Audacious Hope

Through the monsoon season of 2016, India was rocked by chilling images of seven labourers of Dalit backgrounds, stigmatised as “untouchables”, being lynched by cow protection vigilantes. They had been skinning cattle carcasses in the village of Una, Gujarat when they were brutally beaten on the street for being disrespectful to the cow, which many Hindus consider sacred. The vigilantes even filmed the entire episode and uploaded it on social media as a warning to all.

As the video went viral, Dalits across the state of Gujarat were furious. They responded with unprecedented protests. A fortnight after the lynching, social workers Nathubhai Parmar and Maheshbhai Rathod along with businessman Hirabhai Chawda obtained permission for a rally that would culminate at Una’s apex district office. The administration was reluctant at first but gave in. On the afternoon of 18 July, when the rally was to converge on the district office, the authorities were in for a rude shock. Using Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media, the trio had mobilised almost 1,500 Dalits to travel to the district office with as many carcasses of dead cattle as they could find.

‘The district superintendent of police was shocked to see the carcasses but then I just showed him the permission letter for the rally—it didn’t say you can’t bring carcasses!’ the trio chuckled when asked about their daring. The rallyists began dumping the carcasses they had brought with them in front of the district office and left. The alarmed officials pleaded with local Dalits to clear out the carcasses, a job traditionally associated with, and often officially outsourced to, some “untouchable” communities, but to no avail. Over the next few days, Dalits across Gujarat struck work and refused to clear out the carcasses of dead cows. ‘The cow is your mother, you better look after it,’ they declared. As carcasses piled up, the administration pressed earth movers and chemicals into the work of carcass disposal. In the meantime, rallies and protests against the Una lynching continued, culminating in an assembly of thousands of people in Una on India’s 69th Independence Day. Gujarat’s chief minister was ultimately forced to resign.

When the BJP rode high on its re-election in 2019 to introduce the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that introduced a religious filter to the country’s citizenship laws, it was simply not prepared for the pushback from ordinary Indians. People poured out into the streets with copies of the Indian Constitution across big cities and small towns all over India in the weeks that followed. The slogans they chanted, the placards they held and the demands they raised emphasised their belief that the CAA was an unconstitutional piece of legislation that had no place in a civilised society.

Hand-made placards held up by young women which read ‘Grand-daughters of refugees against the CAA’ and ‘Not in my name’ drove home the simple yet powerful message that the people in whose name the legislation was being passed did not share its exclusionary aims. Other posters played on versions of the ‘It’s so bad …’ joke, i.e., ‘It’s so bad, even the introverts are here’, ‘It’s so bad, even cynics are here’ and the extremely self-aware ‘It’s so bad, even the privileged are here’, suggesting that anger against the legislation had managed to penetrate widely divergent circles of the population. Among the most evocative messages conveyed during the protests was the one held up by a young man proclaiming ‘Hindu hoon, chutiya nahin’ (I am a Hindu, not an idiot).

Folks from all generations, backgrounds and genders merged together to protest the divisive legislation. ‘Fascism is achieved not when government oppresses half of its people but when the other half chooses to be silent,’ screamed one vibrantly red poster that was inked in black. Another declared, ‘We are Indians by blood, not by documentation,’ asserting a civic conception of citizenship that rejected the religious filter being floated by the CAA.  A poster held up by three women dared, ‘Isi mitti ke hai, isi mitti mein mil jaayeinge, kissi ke baap ka mulq nahin, ki Mussalman aise chale jaayenge’ or ‘We are of this land and we will merge with its soil; this country is not the property of any single community that the Muslims will simply leave’. 

Beyond the well-documented sit-in at Shaheen Bagh at the south-eastern edge of Delhi, people protested the divisive legislation across the land. Braving the brutal Indo-Gangetic winter as well as a particularly repressive State government, hundreds of women, mostly Muslim, assembled outside the Clock Tower in the heart of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s capital city. The north Indian fog hung thick in the air, but did little to dampen the spirits of the women. Wrapping themselves in blankets, they huddled together night after night to register their protest against the CAA. One night, the city police swooped down on them and made off with their blankets, leaving them out in the cold. The women defiantly replaced their old blankets with new ones. The city police then hoisted hoardings that named the protestors in order to shame them. It was at this point that the Supreme Court intervened and declared the state government’s actions a violation of protestors’ privacy. Although the blankets were never returned, the hoardings were dismantled.

