BackGrowing up with protest
A 4-year-old's questions about 'azadi' bring back memories of the violence before the Assam Accord signed in 1984
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Right in the middle of an unexpected traffic jam, reconciled to the fact that we would be entering the school gates only after the national anthem, I get a pointed question from my four-year-old daughter: “Mama, what is ‘azadi’?" She watches the news on TV often, and has heard this word often in the past month. Maybe she has even heard “lal salaam". I hope not. My answer is hasty and feeble, and quite rightly, she is not satisfied.
In school in Assam in the late 1980s, I remember making a similarly feeble attempt at an inter-school debating competition speaking against the motion: Students should join politics. True to the spirit of an unapologetic nerd, I had said students should read books, contribute to society, and in their free time travel to new, faraway places. A dear friend, who is now a successful entrepreneur in Mumbai, countered me in rousing polemics in support of student politics, and my side lost the competition. This was a few years after the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) had signed the Assam accord in 1985 and formed the government in that state—Prafulla Mahanta became the youngest chief minister.
I spent much of my adolescence witnessing the All Assam Students’ Union agitate against Bangladeshi immigration. Their methods were often violent, but the young students’ confederation electrified an entire state into political protest. Indira Gandhi was The Enemy. Our ancestral home, like many other homes in Nagaon town, where I grew up, was a shelter for student leaders; CRPF jawans freely unleashed tear gas on crowds gathered to shout anti-foreigner slogans; the cure for tear gas tears was dabbing the eyes with rose water; children surreptitiously threw a thistle plant called bandor kekura (monkey crab, the literal translation of the name) on the jawans, leaving their skins itchy for hours. It all culminated in the horrific Nellie massacre in 1983 and, then, the Assam accord.
I remember those years as harrowing, with fun interludes of no-school days. How about taking a long, enjoyable bus ride? How about watching Betaab on the big screen without the aunt worrying every single minute that a bomb would go off?
Many older cousins lost a year or two of college education. One way of protest against the government in Delhi, and its supposed support for Bangladeshi immigrant settlements in the state at the time, was to switch off all lights across the state. A game called Dark Room became popular among us children—it simply required us to find each other in complete darkness in a living room.
After the government was formed, a monumental moment for the state, the AGP men under Mahanta ran one of the most inefficient governments in Assam’s history. The revolution, the radicalism, and then the wretched bitter pill. So my belief in student politics and public protest was jaded by the time I reached Kolkata in the early 1990s to attend college.
This city was hooked to the microphone.
The big city should have been full of promise, and it did have some promise. But nothing really moved in its institutions, its ambitions, its infrastructure. Communist slogans were a sprawling aural canvas. You’ve probably heard enough about Kolkata’s romance with communism, so I won’t bore you. My point is, protest became even less of a revolutionary thing for me after four years in Kolkata.
But till then, from age 6-20, protest was right outside my door.
When my daughter asked about “azadi", after watching that spectacularly entertaining and forceful speech of Jawaharlal Nehru University student Kanhaiya Kumar, I could not give her a cool, logical answer. I said it means to be free, and the guy was asking to be freed from many things by repeating the word many times.
The truth is that for the first time, I have faith in public protest. This new protest is no violent or ideological regression. The Kolkata years have taught me to be deeply sceptical of the phrase “lal salaam", which Kanhaiya Kumar throws casually into his speeches. Politics is different from protest and ideology, as the AGP men taught us long ago. Kanhaiya Kumar’s political career has not even started. You have read enough character portraits of the guy, enough inspired analyses of his Bihari oratory. Our columnist Aakar Patel has an excellent take.
For the first time, even someone jaded like me is ready to engage with “azadi", with questions about “azadi", and the idea of public protest. Thanks to the passion, clarity and wit of Kanhaiya Kumar.
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