Young college awareness

Young man Rohan has just turned nineteen. He tells me he sometimes forgets that he’s still a teen, he feels so grown up. Stepping into college portals clearly signals the outgrowing of the cocooned shelter of home.

It seems adult characters are being chiseled out of the undifferentiated child block. Within months of entry, the college student is actively shedding puppy fat. His fond mother tells me a little wanly that he’s stopped eating.  He is going through the lean-and-mean phase in the search for individual identity, which needs must include the physical. Besides, there are girls to impress at the college.

Quite recently, I visit their home, and see the college newbie looking exhausted, but elated all the same. What’s up? I ask. He has been walking miles, he says, and is just back from a student rally. We hear that thousands of students of different colleges cut classes to march from their institutions to another to express solidarity with the student body there. This rally is against police action against their protest against official inaction against student demands against the molestation of a girl-student earlier. It all seems a little complicated to me, but essentially, the student body is riled up.

I ask the question that probably keeps his parents awake at night, have you become a political activist? No, no, he says, we joined in only because it (the protest rally) was apolitical. For children born into the traditional family system in India, breaking bounds in such a way is an awesome feeling. What is important is the realization that in a democracy protest is a right, and they begin to understand the value of the adult franchise they gain at age eighteen. 

In the college world, political awareness is imbibed from the environment. In our time, decades ago, the campus was the hotbed of political activities. Political parties would run their recruitment drives through the student unions dependent on their patronage. Thousands of young people fell victims to their machinations, during the Naxalbari movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Some political people had wanted to ‘lead’ the rally, Rohan informs us, but were asked to leave. These students want no such overtones, or to have their opinions hijacked by party organizers.  

We tune into the news channel on television and find coverage of rally. We see the students marching along, and Rohan is a little disappointed that he is indistinguishable in the crowd. The elders around him though, are secretly relieved that he is not identifiable; nobody wants to be the unwitting recipient of political ire. 

Many of the young marchers clearly perceive the rally as some sort of college excursion or picnic. The musically inclined have taken along their guitars. They gather en masse to sing songs and join into street plays. It was peaceful, entirely peaceful, the young man insists, and it quite seems that way.   

Then the state minister comes on view, and he is like an aggrieved, martyred parent bemoaning bad behaviour of unruly children. He says that he was saddened by the videos shown to him of the incidents - aggressive students on a rampage, destroying property, beating up unarmed police personnel, abusing elders and so on. Lies, all lies, says our young man excitedly, nothing like that happened. I tell him to calm down and that ‘democracy’ means the other side too must be heard.  

It gets too much for him. We were there; we saw it all, he insists, everything was peaceful. I remind him that the incidents in question happened before their rally. Yes, yes, he says, but we saw the unedited videos. The police put 35 students in hospital, how come that is not being mentioned or shown on tv? The students involved in the fracas had recorded the police actions, and displayed them at the rally. Well, I counter, these could have been edited as well to show the authorities in a bad light, no? 

 

Or it just might be that outside influences did come in, in the guise of the students, to make mischief. Do you know, says Rohan, some ruling party goons locked students in at a college, so they could not participate in the rally! In volatile situations, anything is possible, and the young people are yet too naive to understand their implications. Small wonder then that parents that have suffered in the past are at pains to ensure that their children focus on studies and stay away from anything that might be deemed political. 

Memories of past times resurface in the elders, and they are fearful for the children. Remember those times, one tells me, how thousands were made to just disappear? Indeed, student unrest had been quelled with an iron hand in the past. We had heard little about that on news waves then officially censored. We had felt their effects however, with academic sessions completely disrupted in the ‘70s, and students unable to graduate because examinations were cancelled.

That government was voted out, and the Left Front came to power as the people’s party, and ruled for over three decades. Ironically, the present state administration in Bengal won the elections against all odds, sweeping them aside. The incumbent chief minister had been much admired for her grit and tenacity in standing up to their political stranglehold. It reflected in her party’s success in the elections, which had been once deemed unthinkable.

However, winning elections is one thing and governance is quite another. Despite election promises and good intentions, political mistakes seem to pile up. Anybody that doesn’t agree with them is now branded ‘maoist’ Rohan tells me, so we started to shout that we were Maoists! The point is the present administrative incumbent is fast losing the support of youth. In India, they are the new voting public, and now a sizeable demographic group. 

Most recently, the social activism against corruption carried by students in Delhi contributed to bringing down the entrenched state government. I suppose the political elders had forgotten that the young people are far more adept with technology and social networks. State machineries cannot even hope to control their communications through the informal grapevine. Political heavyweights need to learn from the past to respect the future.