Over the fall of 2020, the BJP government introduced legislation that promised to reform India’s ailing agricultural sector. The speed with which the legislations were bamboozled through the Lok Sabha without wider consultations annoyed the country’s farmers who would be directly affected by the reforms. When they converged on Delhi to protest through the bitter winter of 2020/2021, influential sections of the media portrayed many of them as anti-nationals and secessionists, branding them Khalistanis, invoking the spectre of Hindu-Sikh violence that had ripped the northwestern States of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi during the 1980s. Hindu-Muslim conflict in 2013 had further shattered the agricultural fabric in neighbouring western Uttar Pradesh. The farmers’ protests were not expected to survive these divisions. Anticipating arrest and a brutal crackdown, their leader Rakesh Tikait broke down in tears on national television. 

Tikait’s tears turned the tables. Beamed into homes and communities across rural north India, they struck a chord. Over the next few hours, you could see thousands of tractors on the highways converging towards Delhi. Short video clips were circulated by contingents that were already on their way or planning to be. Tiny temples across Haryana and Uttar Pradesh called for devotees to support the protests, urging them to leave for the protest sites as soon as they could. If the national media had been hellbent on humiliating Tikait, social media users on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook were galvanised to support him. The roads from little-known districts such as Jind, Bhivani, Kaithal, Hissar and others were soon choc-a-bloc with people and their vehicles heading to the capital. The movement had been revived. By the time dawn broke, Delhi’s protest sites had been bolstered with both numbers and fresh morale. 

What was more, Hindu and Muslim farmers across western Uttar Pradesh made common cause with each other, setting aside their differences, at least for the time being. Over the next few months, Tikait would insist that meetings commenced with ‘Har Har Madev’ interspersed with ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal’ to emphasise the inter-religious solidarity among the farmers. The protests gained from strength to strength. On 27 September 2021, the farmers’ organisations called for a Bharat Bandh, an all-India strike. The strike paralysed Punjab and parts of western Uttar Pradesh, and received extensive support in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Sensing the ever-increasing support for the farmers’ cause, Prime Minister Modi publicly announced on 19 November 2021 that the unpopular farm laws would be repealed at the earliest. Within a fortnight, their withdrawal was approved by both houses of Parliament. The President signed the Repeal Act on 2 December, almost a year after the protestors had begun their march to Delhi. The farmers had achieved a decisive victory.

India’s democratic achievements, far from perfect, since Independence have been eroded after 2014. Yet, as Audacious Hope illustrates, Indians are not letting their democracy quietly slip away without putting up a good fight. The actions of countless Indians—ranging from farmers to students, and politicians to artistes, and social activists to daily wage labourers—shows the many ways in which they are resisting the onslaughts on their democratic freedoms. Their immense courage and fortitude warn observers that fixating on democracy’s collapse in India (or anywhere else for that matter) is not only counter-productive but extremely unfair to people’s (increasingly desperate) attempts at salvaging their democracy. To say that there is no hope for democracy to survive in India is to mirror the actions of those who seek to strangle it. Hopelessness is a luxury no one who cares about democracy can afford. 

The dissenting Indians documented in Audacious Hope remind us that democracy is not merely about free and fair elections or about institutional checks and balances. Democracy is also a social process that ensures equality before the law, the right to be consulted, and the freedom of expression and argument. Democracy is certainly not to be limited to majority rule, but entails working across political divides and treating one another with respect. As opposition parties crumble, institutions buckle under pressure, and the media crawls when asked to bend, Indians draw on age-old and vibrant traditions of protest. Through their social struggles against brutal odds, these dissenting Indians are illustrating what it means to be a vishwaguru, the teacher to the world which Prime Minister would like the country be. 

It is impossible to forecast the outcome of these struggles. While the farmers’ movement seems to have won a clear immediate victory, the same cannot be said of the myriad struggles by students or those challenging caste hierarchies. The pandemic stalled the protests against the CAA as well as the state’s efforts at creating the NRC, even as it inflicted death and destruction on the people. Although artists find themselves increasingly under siege, there can be little doubt that there has, in fact, been a proliferation of different artistic mediums of conveying dissent. 

Such uncertainty is integral to hope since it is, after all, prone to disappointment. But then, as Hindus would recognise from the advice Krishna gives Arjuna on the eve of the battle in the Mahabharata:

"You have the right to act, but no right over the fruits of your actions. Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let not your attachment be to inaction."

In this tale as old as time, Arjuna falters when he sees the array of adversaries opposed to him. They are greater in number and better organised. Is there any chance of victory, he wonders, and is ready to lay down his arms and concede defeat even before the war had begun. It is at that point that Krishna—his charioteer, friend and spiritual mentor—steps in to guide him out of his confusion. Whether Arjuna wins the war or loses it is immaterial, Krishna tells him firmly. What matters is that he fights in it, that he does not let injustice go unchallenged. It is a similar commitment to action that underpins the spirit of audacious hope and motivates millions of Indians to defend their democracy.