The Ferment: Youth Unrest in India

By Nikhila Henry

‘From JNU to Jadavpur, anti-national movement spreads!’—Zee News
‘Activism or anti-nationalism?’—Times Now
‘Dalit students on warpath after Vemula suicide’ —First Post
‘Violence on Ramjas campus: no room for free, peaceful political debate’—NDTV
‘Kashmir University students protest anti–free speech circular’—Quint
These are but a tiny sample of headlines that have become commonplace in India in recent years. What is it about the present moment in the life of our nation that has stirred so many thousands of young citizens into political action? And what is it about the nature of their protests that is threatening enough for the establishment to brand it ‘anti-national’?
The wave of youth protests, agitations, and marches that gripped India in the last few years were not, Nikhila Henry argues, sporadic, isolated, or piecemeal. Rather, they were an organized effort against a fractured, unforgiving, and deeply discriminatory society. The participants, despite differences, often found convergence and empathy for each other, and fought larger battles: battles of the Dalit, of the Adivasi, of the Kashmiri, of the Women, of the Muslim.
In so doing, it was not simply entrenched discrimination they highlighted. In so doing, they questioned fundamental ideas of public morality and the very essence that makes us a united nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781529016628

Book preview

THE FERMENT

Youth Unrest in India

NIKHILA HENRY

MACMILLAN

To

Sohan and Sethu, pa and ma, who weathered the winds of

their generation to anticipate the thunders in mine

Contents

Preface: When Green Leaves Rustled Out a Fire

STAR GAZERS

1.   Amour Propre; a Fistful

2.   Makers of the New Mainstream

3.   Leading the Nascent Public

FREEDOM SEEKERS

4.   Temples of Sacrilege

5.   We Won’t Mother India

6.   Greenrooms of Impending Revolt

CONFLICT BOUND

7.   Vermin in the Underbelly

8.   Kashmir: They Who Triggered a War

9.   Harbingers of Hidden Homelands

DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND

9.   In Conversation with the Nation

10.   The Butterfly Effect

Acknowledgements

Index

Preface

When Green Leaves Rustled Out a Fire

Her home was one among the millions in the labyrinth of the Mumbai cosmopolis with its slums, beaches, pubs, cluster dwellings, dilapidated government offices, chic corporate edifices, and stock market buildings. Kritika thought she lived in India’s heartland till January 2016 arrived. After 17 January, the 24-year-old undergraduate-degree-holder in Arts made herself virtually present in Hyderabad. Her browser sought out young people, friends from across India, who were protesting a death. The petite girl, who had cut off all interpersonal interactions to remain cooped up in her bedroom in Dadar, pored over a suicide note: the last words of 26-year-old Rohith Vemula. On one of the teacher education charts she had prepared for her Bachelor’s in Education class, she wrote, in thick blue letters, lines from the suicide note. The poster hung above her bed when I met her five months later, in July 2016. Kritika was, by then, a vibrant girl. To the bewilderment of her family, she went for each students’ protest in Mumbai, and sometimes in New Delhi as well. She pelted stones at police who tried to control protestors and asked her neighbourhood boys to join her at rallies. At night, she read a lot. Books were always strewn around her wooden desk. She lived in Maharashtra, where 2.17 crore out of the 11.23 crore population (as per the 2011 census) were 15- to 24-year-olds. In her state, 94 per cent of youth were literate though just 22 per cent of 20- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in any educational institution. Youngsters in cosmopolitan Mumbai gaped at an uncertain future. Sitting at her desk, from where she could see the fluttering saffron flags of the neighbourhood Shiv Sena adda, Kritika said Rohith Vemula gave her a community. She was a Dalit woman from a middle-income family, who was connected to thousands of youth who were out on the streets rallying behind the name of one young man. A new zest for life is what she said came over her that year. Even when she walked to the railway station, to catch the morning local to her college, she looked at the world for answers. The vision of a new future, one she wanted to build for coming generations, occupied her conscience: a collective fight for rights of all kinds; an agitation against injustice; a battle for securing a new future. Kritika’s thoughts at the time snowballed during these journeys taken in local trains.

It was Rohith Vemula who, in his death, turned out to be a significant force in the making of one of India’s biggest youth revolts, agitations in which disaffected young people marched in boundless numbers. What happened in India after January 2016 was, indeed, not too different from the great uprisings of history.

