The Vacuum We Refuse to Name
What happened with the students during the march set out from Jantar Mantar to Parliament or in Jharkhand did not make me feel angry. That surprised me a little, because anger is the expected currency of days like these.
Students, mostly. They were asking for one thing, the resignation of a minister, over exams that had been leaked and futures that had been quietly rearranged because of it. The police did what the police were always going to do. There were the barricades and the prohibitory orders that turn a gathering into a crime. Then the lathis. The internet went quiet in parts of the city, the way it always does now, as if silence itself has learned to wear a uniform.
I watched it and I did not feel anger. I felt something slower. A kind of thakaan that does not come from the body. I sat with it for a long time, the way you sit beside someone who is dying and you already know there is nothing left to fix. What was dying, or what had already died, was not a person. It was an idea we were once taught to believe in: that this country belonged to its people and that its institutions were built to hold them.
I will say the ugly thing plainly, because I am tired of dressing it up. I felt ashamed to be Indian these days.
And then, in the same breath, something else. Hope, though not the cheap kind. I saw how many young people had come. I saw them carrying the Constitution in their hands, a small book held up like a shield, and I saw them ask for accountability from a government that behaves as though it has never heard the word. This government does not answer to anyone. Call it what it is. It behaves like a tyranny that has learned to hold elections. Accountability is a language it stopped speaking a long time ago.
So the protest matters. Let me not pretend otherwise. But I have to say the part that will make some of you uncomfortable, including the part of me that still wants to believe voting is enough.
If all we are asking for is satta parivartan, a change of who sits on the throne, then nothing will change.
I mean this without cynicism. I mean it as someone who has voted, who has hoped, who has stood in those lines believing the arithmetic of it would save us. The next government will also behave like kings and queens. It will build its own barricades. It will train its own police to swing the same lathi at some other child, in some other decade, for some other inconvenient demand. And here is the part we keep refusing to look at. The policeman who beat those students yesterday is not a monster. He is a product. He was made. He is sustained by the same system, conditioned by it, slowly emptied of himself by it, until the person standing in front of him stops registering as a person at all. A man hollowed out by the machine will hollow out whoever the machine points him toward. That is not only his failing. It is the design working exactly as it was built to work.
So when I say the problem is not the BJP, I need you to hear me carefully, because it is easy to mishear this as defeatism.
The problem was never the absence of opposition. We have opposition. We have parties fighting this government on a dozen fronts. There are protests happening across this country right now, in the courts, in the assemblies, out on the streets, in a hundred places that will never reach a headline. Resistance is not what we lack.
What we lack is an idea to stand on.
This is the vacuum I keep returning to. The real opposition to a broken system is not another party. It is an ideology, a shared sense of what kind of country we are trying to become. And we do not have one. We are frightened of the word. We have made apolitical into a badge, and we wear it with a strange pride, as though refusing to think about power keeps our hands clean. Some of us hide inside our privilege, inside comfortable lives the system has not yet come for, and we call that neutrality.
Look at what everyone is actually fighting for. Someone wants education that a poor child can afford. Someone wants work. Someone wants the forest left standing. Someone wants their land back. Someone wants the labor of their hands treated as though it belongs to a human being. Someone wants to walk home without fear. Pull on any one of these threads and the same few words come loose underneath. Samta. Swatantrata. The dignity of being seen as a full person. Nyaay.
These are not neutral wishes. They have a lineage. They come from the left, from feminism, from the thought of Ambedkar, and from the long traditions that spent a century arguing about exactly this, about how a society carries its weakest without letting them fall. And yet the very people who want these things will not say those words. They will demand what feminism demanded and refuse to be called feminists. They will ask for what Ambedkar spent his life asking for and flinch at the word Ambedkarvadi. The thing they are reaching for has a name, and they would rather not know it.
I am not asking anyone to join a party. Parties come and go, and most of them will disappoint you. I am asking for something quieter and harder. Hold an ideology. Own it. Let it be a place you stand on, a set of principles that tells you what you will not accept, what you owe to a stranger, and what dignity means on the day it is not your own on the line. Ours is already written. It is in the preamble that those students were holding in their hands as the lathis came down. Nyaay, swatantrata, samta, bandhuta. We printed our ideology into the first page of our own book and then spent three generations being embarrassed to live by it.
Until we feel that absence, the vacuum where a shared idea should be, we are not ready to ask for change. Because what we will get is not change. We will get a new set of rulers wearing the old crown. The system will stand. The mindset will stand. Only the faces will move.
जब सड़कें फैसला लिखेंगी
इस देश की विडंबना यह नहीं
कि अपराधी बच निकले।
विडंबना यह है
कि अपराध
अब शपथ लेकर सत्ता में बैठता है।
जिन्हें सलाख़ों के पीछे होना था,
वे कानून की किताब पर हाथ रखकर
जनता की किस्मत लिख रहे हैं।
जिन हाथों में हथकड़ियाँ होनी चाहिए थीं,
उन्हीं हाथों में पुलिस का डंडा है।
जिन्हें शब्दों का सम्मान नहीं,
वे अख़बार चलाते हैं।
जिन्हें सच से एलर्जी है,
वे न्यूज़ चैनलों पर
राष्ट्रभक्ति की दवा बेचते हैं।
और जिन्हें न्याय के कटघरे में खड़ा होना था,
वे न्याय की कुर्सियों के सबसे पास बैठे हैं।
अब अदालतों में
सिर्फ़ मुक़दमे नहीं चलते,
चलता है यह सवाल
कि सच की औक़ात
कितने वकील खरीद सकते हैं।
यह कैसा समय है
जहाँ संविधान
जेब में रखा हुआ एक छोटा-सा ग्रंथ है,
और नफ़रत
पूरे देश का सबसे बड़ा पाठ्यक्रम।
जहाँ डर
वर्दी पहनता है,
और साहस
देशद्रोह कहलाता है।
लेकिन इतिहास…
इतिहास कभी संसदों से नहीं बदलता।
इतिहास तब करवट लेता है
जब लोग
अपनी चुप्पी उतारकर
सड़क पहन लेते हैं।
जिस दिन
भीड़ नहीं,
नागरिक सड़कों पर उतरेंगे,
जिस दिन
कदमों की आवाज़
भाषणों से ऊँची हो जाएगी,
जिस दिन
हज़ारों हाथ
एक-दूसरे का हाथ पकड़कर कहेंगे,
बस। अब और नहीं।
उस दिन
लाठियाँ थक जाएँगी,
आँसू गैस हवा से हार जाएगी,
और सत्ता पहली बार समझेगी
कि जनता
सिर्फ़ वोट नहीं होती।
जनता
चलती हुई चेतना होती है।
याद रखना,
सिंहासन कभी अमर नहीं होते।
अमर होती हैं
वे पदचापें
जो अन्याय के सामने
घुटने टेकने से इनकार कर देती हैं।
क्रांतियाँ
पहले नारों में नहीं,
मनुष्य की रीढ़ में जन्म लेती हैं।
और जिस दिन
एक साधारण आदमी
डर से बड़ा हो जाएगा,
उसी दिन
लोकतंत्र
फिर से
जनता का हो जाएगा।
I wrote those lines on a night when I wanted to believe them. I am not sure I do yet. The streets did rise. The lathis did not tire. Somewhere a policeman went home to his own children, and somewhere a student pressed ice to a bruise and asked herself whether any of it was worth it. But the vacuum is still there, and that naming it is where we have to begin.
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