SerpApi.Org
They keep telling us this republic is dysfunctional. I disagree, and I have evidence. In the last fortnight, every single organ of our democracy has functioned at full capacity, some of them at 200 per cent. Rejoice, the system worked. Only the children broke. Aap chronology samajhiye.
Start where all our systems start, with a leak. The NEET paper leaked, again. Lakhs of aspirants, their parents, their teachers and their coaching cartels sat down together and said the four saddest words in Indian public life: oh no, not again. Then the state stirred. The CBI swooped, scooped and scored, netting the leakers, the sellers, the buyers and the assorted middlemen who treat a sacrosanct process like Mangal bazaar. A re-examination was ordered. It was held within the month. The results are out. Neat. Almost NEET.
Somewhere in that same month, a word escaped a courtroom. The Chief Justice of India, hearing yet another petition from yet another briefless barrister who files PILs the way pigeons file droppings, reached for an insect. Cockroach. It travelled the way only a judicial insult can travel in this country, instantly and inaccurately.
An Aam Aadmi Party worker in Boston caught it mid-flight and made a meme page out of it. Cockroach Janta Party. Twenty-two million followers joined the cockroach dance. His advisers, who are all below 30 and all of them strategists, told him the truth every Indian influencer eventually hears: you have the audience, now find a grievance. Abhijeet Dipke went shopping.
Protesting against the Supreme Court was off the menu, contempt being the only law we enforce with real enthusiasm. So he widened the word. Cockroach, he decided, meant the unemployed. But unemployment in India is not a hot topic. It is not even lukewarm. It has been sitting on the table since 1951 like a chicken piece in front of a BJP leader. Then he found NEET, and NEET found him. Paper leaks are the one national integration project that actually works. Central exam, state exam, constable recruitment, patwari vacancy, everything leaks, without a sealant in sight.
Millions of children were anguished and had nowhere to place the anguish. Anguish without an address is just noise. Dipke gave it an address: Dharmendra Pradhan must go. One demand, one hashtag. Wildfire.
He landed expecting handcuffs. He got a garland. He had not sought permission for a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, expecting the denial to be his second act. The permission came through. The Indian government understands pressure cookers as well as any Indian household does. The government had decided to let the whistle blow. AAP, a party born in a protest, was delighted to see its man father another. The BJP was delighted too. Let them vent, let them tweet, let them tire, let them go home when the monsoon turns the tarpaulin into a swimming pool.
Because underneath the morality, there is a map.
Punjab votes next year. AAP rules it. The BJP is a bit player there but a two-bit player with a 64-bit confidence, having taken Bengal, the unwinnable. It has already poached AAP's better-known faces. So, the AAP put its shoulder behind Dipke, because youth discontent, properly fanned, blows away from Bhagwant Mann and towards nobody in particular, which suits AAP fine. The BJP was pleased that the Congress was left standing outside the frame, since the Congress, not the BJP, is what threatens AAP in Punjab. And Rahul Gandhi, who has spent years touring university auditoriums building a young vote bank one live push-up at a time, was not about to gift that constituency to a newcomer he suspects is an AAP front.
Then Sonam Wangchuk, fresh from a jail term and freshly aware that tightened FCRA rules will starve foreign-funded NGOs, climbed aboard and stopped eating. He brought something Dipke could not manufacture, a biography. Kejriwal ran an NGO and became a national player. Wangchuk runs NGOs and remains a local one, minor even in Ladakh. A hunger strike is a regular loan this activist raises against his own body. Anna Hazare Redux.
Meanwhile the algorithm did the organising. Instagram, which can rearrange the convictions of a 45-year-old chartered accountant, was let loose on 17-year-olds. The echo chamber echoed.
The government felt the heat and switched on the air conditioner of delusion, hoping it was a fad, hoping it will fade. Hope is not a strategy. Hope faded. Wangchuk's thin shoulders carried the promised revolution alone while Dipke's team ran the logistics and Junaid ran the food supplies.
The mainstream media was booed off the site on Day 1 and 2, trolled, abused, shoved. Dipke then turned the absence of coverage into proof of conspiracy, which is a neat trick: chase the lights away, then complain about the darkness. He did not need them. His audience was already in his pocket, literally.