Once upon a time in Sorbonne in France, youth plastered the street corners, compound walls, college windows, and factory doors with a peculiar slogan: Soyez realistes, demandez l’impossible. It was May 1968, the time of the great general strike, and the words meant: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible’. A churning had been set in motion by the youth against the status quo. The strike demanded an overhaul of existing values, practices, and political structures. The slogan rocked universities and spread like wildfire in factories. It resounded in all of France making a call for the unimaginable. It was a cry to reach out and touch the unknown; a utopian dream which went down in history. Decades later, Rohith Vemula wrote his final words in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Driven to commit suicide by caste-based discrimination in a country sandwiched between archaic traditions and unrealized modernity, Rohith symbolized the dawn of a new age. A new generation troubled by the turmoil of all that had plagued them since birth—illiteracy, poverty, and backwardness—flooded the streets. The fire which started in Hyderabad where Rohith breathed his last, quickly engulfed the country, transforming into a pan-Indian protest by the youth against systemic violence. In the dock was India’s national conscience which turned a blind eye to, and in some cases approved lynching, gang rapes, mob violence, political assassinations, religious and caste persecutions, and racial hatred; sectarianisms of all kinds that thrived behind an illusion of diversity.

The revolt exhibited organizational characteristics of a collective agitation. No stone was unturned as both the heartland and the hinterland went up in flames over varied struggles. The most basic ideals of the state—nationalism, patriotism, and citizenship—which children grow up absorbing into their lives, were questioned and debunked. To a country which defined progress by measuring its Gross Domestic Product, this turmoil was an unsettling affair. In 2016, from Kashmir to Kerala, 34. 8 per cent of the population between 15 and 34 years of age gave voice to their discontent, triggering a ferment of varied intensities and inclinations.

This book presents the stories of the country’s disenchanted youth, reverberating a thousand voices, cries and protests that came together to give rise to a youth movement of great magnitude in the world’s largest democracy. A youth uprising in India, in fact, has global ramifications. In 2010, India accounted for 17.8 per cent of the world population. Every sixth person in the world was Indian. By 2030, Indians are projected to constitute 18 per cent of the global population. Moreover, in 2010, the proportion of youth in India’s total population was the highest at 35.11 per cent. Six years later, in 2016—when global demographic trends precipitated a downward spiral—for the first time after 1950, the combined working age population (15 to 59 years age) in Developed Countries declined. India expected its working age population to grow by a third. The country was blessed with a youth bulge that had immense potential. But, between 2016 and 2018, when India was just a few years away from the decline of its demographic dividend—the population would begin to lose its youth advantage and start ageing—youngsters attempted to bring about change in socioeconomic-cultural status quo. And an avalanche of unsettling agitations was set in motion.

When I started writing about the troubles that kept Indian youth up at night, I was not sure why a series of suicides plagued this generation of millennials. One lakh people committed suicide in India every year. Of this, 33 per cent were 18- to 33-year-olds. Out of all suicide victims, 68.5 per cent were men and 31.5 per cent were women. The first student suicide I reported was in 2008. Senthil Kumar, a PhD student who had not been allotted a guide for almost a year, killed himself on 27 February 2008. He was from Tamil Nadu and loved music. A topper in his village school, Senthil was the first to graduate in his family which earned a living by rearing pigs in Jalakandapuram, a weavers’ town in Salem district. I had always wondered why India’s institutions maintained an eerie silence when it came to youth unrest. While young people committed suicide out of desperation or to support idealistic but realizable causes, the country’s policy makers almost always turned their faces the other way, rubbishing youth angst as individual emotional outbursts. What escaped the nation’s attention was the fact that individual stories of desperation and revolt among youngsters were embedded deep in the societal labyrinth of India. Each young person in India carried the burden of the past as they travelled towards the future and each locale in India was a catacomb of stratified oligarchies, with which youngsters regularly interacted. Even the quietest localities, villages, towns, cities, districts, and states in the country harboured enough discontent to rustle up a youth rebellion; most places were ticking time bombs of youth angst.

