It’s nearly a month since members of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) and their supporters gathered at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on 6 June to stage a public protest. Despite extreme summer days and virulent opposition from a section of society, the youth-led movement has remained steadfast in its demand for the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, whose failure to ensure fair conduct of the NEET examinations this year has allegedly led to the death by suicide of around 20 aspirants. Last week, what started as a peaceful protest against corruption in education assumed a belligerent tone as Nitin Nabin, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national chief, threatened to teach CJP “a lesson” for being part of the “tukde tukde gang”, bent on dividing India. The term was first used in 2016 for students of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) when they protested against the execution of 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. In subsequent years, it has been turned into a catch-all slur.
The establishment’s reaction to CJP is far from unfamiliar. Karl Marx famously said, history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. In India, history repeats itself in an endless loop of nightmares.
Exactly 10 years ago, another youth-led movement had taken the country by storm following the death by suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, and was greeted with similar derision. A PhD candidate at the University of Hyderabad, the 26-year-old left behind an incriminating note about the caste-based discrimination he and his fellow students faced at the institution. Despite multiple complaints, the authorities had done little to remedy the situation.
Such lack of redress along with mounting retribution for filing complaints wasn’t an uncommon occurrence at the university. In 2008, a 27-year-old research scholar, P. Senthil Kumar, died by suicide, once again an alleged victim of caste bias who faced inordinate delays in finding a guide and getting his topic approved. Elsewhere, in the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, such injustices had been systematically perpetuated by upper-caste faculty and students through generations of gaslighting and abuse of power. In 2016, a number of movements led by young women and men came together to bring this heady whirlpool of caste, gender and other biases to a head. Journalist Nikhila Henry told the story of this “ferment” in her book of the same name in 2018.
From Jadavpur University in Kolkata to youth unrest in Kashmir following the killing of Burhan Wani, leader of the Hizbul Mujahideen, to campuses in Nagaland and Manipur—The Ferment covers a wide ground through intensive reportage and investigations. While human voices are vital to Henry’s narrative, her book stands as much on her illuminating citation of data to test out her thesis that higher education in post-independence India has not only failed to deliver the promise of social justice to the wider citizenry but also kept itself selfishly aloof from such an intent.
Between 2012 and 2017, several youth movements emerged in response to the festering evil in educational institutions around India. Henry travelled to some of these flashpoints to meet the main characters in the local theatres of politics. From Chandrashekhar Azad, who co-founded the Bhim Army in 2014, to Jignesh Mevani, who fought for justice for Vemula in 2016, the book profiles the leading lights of these movements of yore, their meteoric rise, and entry into politics.
Re-reading The Ferment eight years after it was published is a sobering reminder of the thinning influence of these leaders who were once household names. Was it their entry into party politics with its inevitable moral compromises that dimmed their mass appeal? Or did the sea change in the political, judicial and social landscape of India over the last decade push the idealism of youth into irrelevance?
Apart from a wave of anti-caste movements, 2016 saw young women on Indian campuses get together to fight patriarchy. The year before, a new regulation issued by Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi had decided that women students of the institution would not be allowed to stay out of the hostel beyond 8pm. In response, women students and alumni from across Delhi colleges formed the Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage) collective to protest against such hyper-surveillance of women’s lives. Soon after, a group of women students from Jamia Millia Islamia launched the #PadsAgainstSexism campaign to remove the public’s stigma against menstrual blood.
These twin incidents, among others, led to the spread of collective peaceful protests in and beyond campuses in Delhi in 2016. Also that year, a 24-year-old woman from Kerala called Hadiya staunchly stood her ground about her decision to marry a Muslim man. Her orthodox Hindu family took her to court, arguing that she had been forcefully indoctrinated, but Hadiya disagreed. The fiasco added another notorious slur, “Love Jihad”, to the arsenal of right-wing vocabulary. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Hadiya, giving her the right to make her own decisions as a consenting adult.
Reading Henry’s account of the tumultuous months of 2016, especially the fire it lit in the belly of so many youth across the country, is at once heartening and dispiriting. The most memorable upheaval from the year was perhaps the arrest of research scholars from JNU—Umar Khalid, Kanhaiya Kumar and Anirban Bhattacharya, among others—for raising “anti-national” slogans at a protest meeting on campus. Henry chronicles the aftermath of this event—the police atrocity, detention without trial and persecution—in chilling detail. Bhattacharya and Kumar were eventually released, but Khalid continues to be incarcerated, six years running, without a trial. Another prominent student leader from JNU, Shehla Rashid, has distanced herself from her once-firebrand anti-fascist stance and withdrawn from politics.
Henry’s book acts as an antidote to amnesia, especially at a time when the news cycle changes faster than the time needed to mourn a tragedy. The Ferment reminds the reader of the struggles and sacrifices that a generation of millennials had to endure in the hope of a better future. The book also resurrects figures like Najeeb Ahmed, a JNU student who disappeared in October 2016, after a clash with members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) during a hostel election campaign.
Even as Radhika Vemula and Fatima Nafees await justice for their sons, India is in the throes of a Gen Z-led movement against the status quo. In the recent past, people of this generation have mobilised in Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia and elsewhere to fight for better governance. Whether their victories have been conclusive remains to be seen. But as one of the student leaders of 2016 told Henry, “We made the country face the fact that caste exists.” All change must start somewhere.