On Day 20, Wangchuk was lifted off the stage and put under medical supervision. Victimhood is a content format, and the CJP is fluent in it. They announced that the previously announced Sansad March for the 20th of July will go on.
Parliament was in session, so gatherings beyond a point were banned, and at that point the barricades went up. Behind the students came the professionals. Samajwadi Party cadre and Chandrashekhar Azad's Azad Samaj Party workers, men whose backs have been read by lathis the way a jyotishi reads hands, arrived from across UP. Punjab activists came to oppose the BJP. NEET was now merely the bottom layer of a much taller cake. For the toppings, a local East Delhi leader brought the choicest petty offenders to the scene. Trouble was brewing. Or pour-over moment was nigh.
Into all this walked thousands of children from small towns across north India who did not know each other, did not know the men beside them, and did not know that a rally has an anatomy which must be learnt before it can be survived. That a rally usually ends in a lathi-charge to begin with and police firing if it progresses.
The infiltrators did what infiltrators are hired to do. Barricades broke. Vehicles burned. Stones flew. And the police, whose training assumes every crowd is a cadre, replied with a baton charge calibrated for hardened political workers. It landed on the heads of 17-year-olds who had come with a water bottle and a placard, and who, until Monday morning, had never seen a lathi except on television. They were articulate when it came to accountability but froze when it came to survivability.
Monday and Tuesday were not politics. Monday and Tuesday were a hospital corridor. I will not pretend to a balance I do not feel. Those children had every right to be angry. They rose without asking who was leading, because the cause was clean even when the leadership was not, and there is something magnificent in a generation that shows up before it works out whose photograph is on the banner. Naive, yes. Used, certainly.
But the fraud belongs to the men who used them, not to the boys and girls who believed them. And my heart is in that corridor. With the girl with a fractured wrist, she will explain away at home. With the boy whose spectacles were ground into the road. And also with a constable, 11 hours on his feet in a July that has forgotten how to rain, stitches above his eyebrow from a stone, who is somebody's father and somebody's son and who will be transferred for doing exactly what he was ordered to do. Nobody in that lane on Monday wanted to be there. Everybody in that lane on Monday paid.
The algorithm then finished the job. Those who saw bruises were shown more bruises. Those who saw conspiracy were shown buckets of conspiracy. Polarisation complete, delivered in under 48 hours, faster than any Indian public service. The country is furious. Furious at the police for the brazenness. Furious at the government for its deafness. Dharmendra Pradhan is still a minister.
Rahul Gandhi, watching a novice with no cadre urinate cheerfully on his parade, has launched a protest of his own. Delhi is tense. Fresh troublemakers have been requisitioned, payments escrowed.
But look at the bright side of this shabby, shining, shitty life. Everything worked. The government was strong. The state was firm. Dissent was visible. Protest was permitted. The march was allowed to proceed, up to a point, and points are what democracies are made of.
The police functioned, expressing the state's monopoly over violence with a thoroughness that would please Weber and depress his mother.
The opposition took to the streets, defending the right of the people to be heard by shouting over them.
Parliament functioned by adjourning, the opposition benches screaming to be heard, the treasury benches screaming to be heard, nobody hearing anything, all of it recorded for posterity.
The judiciary functioned by not hearing the protest petitions at all. The Chief Justice, who supplied the insect, has said nothing further, taken no suo motu notice, offered no clarification.
The strong government functioned by refusing to yield to blackmail from unelected, self-declared representatives of the youth, a category that in 1974 produced most of our present Cabinet.
The youth functioned by refusing to go home until accountability arrives in the exact shape they have imagined it. Dharmendra Pradhan.
The Left functioned by singing. The far Left functioned by explaining to teenagers why dying young is a career and not saying for whose career.
The professional protester functioned, present as always wherever a tent meets a topic, denouncing the media on a YouTube before crossing over to give the same sweet byte to an OB van. The reporters were beaten by protesters for being pro-government. Caned by policemen for standing for the stone throwers. Still there. Still doing the job.
Every organ of our democracy is functioning exactly as designed. Sleep well, India. Nothing is broken. Only the children. Neat.
(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)