Goa, with its beaches, heritage sites, and a steady tourist population, was always considered a youth haven. But for 26-year-old Hagen DeSa, it was home. When we met in 2017, Hagen, like most youngsters, carried within him India’s fissures. From our conversation I learnt that the young Anglo-Indian man, who had turned atheist after leaving a Catholic seminary where he had been enrolled to be a priest, had felt the sea change which Goa underwent at the end of the twentieth century. In his rented room in Malviya Nagar, New Delhi he had stacks of books on Goan history, most of which documented the colonial rule of the Portuguese and the Dutch. Hagen knew that Goa had been annexed into the Indian state in 1961, years after India won its independence. Goa where 66.8 per cent of the population was within the working-age limit, became a state in 1987, just four years before Hagen’s birth. Born in 1991, he grew up 24 kilometres from Panaji, in a village called Assonora, populated by people of different faiths. As a child, he had gone fishing in brooks, eaten roast beef till he grew tired of it, and contemplated what he should choose for higher studies. But, before he could come to a clear decision, Hagen’s surroundings underwent a drastic change. The lakes, where he had gone swimming in his boyhood days, and the bushes where he hunted wild boar with his elders, were converted into sites for mining iron ore. In Shirgao, located close to Assonora, villas came up where single-storied homes once rested peacefully. And his friends, who were once indifferent to what his diet was, now asked him whether he ate pork and beef. The state had by then undergone power changes in the Legislative Assembly. As he left for New Delhi in 2014, Hagen felt no sense of belonging to Goa. And his travels were, in fact, a quest to find the now-vanished ground beneath his feet. Though the International Monetary Fund was bullish about India’s growth, with a GDP projection of 7.4 per cent in 2018, young people were better represented by various indices of dissatisfaction. Several journeys within India’s political geography allowed me into the lives of youth who projected the various hues of India’s youth surge and rage.

While protests against college fee hikes and ragging were the only youth struggles that newspaper editors had historically published, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, it was impossible to ignore the youth factor in almost all struggles within the political map of the subcontinent. Be it insurgencies in the Northeast and in Kashmir, anti-caste movements in central and southern India, or the Maoist presence in the Red Corridor, the youth involvement stood out. The country’s political leaders, too, could no longer ignore its young citizens. Both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the opposition coalition, led by the Indian National Congress (Congress), tried to woo young people in order to multiply their votes. While people belonging to the older generation discussed some of the biggest student movements of the seventies—including those in Europe, Russia, and the US—the new post-liberalization, post-Mandal, generation in India took baby steps towards defining their future struggles. And I, who, by age, would still be an asset as far as the demographic dividend is concerned, was fortunate enough to closely observe and record the emergence of the country’s formidable youth uprising.

India’s youth agitations were not a series of sporadic protests but were fierce expressions of discontent and outrage. Be it in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) which saw, in February 2016 one of the biggest organized protests after the 1970s, or the small Satyajit Ray Film Institute in Kolkata where a group of young female film students fought against sexual harassment ingrained in the educational institution, or even Pathapalli in Mahbubnagar district of Telangana where young Dalits fought for land rights, youth of different hues were asking for a just society that could fulfil their aspirations. From caste to class, from gender to sexuality, they interrogated deeply problematic ideas and attitudes embedded in the heart of India. As television channels blared stories of rising anti-nationalism, the youth conversed with history, from M. K. Gandhi to Narendra Modi. While news reports focused on routine stories of depression and drug use among youngsters, the agile, working, reading, gaming, praying, thinking, writing, travelling and politicking youth, in fact, offered the most challenging profiles that represented a cross-section of India’s future. The Ferment could be the story of any one of the many youth who realized that the country’s Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary had to be woken from a deep slumber which ignored, often wilfully, their pressing needs. In the following pages, the nuances of the youth rebellion will emerge, giving one a sense of what India should do to tap into its demographic dividend.

This book is a guided tour through the youth battles which India, a country of many differences, harbours. The Ferment is, ultimately, the story of the country’s children who have the potential to determine its future, whether it be one of disintegration or reconstruction. It is the tale of India’s tomorrow.

NIKHILA HENRY

STAR GAZERS

1

Amour Propre; a Fistful

Under a starless sky, on a rock that still radiated the day’s warmth, Rohith Vemula and I sat, our conversation aimless. Heated discussions erupted intermittently amongst a group of friends seated just a stone’s throw away.

In June 2015, a casual meeting had brought us to this rock at the University of Hyderabad (UoH); this location was a hotspot for student parties. That night, languishing on the VC Rock—so named because it overlooked the vice chancellor’s palatial official residence that was remodelled in 2013 spending three crore rupees—Rohith spoke of death. Well, mostly he asked me what I thought of it.

Stray dogs patrolled the huge rock; the night was grey.

‘Would you like to be buried?’ he asked. In a country where funeral rites were as diverse as life itself, it was a question likely to be asked by young people who did not fear the possibility of imminent death.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I would like my family to visit,’ I said, after some thought. When it started, our conversation was on French film noir: he spoke about the 1954 film, Avant le deluge. On YouTube, ‘Death Letter Blues’ played, ‘Hurry, Hurry, yeah your love is dead… how come the gal you love is dead’, rising into the humid air. Conversation on death was a natural digression.

