in the light of heterogeneous identities, gender and sexualities. There is in that sense a move to intellectually declass communist cultural capital. Second, some of the artistic performances deliberately draw upon rituals and the relation of economic and social power with inflicting ritual violence. The following sections track these elements and themes further, taking us right into the events since February 2016 in JNU.

 

Ideologically speaking, the language of student politics in the thread I am following is a patchwork of different influences and sociological positions, at once eclectic and plural in composition. Nevertheless, one can discern certain important tendencies. What strikes one most immediately is the broadening of the idea of ‘the people’ whose interests and exclusions make up the political reality. The mere addition of gender and caste to a list of oppression does not give a proper sense of this extension of the ground of politics. It implies political interpretation of not only electoral support for party policies but also increasingly of the representations, acts and injunctions available in the social domain. The manners of oppression appear multiplied when the site is no longer purely economic, as do the framing of what counts as oppression. It invites a more careful reflection on everyday life and practices, which is where the figure of ‘the people’ begins to mutate.

For example, it mutates when a feminist campaign like Pinjra Tod, challenging the conservative, prison like rules of women’s hostels, organically connects to movements like Why Loiter that questions the invisibility of women from public spaces across cities and their right to inhabit those spaces. There is an emerging relation between this multiplication of the people and a political turn towards a radical civic sensibility, as the matrix of new kinds of practice, focusing, for instance, on the exclusionary character of space. The experience of inhabiting different spaces, especially but not only urban space, is becoming one of the practical tests of democracy. This problematic is what makes political actors engage with the body as a material site of politics today.

 

This does not mean that there is a complete consensus over these questions. In fact, the course of the students’ struggle in JNU is thickly marked with fierce ideological differences and recurring debates, especially between the left and dalit segments. It is of course part of a wider and ongoing dalit critique of the upper caste character of the left in this country, and the left’s critique of identity politics at the cost of class. Of late this has turned more complicated by what some dalits perceive as the left’s ‘appropriation’ of Ambedkarite politics. Indeed, there are moments when the left and right are seen as equally oppressive by dalits, while the left in turn finds Dalit politics equally seduced by capitalism. However, there is no doubt that a conceptual struggle is underway whether class struggle should be the most important framework any longer, let alone the only framework for politics. There is a growing tendency for intersectional analysis, attempting to combine economic, social and cultural locations in complex ways. This coincides with a significant change in the students’ composition in the wake of reservations and progressive policies that has finally assumed critical proportions in higher academic institutions.

Students from struggling backgrounds who join JNU today often come with their own histories of struggle, and they are the ones who have made spring 2016 into national news. Very few reacted when JNU was closed sine die in 1983 or when its leader Chandrashekhar was killed in 1997. These were strong agitations broadly framed in the familiar language of class struggle by an older generation of activists. The new generations of students have outgrown this idiom and grammar of practice. They have not only transformed the visible texture of politics, for instance, the carnivalesque mood of Dalit protests, but also the very nature of the event called political agitation. Agitations no longer must remain antagonistic and adversarial in the old style – they can be invitations to a deliberation, they can be a collective waiting for justice, they can be, as Maya Rao illustrated on the stairs of freedom square, simply an act of walking. One may say, as a result, that an ideological retooling is taking place, indicating new theoretical horizons.

 

In the face of these heterogeneous forms of the political, which are being multiplied by the social media and mediatization of politics, the established parties on the left-liberal spectrum seem at a loss. Used to a reactive and managerial mode of conducting politics, the communist parties are not in the habit of encouraging dissenting questions or what is known as inner-party struggle. The mechanical and bureaucratic manner in which they repeat their dogmatic stand and expel dissenters seem seriously misplaced and woefully inadequate to address the churning on the ground. It is not surprising that the events at JNU show clear signs of a growing activist discontent with the party style of functioning and its reproduction of authority, leading to explorations of independent ways of doing politics. This has given rise to numerically small, and perhaps temporary but fairly dynamic formations, acting like critical mass on the larger students’ body. Many of the meetings where students deliberate over the course of action are ‘all organization’ meetings instead of merely the union office bearers. These meetings are often messy and long-drawn due to arguments between the larger organizations and such groups, with added interventions from individuals. It may seem a less efficient way of conducting politics from a pragmatic point of view. Nevertheless, it is a more substantive and democratic mode of approaching political practice. There is then, in terms of ideology, an added issue of the critical freedom to interrogate one’s own politics, or, differently framed, an ethical obligation to criticize the self, which is setting up a difference between party activists and the new political actors. How do these actors give practical and strategic shape to this ethical obligation? What follows explains.

