The India in which I grew up was in a constant churn of democratic protests. Dharna, gherao, michil, juloos, chakka jam… these were everyday words for us, across a spread of Indian languages. Cries of Inquilab Zindabad rent the air regularly. People made demands of their governments — money, jobs, rights, equality, justice.
And we also had the great Bharat Bandh. When someone tried to bring India to a standstill. Those were tough times, if successful. Or, if you were a child, enormously appreciated since school got cancelled for the day.
The curse of the apathetic middle classes was a slow poison into Indian society. Let us not forget that our freedom movement — I’m going with accepted history right now, not the Nagpur version — was full of people from all classes of Indian life and society.
On February 1 this year I visited Gandhi Smriti in New Delhi. This was the house of the industrialist G.D. Birla, where Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948. Gandhi stayed here for 144 days before he was killed by Godse. The grounds still carried remnants of the prayer meeting held two days earlier, where politicians who belong to the ideology which assassinated Gandhi attended Gandhi’s memorial. At least the place where the Father of the Nation — as named by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose — fell to Godse’s bullets has not been removed and replaced. I want to write “yet” because of the rate at which history is being replaced by right-wing fantasy propaganda in India…
Visitors to the Gandhi Smriti on that day appeared to be mainly foreign tourists, but soon Indians trickled in. Gandhiji was a great believer in public street protests and the pioneer of civil disobedience. If you have studied history in a non-Nagpur-run school, you would know these, from the Dandi March to Swadeshi to Quit India. The diorama museum in Gandhi Smriti tells the story of many of his protests.
Somewhere, the other middle class, the one that did not accompany Gandhi on his many protests or have some of their own, took over. That middle class was very worried about traffic jams, about loss of business and earnings. Some of this sounds reasonable. After all, if India is shut down, what happens to daily wage earners, to less privileged people who may suffer if they cannot make it to work and so on?
Or is it reasonable? To protest is a democratic right. It is a way to make your voice heard in a sea of indifference. It is a way to make governments realise that they draw power from you, us, the people, not from systems which they can manipulate. It is a way to put pressure, to get your demands heard. Those days are seemingly gone. We just about vote and that’s it. The rest of the time we obey government and political instructions. And call anyone who opposes the elected “anti-national”, shout “go back to xyz” and so on.
The last big “people’s” movement was India Against Corruption and what a fraud that turned out to be. Propped up by the television media, its “leaders” pushed as saviours, all it did was create one more political party. And the corruption turned out to be not so much. And the answer provided to stop corruption? Well, that didn’t work out either.
Over the years though I have started joining tiny little citizens’ protests. For the environment, to save trees within cities, to stop governments from destroying whatever greenery we have left, to save public money. From Dehradun to Delhi to Secunderabad. In all of them, older people are in big numbers, children and young people come next and that middle bit of decision-makers and movers and shakers largely absent.
It is still inspiring. People who want a save a park in their colony. People who read the Preamble to our Constitution. People who form human chains to demand justice and equality and fair play. Marches where political parties put aside their difference and join together to make these demands.
I cannot deny that these are tiny protests, not even pinpricks on the thick skin of the behemoth. Nor can I pretend that the general public which drives by is remotely interested. I can only hope that something trickles past them. But these are voices, our voices, which speak out. It is not in my nature to be part of these, largely because my work meant I had to watch and observe, not participate. But I no longer have a job. I am free therefore to feed myself. To stand on the edges while those who are braver, more vocal, more involved hold the stage and set the pace.
I bow to their courage with my attendance.
I try to hum along to their songs of hope and resistance, which I do not know.
I learn about their diversity and their persistence.
Small steps of hope, for a democracy to awaken, so learn that voting is not enough. To learn that homogeneity is the path to disaster. To celebrate differences and the strength we can get from that.
Though yesterday someone shouted “Inquilab Zindabad” and almost no one knew how to respond…
I watch the world march and speak for Palestine, and I wonder at our own radio silence. Us who once stood at the forefront of movements against colonial oppression and Us that now frolic with the oppressors.
Where are our marches for Palestine, for Gaza, for the thousands killed by Israel, just because they exist as an inconvenience for a colonial power?
I learn from these lines from American poet Sonia Sanchez’s Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman, the great American abolitionist and social activist:
“Imagine her saying:
I freed a thousand slaves,
could have freed
a thousand more if they
only knew they were slaves    ...   ”
I march mainly for us, if only we knew that we were slaves.