‘Me too.’

‘What? Be buried?’

‘I too would like to be remembered.’

The 26-year-old Rohith Vemula killed himself on 17 January 2016. The very next day his story and struggle rose from the dead. Transcending grief his words were resurrected in the memory of millions. In due course of time, he became the harbinger of the first youth agitation twenty-first century India’s millennial generation witnessed.

*

Himachal Pradesh has always been quite the tourist spot. In February 2016, the state registered a footfall of 1.72 crore people, amassing Rs 8,288 crore as revenue in the financial year 2016–17. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cleanliness scheme ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ garnered support in the foothills of Himalayas, a loud young group attracted the attention of curious tourists in Shimla. On 4 February 2016, outside Himachal Pradesh University, young men and women gathered in huge numbers. They shouted, ‘Jai Bhim!’ It was not clear whether the crowd was mourning or protesting; some were in tears and others seemed consumed by rage, and yet others looked intent to take the protest to its distant conclusion: justice. For foreign tourists who visited Shimla it was a strange sight. The district was believed to be commotion-free. Shimla has Kashmir’s scenery and New Delhi’s placidity, tour guides had vouched. Tourists were obviously not told of 1990, the year the Indian Army had marched into the hill districts to quell anti-Mandal agitations which had threatened the lives of Dalit-Bahujan youth. Most residents had almost forgotten the tumultuous years which followed the tabling of the Mandal Commission report that recommended extending benefits of affirmative action to Other Backward Classes, besides the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe population.

Philipp Schmidt (self-assigned alias, a 36-year-old Black Panther activist) zoomed in on the crowd with his Canon 5D camera. In the LCD frame, a four-foot-tall picture of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, which many hands raised up above the crowd, froze. The crowd was chanting salutes to Ambedkar. He had been the leader of the untouchables in India, someone told Philipp. What was unusual was the photograph of a young man in a green checked shirt placed next to the Ambedkar portrait. ‘Rohith Vemula Amar Rahe!’ the crowd chanted. Since Philipp’s last visit, Shimla had turned restless. And at the heart of this tumultuous rage was the smiling photograph of Rohith.

‘Who is he?’ Philipp asked a middle-aged man who was seen mumbling some of the slogans.

‘A student. He is dead. Suicide. Caste discrimination,’ the man seemed irritable at having to answer questions.

Philipp did not want to ask what ‘caste’ was. The crowd’s involvement seemed sacred. No one liked to be disturbed. Straying from his tour plan, he travelled to Hyderabad in search of a rising revolt. On 12 February, in the raging protest spot of the University of Hyderabad’s Shopping Complex (ShopCom)—where the makeshift tent named Velivada (‘Dalit Ghetto’) was propped up—Philipp once again looked at the portrait of Rohith Vemula. It was there that I met this confused foreigner.

Accompanied by a few students, Philipp and I walked towards Room 207 of New Research Scholar Hostel where Rohith had spent his last day. It was locked. On the door, there was a poster of Ambedkar and Buddha. Under the figures, an utterance from the Udanavarga: ‘Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.’ Painted in blue on the walls was an acronym: ASA—Ambedkar Students Association. The organization was set up in 1993 by a few students who took admission in the university decades after the Indian Constitution ensured a total of 22.5 reserved seats, in government education and employment, for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories. Other Backward Class students, who trickled into the university before the first Mandal reforms of 1990, were also part of ASA’s making. In Room 207, Rohith had hanged himself from a ceiling fan using the ASA’s blue banner. Phillipp, who had by then made sense of caste—as a practice based on birth, sanctified by religion, and reinforced by tradition—asked hesitantly, ‘Is untouchability practiced in such universities even now?’ I had heard the question many times before, commonly asked in ‘forward-caste’ student circles in educational institutions. India found comfort so long as it believed, collectively, that caste was a thing of the past. In 2001, Omar Abdullah, minister of state for External Affairs, had refused to discuss caste in a United Nations world conference against racism. India was, once again, visibly upset with the UN’s special rapporteur’s report on caste-based discrimination submitted in March 2016, soon after Rohith’s suicide. This was despite National Crime Records Bureau 2015 recording a caste-based atrocity rate of 19.2. During Philipp’s enquiry into caste, the group of students who took us to the hostel were silent. Not a month had passed since Rohith wrote his last note, ‘… But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident.’

