Get young on Kashmir

When was the last time you saw an MBA grad or a research student stripping off his shirt, baring his hairy chest to the muzzle of a gun, challenging the frazzled security personnel to pull the trigger? When was the last time you heard of students keeping to the straight and narrow of campus education throwing their career out of the window and walking shoulder to shoulder with protesters, demanding withdrawal of armed forces from their turf? Not often. Not very often.

India hasn't seen many stirring student movements since the 1990 Mandal agitation. Note the year. 1990. Within months of the agitation, India opened up its economy, let the globalization breeze in -- it helped mint-fresh college graduates to reap rich job benefits. The ghost of unemployment -- at least the way it came to haunt the left-of-the-centre India in 1970s and 1980s -- was to be put to fire and, hopefully, for ever. Just around then, in the quiet Kashmir Valley, secessionism, too, began taking roots, robbing an entire generation of the innocence of its childhood. This generation of kids born after 1989 went to sleep to the lullaby of jackboots, played to the report of gunfire, and attended schools and colleges during squeezes of time when curfew was lifted.

This is a generation of kids which grew up on vitriol, and not on the oxygen of free speech the rest of India had plenty in store. For a nanosecond, contrast this generation with the kids of liberalisation -- whose journey is purposefully aspirational, pursuing campus education with a definite window to the booming job market, and a placid ecosystem that got punctured by terror attacks only of late.

Whenever terror attacks shatter the calm of a metro, students, in all their seriousness, light a candle, shed a tear or two, and wear white T-shirts and march down the downtown thoroughfare. Not for them bunking of classes and holding demonstrations at the townsquare, screaming their lungs out for a cause. This is certainly not to belittle their concern; they're certainly bothered as much about the nation's security as like any concerned patriot. But the kind of violent protests that bring students out on to the streets of Kashmir has something to do with the way they have been treated since their childhood.

That street protests in the Valley since mid-June this year have the clear sanction of troublemakers, maybe from across the border, is a given. There's no denying that there's inciting from a section of separatists. But the question is: why is that an increasing number of educated youth are turning up at protests and defying the forces the way they do? Has the voice of the youth been muzzled in a medley of political rhetoric? Have the youth been given short shrift in the New Delhi-centric solution-finding exercise? Have the youth's hopes been blighted by the bayonets of the forces?

It's a paradox of ridiculous proportions that the youth in Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah hasn't found a matching wavelength with the agitating young men and women of the Valley. Call it out of the box, but try holding open houses on the Kashmir problems on the campuses: let each political party send a representative to listen to what the students have to say. Throw open a debate. Let students take the mike, let them speak, let them be heard. For a change, let netas listen to them. Set up a webpage and invite their suggestions and opinions on what's going wrong with their state and what correctives do they carry in their quiver. Let them hurl solutions, not stones.

At the risk of being dubbed an agent provocateur, I'd say if we don't listen to the Kashmiri youths today, tomorrow we may have to argue with them in a toxic war tongue, for this generation __ brought up on a deadly cocktail of denial of rights, war-like neighbourhood and a democratically elected government that's never there __ could spring a nasty surprise. Craft a delectable policy with the youth being the centrepiece. It might work.

Whose boycott?

Writing in the Sunday Times of India, Chetan Bhagat made an impassioned plea to all of us common citizens not just of Delhi but of all of India to boycott the Commonwealth Games. The writer argued that showing any form of support to the CWG would be to endorse the seemingly bottomless pit of corruption and scams that lies beneath the veneer of an event supposedly meant to promote sport in this country. It is an excellent argument.

Regrettably it won't work in practice. Why? Because you can't boycott someone, or something, that has already boycotted you.

Mohandas Gandhi used boycotts to protest against colonial rule by urging Indians not to buy British-made goods. The strategy was at least partly successful in that it must have hurt imperial coffers, whether or not it stung imperial pride. However, as rapacious and thick-skinned as our colonial masters undoubtedly were, it seems that in both rapacity as well as thickness of skin they have been outdone by our current set of rulers. Under foreign rule, Indians could make their dissent felt by boycotting British products and institutions. Today, a boycott by us of a sarkari product like the CWG, for example, will have little or no impact as it is becoming increasingly clear that our present-day powers-that-be have boycotted us long before we could boycott them, or any of their projects.

In the case of the Commonwealth Games, for instance, it was or ought to have been clear right from the start that the whole show was going to be a money-making exercise for various sarkari agencies, and their contractors, suppliers and middlemen. The participation of the athletes, the involvement of the general public, and the promotion of national pride appear not to have entered into official calculations at all. What we, the common citizens, thought of the Games, or what our experience of the event would be, was not of even marginal concern. Those responsible for the preparations and running of CWG represent a closed system from which the general public has been excluded: the Games boycotted us before we could boycott the Games.

So skip the Games, if you so choose. Your absence (or your presence) won't really matter. Because, whether you're there or not, the primary purpose of the Games will have been achieved: that all those within the loop of organising and preparing for the event end up making a lot of money.

The CWG is only one example of the sarkari boycott of the people. Farmers of western UP are up in arms because, in the name of 'progress' and 'public interest', some 22,000 villages in the area are going to be bulldozed without payment of adequate compensation to make way for the Yamuna Expressway. Which 'public' is this and what is its 'interest'? Is it the general public, or is it the self-enclosed coteries of politicians, bureaucrats and contractors whose sole interest is to rake in as much money as possible from such 'public interest' projects?

The tribal communities of India have long been boycotted by successive governments. Many have been displaced from their traditional forest habitats, again in the name of 'progress' and 'public interest'. The intervention of the Supreme Court has highlighted the plight of the Kondhs of Orissa whose ecologically-fragile homelands in the Niyamgiri hills were threatened by bauxite mining operations which had been given governmental clearance without adequate environmental safety checks. But for each such case reported, a dozen or more slip beneath the radar screen. Can tribals boycott sarkar-approved mines, or steel plants, or do such projects boycott tribals?

The boycott by the weak citizen of a powerful raj was Gandhigiri. Today we are witnessing the boycott by a powerful sarkar of weak citizens. Gandhigiri or goondagiri?