 

There are certain anthropological theories that tell us that religion plays a fundamental function in society – that of managing violence. With modernity this function passes over to the state and juridical order. The problem is to bring a close to the circle of violence that tends to run in the society like intergenerational blood feuds between powerful families. The trial by law and sentence in this regard performs a final act of vengeance, backed by authority, which puts an end to the circle. However, in other societies this closure is performed by religion, often accompanied by what is understood as ritual sacrifice. Ritual sacrifices are meant to stem the bloodshed, at least for some time, through a symbolic substitution of the subject of violence by another subject.

There are two points that should be of particular interest to us. First, everybody is not fit for sacrifice: they must carry some signs and occupy a marginal location on the borders of society. Second, according to anthropologists, there are societies that further substitute the new subject of violence with yet another – a double substitution – in order to protect the former should it be deemed too valuable. I think we have the rudimentary elements here to think about the relationship of the state and the students with violence.

 

Instead of approaching our context as either religious or secular, let us admit it is complex and hybrid, where both can mutate and appear contrary at many points. It should not then be difficult to imagine the state, as many have pointed out, as the new ‘sacred’ object – the nation state as a deity, that is, broadly speaking, the key metaphor in right wing politics. Let us take this metaphor seriously and push the imagination a bit further. Instead of thinking of a bountiful Lakshmi, let us think of her turning into a terrifying and demonic figure, that demands blood sacrifice from its children.

This seems to me closest to the sentiment at work if we are to find a way of logically understanding the patriotic enthusiasm for fake encounters and righteous lynching of anybody called ‘anti-national’. To be sure, there is a steady supply of ‘sacrificiable’ population picked from across the country, ranging from the oppressed nationalities to lower castes, religious minorities and tribal insurgents, not to speak of the poor, the unemployed and the peasants, whose deaths are necessary to propitiate the deity so she can return to being Lakshmi, blessing us with growth.

This demonic theology is the closest approximation of the theoretical character of the state’s relation to violence today. We will not be far off the mark to see such times echoing the Emergency, or to see it as a militarizing, security state, or as Didier Bigo suggests, a state that actually polices insecurities. It should not be difficult to connect the production of fear and insecurities with neoliberal changes of economy. However, these framings will make the question of violence appear in a functionalist light while the relationship I suggest here has a primordial and ritual character.

 

If we look at certain political gestures on the part of the students, that were persistent during the most brutal crackdown by the regime and administration, we can recognize how their responses parried with this ritual logic. Much before JNU, the question of violence had already taken on a different degree of urgency and intensity with what was described as the ‘institutional murder’ of Rohith Vemula. The exceptionality of Vemula’s death is precisely that it established how such deaths are becoming the norm.

The lynching of Muslims suspected of eating beef and Dalits for transporting cattle, the killing of rationalist activists, the rising death toll of civilians in Kashmir, the fake encounters in Chhattisgarh, we have rarely experienced anything more banally and normally than this great rite of sacrificial violence. One cannot tell it apart from the sense in which society talks about culling, without irony, in order to cure. When the court granted bail to the student activists who were arrested for holding a meeting on 9 February 2016 in the memory of Afzal Guru, it felt obliged to pontificate on the necessity of amputating parts of the body that are infected beyond medicine.