Close to the NRS hostel, in the sprawling 1,800-acre campus, existed a small enclosure, a lawn of sorts. On rocks jutting out from the shrivelled ground, in blue paint, a name was inscribed: Raju-Venkatesh Park. ASA had named the place after Puliyala Raju and Madari Venkatesh, two Dalit research scholars who had killed themselves in 2013. Hyderabad’s educational institutions witnessed nine suicides by students from marginalized communities—Dalits and Muslims—in 2013, forcing the state’s High Court to order an enquiry into the appalling scenario. The deaths had left a trail; in Hyderabad Central University (HCU) alone five Dalit students committed suicide between 2008 and 2016. Though university authorities tried to erase the names—Senthil Kumar, Balaraj, Madari Venkatesh, Puliyala Raju—from memory, the ASA had kept track; be it in Raju-Venkatesh park or in the Senthil-Balaraj cricket night cup started in 2012. In acronyms painted on hostel walls, in ‘songs of resistance’ sung during protests, and in names reiterated in slogans, students remembered their counterparts who died because they were denied research supervisors, hostel accommodation, or scholarships. Rohith Vemula, who walked out of his hostel room carrying an Ambedkar portrait in hand days before he committed suicide, was perhaps the first one to establish what student agitations in isolated colleges and universities had pointed out in the past: that educational institutions had turned into Khap panchayats; modern killing fields which repackaged age-old practices of deprivation and discrimination. And as Philipp, a foreign national, was at ground zero watching events unfold at HCU, the world looked cautiously at India’s long-standing tryst with caste: newspapers of the developed world unequivocally called caste system an affront to modernity. The reality, however, was starker: caste was embedded in India’s modernization process.

Not far from NRS Room 207 where Phillip and I stood, there existed a well, which had been dug in a faculty residential area for a Brahmin mathematician and professor, V. Kannan, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science and Indian National Science Academy. Till he retired in 2014, Professor Kannan was known as the mild-mannered, kudumi sporting teacher who ‘did not want to share water from the university’s drinking water supply, that students and faculty members of all castes used’. In a published interview in 2003, Professor Kannan had confirmed that he had decided to lead a ‘simple, spiritual and controlled life with the right blend of penance and pleasure in proper proportions’. The professor, had not taken up job offers abroad as he ‘was against crossing the sea’. The well, dug in late 1980s, still had water in 2017. Contamination of different kinds mattered in India. How did it all go unchallenged? Rohith Vemula’s suicide revealed the rot in India’s educational system. It showed the world that modern India worked on caste principles; an anachronism of sorts.

This is how it began: on 17 January 2016—the night Rohith’s body was still lying in hostel—a student protest was only a whimper in the dark. The university looked incapable of agitation. When I reached the campus around 11.30 pm, it was as calm as a graveyard. Near NRS hostel, a group of students stood reasoning with police officials. They had copies of Rohith’s suicide note which had not yet gone viral on social media and news platforms. ‘Sir, he is talking about the identity he is born with. He also felt that it is a curse having been born. Having been born!’ Dontha Prashant, a student leader tried his best to establish the case: the excruciatingly frustrating job of having to pin down the existence of caste to a word, act, or circumstance. In December 2013, I had seen Prashanth undergo the same agony. His voice cracked and his eyes reddened he asked the former Vice Chancellor of HCU, a Tamil Brahman Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, ‘Sir, please admit, just admit that there is caste-based discrimination in this campus. If you don’t, we won’t have faith in the system.’ Then, he was speaking at a protest shed set up at Shopcom demanding authorities to penalize those responsible for the suicide of Madari Venkatesh. Denial of caste discrimination came in loops and reels. On 17 January, Telangana police was armoured and ready to dismiss questions and protests. ‘It is just the result of a tiff between two groups (ABVP and ASA). I understand your sentiment but it has got nothing to do with what you are saying’, DCP L. Kartikeya, a fair stout man who was treading the narrow line between peace and protest, tried to thwart Prashanth’s point. Students till then had not given up Rohith’s body. They did not want law enforcement officials to touch their friend before filing a case under Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, against those who drove him to suicide. The country had registered 38,564 atrocity cases under the act in 2015 alone. Karthikeya, like others in his team, did not want the ‘issue to be blown out of proportion’. A Telangana cadre police officer from Himachal Pradesh, he, like many others, did not see what was coming. Minutes later, slogans echoed in the university: ‘Kadilindi Dalita Dandu…Khabardar, Khabardar’ (The Dalit movement has begun… Beware, Beware). It took only an hour, starting 7.30 am on 18 January, for HCU to turn into a beehive of protests. As television cameras zoomed in on the students, many others—bloggers, journalists, politicians, and activists—swooped down on HCU; a collective strife dispersed the sparks of agitation