Across India’s towns, protesters demanding greater safety and justice have gathered, their original core consisting of young professionals and college students. Notably, unlike previous such movements, they do not demand special treatment from the government, but the undeniable right to live safely — a core duty of the state. Nor is the protest against any single political party or organ of the state or, for that matter, any specific act of the state. They collected, at first spontaneously, in Narendra Modi’s Ahmedabad as they collected in Sheila Dikshit’s Delhi; and they collected in J Jayalalithaa’s Chennai, and O Ibobi Singh’s Imphal.
These are the first children of India’s economic reforms. They have benefited from all that reforms have offered — greater opportunities in education and occupation, greater aspirations for themselves, and greater expectations from the world around them. Despite the violence at New Delhi’s Vijay Chowk and in Imphal, this is not necessarily a group predisposed to violence. Unlike the days of the agitation against job reservations in the public sector in the 1990s, inspired by the Mandal Committee’s recommendations, the demands are not for or against a specific group, or linked to government benefits; unlike the anti-corruption movement, this is not about specific persons or Bills. To the extent that their disorganised and often contradictory voices have a single theme, it is for a more modern, effective and responsible state.
But the tragedy of Indian reforms has been that the Indian state finds it so difficult to change, as entrenched in its ways and assumptions as is the society it reflects. After the horror enacted on a bus in New Delhi, the prime minister waited too long to speak; the Delhi chief minister spread the blame; and the police claimed a lack of funds — and so on it went. However true their statements may have been, the children of reforms have seen such too often and have been fed too much anger and cynicism by audio-visual and digital media to be easily satisfied. Then, what happened at Vijay Chowk and in Imphal further showed the unpreparedness of the state. A largely peaceful gathering was taken over by hoodlums. Using force, nevertheless, is counterproductive. The stated reason, to impress the world in the person of visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin, is hardly convincing.
These protests, sparked by the brutal rape of a young woman, are also about the sorry state of India’s law, order and governance. They must be dealt with more responsibly by India’s leadership, and allowed free expression. To the extent that the state can step in – through more sensitive policing, better investigation, faster trials – it must be seen to do so. It is worth noting, however, that the children of reforms are themselves as incomplete as is the reforms process. As happened before 1991, the first instinct is to turn to the state for a problem – entrenched misogyny – that is more than partially societal. Anger must be turned not just outward, making the state an “other”, but inward, too. They need an agenda for change, external and internal, rather than tear gas and lathis.