What was the message for JNU? For the larger JNU community, it was one of immediate distancing from the accused students. For the accused students, it was one of distancing from the struggle in Kashmir and refrain from questioning the hanging of figures like Guru. It made them into ‘anti-nationals’ for the state and television anchors, while sundry right wing politicians regaled the media with stories of drug fuelled orgies by the left on campus in between plotting terrorism.

As sections of civil society demanded to know how it is possible on public tax money, lynch mobs from the neighbourhood laid siege at the main gate. Students came under intense pressure, with the police arresting the president of the Student’s Union, and the university ordering an inquiry against them. A few of them went into hiding, but returned when it seemed they had the wider support of the campus and many more outside. The trial is ongoing as I write and, in some sense, the insecurities have spread wider with the disappearance of a student after allegedly being roughed up by right wing students some months back.

 

What is noteworthy is that the students have not only refused to change their stand on state repression but have tried to turn it into a wider struggle for freedom of dissent in democracy. The agitation may have lost some of its intensity and robust mobilization with the winter semester drawing to a close, but not the resolve to counter the ritual logic of violence. What is the shape of this counter gesture of resistance? The agitations tend to be disciplined and strictly non-violent, technically abiding by the law. Strategically, however, the stand of the students amounts to this: here, take us in place of the lives you want. Let us be the ‘other’, the object you hate, the people you want to sacrifice.

This is similar in tenor to when the protesting Manipuri women asked to be raped by the army. So long as blood is spilt, how does the mother deity care who is really sacrificed? The logic is similar to the double substitution of the sacrificial victim discussed by anthropological theories of ritual violence. It is not simply that the students are ready for self-sacrifice. They are offering a ritual exchange of the self with the other, in more sense than one.

The existing state of democracy does not secure genuine freedom, if the freedom of Kashmiri people is the condition of my freedom. At the peak of a #shutdown JNU campaign, when young people were getting roughed up in Delhi because they looked like JNU students, the union president was released on bail after getting lynched by patriotic lawyers twice in the court premises. He returned to the campus to make a speech on the stairs of the administration block that is now known as the freedom square or ‘azaadi chowk’. The speech, delivered with poise, charisma and consummate oratorical skill, concluded with the slogan that has become emblematic – the azaadi chant.

 

Let me return to my anxiety about the trouble with writing about what is still at play. It is one of expectations that may be let down, and chances are that it will look impossible again as time take its toll. What do we stand to lose that is most valuable about the recent students’ unrest and its new language of politics? It is a strategic readjustment of the terms of engagement with the state and its ritual violence. These terms are less military and less monumental, they do not threaten to meet state violence with counter violence, but with making that violence visible in a way the state cannot entirely control.

How does one do that on a day when the state and its apparatuses are trying to control everything from what one should eat to what one should wear to who one should trust and who must we suspect as the enemy? The student unrest provided a new term of engagement here, merely by acting and keeping the resistance simple. This implied that without provoking a direct confrontation, the students will continue to defy what they see as a curb on their freedom to question and dissent on the campus. That is the basic spirit of the matter.

I would like to end with a memory that captured a sense of this spirit and its simplicity without compromising the political urgency. Since memories are what we cannot forget to carry, all the more when life begins to resemble an exile, it is important to remember and memorialize them as political acts in themselves. What I want to flash before our eyes when we think of this unrest, is an extraordinary ‘walk’ by the artist Maya Rao on the stairs of the freedom square in March 2016.

The video posted on YouTube bears out how the artist turned herself for a quarter of an hour into an uncoiling source of primordial energy, ranting and stepping forth like in a war dance, while uttering Malayalam and Hindi phrases and numbers with the intensity of one possessed and seemingly in the presence of a mystical power. ‘Nobody taught me how to walk’, she kept on saying, even if someone taught her to talk. All we have to do is simply to walk, to keep walking, Maya said. That is all it sometimes takes to exercise our freedom and to act politically. The students are walking with Maya, here is a promise to democracy.

 

Footnote:

1. https://kafila. online/2014/09/29/hokko lorob-the-politics-of-making-noise-rajarshi-dasgupta/