Before the batons, there was silence

There is a particular kind of contempt a state reserves for movements it doesn’t take seriously until it is too late. That is roughly the arc of the Cockroach Janta Party, born as a mocking meme and now a loud voice of a generation that feels betrayed by the very examinations meant to decide its future.

By Monday night, the stage was gone. Not dismantled and folded away, but torn down, the way things get torn down when the people doing it want the ones who built it to know it. A few hours earlier, that same patch of ground near Jantar Mantar — an 18th Century observatory now more famous for the protests it hosts than the stars it once measured — had held thousands of students who had walked, bused and trained into the capital to march on Parliament. By dark, reports suggest that close to 200 people were injured.

I’ve sat with this image for two days now, because it is such a precise inversion of what the site is meant to represent. Jantar Mantar was built to read the sky honestly, without flattery. What happened there this week was the opposite of reading anything honestly. It was those governing the country deciding, once again, that the fastest way to end a conversation with its young is to make sure it never really starts.

I have written before, in this column, about students and the young in this country and the peculiar anxiety they seem to provoke in those who govern it. About JNU in Jan 2020. About a college in Bengaluru where a bouquet of posters demanded allegiance instead of inviting conversation. About Disha Ravi, 21, taken from her home in a “closely-guarded” police operation for editing a Google document. Each time, the pattern has repeated with the fidelity of a bad photocopy: young people raise a grievance, the state hears a conspiracy, and the distance between the two widens until it needs tear gas to bridge it.

Delhi this week is the latest print of that photocopy, and the toner is running redder.

The grievance itself was never exotic. A paper-leak scandal in the national medical entrance examination. Reports of a dozen students taking their own lives after the chaos that followed. An education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, whom protesters hold responsible and want gone. Sonam Wangchuk, 59, who chose to fast rather than shout, ended up in a hospital bed for his trouble. None of this required a riot to resolve. It required someone in govt to sit across a table early, and mean it.

Instead, what Delhi got was a slow-building spectacle of avoidance. Metro stations shut. Roads barricaded. The internet, that now-familiar casualty of Indian protest management, throttled. When talks were finally granted, by the govt’s own account, two spokespersons of the movement were made to wait for hours to be given ten minutes with a minister. That is not dialogue. That is a queuing system designed to look like one.

Democracy is the rule of law, not rule by law. A govt does not get to treat every assembly of the young as a security problem to be dispersed rather than a democratic signal to be read. The Constitution’s guarantee of peaceful assembly was not written with an asterisk that dissolves the moment the crowd gets inconvenient for traffic.

Could Delhi have gone differently? I think plainly yes, and not through any great feat of imagination. It could have started months ago, the moment the paper leak surfaced and grieving families began speaking of children who did not survive the fallout. It could have continued with an actual commission, credible and time-bound, rather than a minister’s ten cordial minutes.

It could have allowed the march to reach wherever marches in a functioning democracy are allowed to reach, under negotiated terms, with police present to protect rather than to preempt. None of that guarantees a happy ending. But it changes what kind of ending is possible.

What it required, above all, was something this state has struggled with each time its young have organised: the willingness to actually listen before deciding what was said.

I do not romanticise every choice a protest makes. Movements can overreach, can misjudge their moment, can hand ammunition to those who would rather discuss their tactics than their grievance. But that has never, in my view, been licence for a state to reach for force before it has exhausted the far cheaper, far more democratic option of simply talking.

Every column I have written on this subject across several years now converges on the same, almost boring, conclusion: dissent is not a design flaw in Indian democracy. It is a safety valve. Seal it often enough, forcefully enough, and the pressure does not vanish. It finds another way out, usually a worse one.

Delhi did not have to end this week the way it did. It ended this way because listening was, once again, the option nobody in power tried first. If this country wants a different photocopy the next time students gather with placards, someone in govt will have to break the machine that keeps producing this one — and it will have to begin with something as unglamorous, and as necessary, as actually hearing them out.

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