The professional army of dissenters, nay-sayers, and revolutionaries have latched their hopes of renewal and revival around the Cockroach Janta Party formed in cyberspace by an unknown reformer and followed by invisible millions. Old banners have been dusted and repainted; new slogans have been coined to reflect the changed realities of the situation. The young are being exhorted to take to the streets.
We are overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu; we have an uncanny feeling that we have travelled this road before. Trusting the instinct and judgement of these gentlemen , we marched behind an army havildar, a certain Anna Hazare, to rid society of corruption. The regiment that set out on this noble mission discovered a saviour in the Aam Aadmi Party instead. The AAP played its games of mates and slays for many years, and one by one the pawns and knights, in the BJP closet, lay. Those old enough will remember the turbulence of “Total Revolution.” For all its moral thunder and revolutionary fervour, all it did was unseat Indira Gandhi, who returned barely two years later with an even larger majority. The products of that great churn have since steered Bihar according to their own lights. History alone will decide on which side of its ledger that upheaval will finally be entered.
Corruption and power make a pretty pair and, and though slayed over and over again, corruption never dies. What is new, however, is that it is no longer whispered behind ears; it announces itself as an inalienable privilege of the powerful. Those responsible for the leakage of NEET examination papers, the trigger for the current crisis, despite the damage that it caused to millions of our youth, despite national outrage, have not been called to account, leaving the youth feeling aggrieved, bewildered, shortchanged, cheated and hugely angry. There is the growing despair on account of shrinking opportunities, dog-eat-dog competition and the growing feeling that public life and the system do not reward patience, merit or restraint. Unfortunate as it may be, even the most sacrosanct of our institutions no longer enjoy the implicit trust of the people.
The result is for us to see. An off-the-cuff courtroom remark, which perhaps arose merely out of irritation -“there are youngsters like cockroaches… some become media, some social media, some RTI activists” - led to the formation, in a spirit of facetiousness The Cockroach Janata Party. It started gathering momentum by the minute, and soon acquired an independent political life of its own and regime change agents , ever alert to the possibility of political advantage, lined up behind imaginary and real supporters in cyberspace.
We are living in strange times : threat to democratic balance no longer appears to come only from the standard villains -demagogues, mobs, reckless politicians. Increasingly, instability seems to emanate from within institutions once trusted to preserve restraint, continuity and constitutional propriety.
Politics, which once occupied a corner of the social turf, has metastasised to occupy the whole turf, and society now lives by the values and vulgarities of politics. All of us, even the poor, to whom tradition assigned the burden of remaining honest, are in some measure, ‘half victims and half accomplices’. and that makes ameliorative action-looking inward - that much more difficult. It brews a lethal cocktail of anger and helplessness.
Borrowing from the insights of Antonio Gramsci, transformative movement requires a systematic and coherent account of one’s own situation. I am quite aware that people may well be very capable of seeing the little valley they inhabit very clearly. But it is important that they also have an understanding of how their world fits into the larger economic, political, or cultural realities of their time .
So, to me, the real question is not whether the youth in whom every age reposes its faith, are ready for revolution, but whether they know where they wish to go. As Gramsci understood, societies do not renew themselves through anger alone. Without clear goals , all such emancipatory movements drift into noise, agitation, and fragmentation “all sail and no anchor.” That is where the role “organic intellectuals” - individuals capable of articulating and systematising their conception of the world, interpreting social anxieties honestly, disciplining public emotion, and raising political consciousness beyond mere reaction become important.
One of the founding spirits of the AAP, himself long expelled from the movement he helped birth, now says in an insta message that electorally regime change is no longer possible. One must take to streets. Perhaps he is right. The moment is certainly propitious what with millions of mutinies raging within , people angry, institutions distrusted. The whole nation has been prepared like a huge altar awaiting burnt offerings. So where will it all end? There will of course be political winners, but the choice is “between the heron and the wren, / Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.” Like the Chinese in Charles Lamb’s story, we may well end up burning down the house merely to roast the pig.
