Paradoxical and a little thrilling that it was a slapdash bunch of young Indians and not the opposition parties who brought the Prime Minister to his knees. On Saturday, just as this column was going to press, the PM finally persuaded the Education Minister to resign. He was the rotten symbol of a rotting education system and had to go. But, by taking his time, he may have done India a favour. As for the Prime Minister, all he has offered is a stringent new law which he has told us was stringent at least five times before. Not good enough.
Here I must point out that the Leader of the Opposition is delusional when he says that before Modi became Prime Minister the Indian education system was the envy of the world. It was not. Indian children who could not afford private schools were dependent on a school system that let them down from kindergarten to the time they graduated from high school. BJP chief ministers control most large Indian states and should have been able to transform schools but did not. Their priorities have been rewriting history to exalt ancient India and rubbish the Moghul period. And to exalt India’s achievements since Modi became Prime Minister. This is a subject for another day.
Today let us talk about what the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has achieved with its Jantar Mantar protest. It has now spread to cities and small towns across India. As one of those who gauged that the cockroaches could become huge right from the start, I spent an afternoon in Jantar Mantar a few days before the big march to Parliament last week. I wanted to see if BJP ‘intellectuals’ with considerable influence in higher echelons were right to dismiss the cockroaches as anarchists and activists. They were wrong.
The young people I talked to that afternoon had genuine grievances and should have been listened to long before the whole world discovered that young Indians believe that the system (the establishment) has let them down and that their future is bleak. The demand for the education minister’s resignation was a desperate cry for accountability, and it is a shame that the Prime Minister does not see this.
Meanwhile, if you observe what has been happening in Jantar Mantar, as I have, you will notice that the young people who continue to flock there in support of the CJP are interested in a better idea of India. They sing Vande Mataram and the national anthem raucously as if to show Modi’s BJP that they do not have a copyright on nationalism. Hindus of all castes seem to have no problem in eating together and from the hands of Muslims, Christians and Sikhs as if to show that the India in which we all once lived in relative harmony still exists. Since Modi became Prime Minister, we have seen too many attempts to damage this harmony, sometimes in the name of cows and sometimes by banging on about temples and religion.
Those who have objected to this excessive religiosity and aggressive nationalism have been branded Pakistanis and anti-nationals by the self-appointed custodians of the Hindutva ideology. If you watched the coverage of the protests by the ‘independent’ TV channels last week, you would have noticed that certain anchors who also behave as if they are guardians of Hindutva nationalism ranted on about the ‘foreign hand’. Eminent lawyers gave interviews filled with doomsday warnings about how India’s ‘rise’ is not popular with certain big powers. The question we should ask is what ‘rise’? Would so many thousands of young Indians have taken to the streets in protest last week if they believed that their lives had improved in Modi’s time? The truth is that millions of middle-class Indians were for a while lulled into a sense of false security by the number of new roads, highways, ports and airports that have been built in the past twelve years, but now they have noticed that these have not benefited them personally.
They remain trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, from which they try to escape by becoming doctors, lawyers, engineers and computer scientists, only to find that when they pass their examinations, they are trapped in a new vicious cycle in search of jobs. They are usually unqualified for jobs in the private sector, so they depend on government jobs, and these have become scarcer by the day. Those who can afford to emigrate become economic refugees in rich western countries, where the standard of living allows ordinary middle-class people to live comfortable and dignified lives.
Speaking for myself, I would like to say that I totally support the cockroaches and understand their pain and anger. It is my fervent hope that the CJP turns itself into a political party before the next general election and shows the BJP that it is up against a new kind of politician who does not come from the entitlement and privilege that most of the opposition leaders come from. India needs new younger faces in politics and governance so that we get beyond that increasingly tedious choice between secularism and Hindutva. Both words have lost all meaning, as we can see from how ‘secular’ defectors become rabidly communal upon joining the BJP.
