AT the crossing of Munirka, in the feverish build-up to the last Delhi elections, there is a still point in the chaos of traffic and crowds. A man is standing in one spot just at the corner where the road turns a sharp bend, oblivious to the cars, buses and autos that threaten to run him down. He is holding a broom in one hand. More specifically, he is standing ramrod straight, his legs planted firmly on the rubble, his right hand stretched upwards at a diagonal rather like a steel rod, the clenched fist of his hand holding onto a bamboo broom emblazoned against the sky like a flaming torch. In the other hand, he supports a heavy placard of the Aam Aadmi Party, a supplement to the broom. Motionless, he holds this tableau on the street, an assemblage of broom/placard/hand/body, a vibrant circuit of energy, his eyes piercing the street and everyone in sight with a fierce stare.

It is not possible to ignore him. His entire presence challenges one’s attention. No election gimmick, as it might appear; the street performance of this man commands respect through the sheer commitment of his gesture – fully embodied, with no compromise. Animating this gesture is a performative force, a display of defiance with which the man seeks a direct confrontation with the public at large. He is the Aam Aadmi, the collective dynamics of an entire movement singularized in all he stands for. Ignore me at your own cost, he seems to say, as our eyes meet for a few seconds, the immediacy of that encounter remaining with me as I recall one moment in the political present.

Much can be learned from the broom, the most marginalized, invisibilized, and yet most tenacious of objects, without which there would be no semblance of order in our world. At once stigmatized in its visceral associations with untouchable communities, it can also be valorized as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Steeped in dirt and the most heterogeneous of pollutants, from dust to shit, it is also, paradoxically, a healing device with shamanic power. In the local shrines of Jhadu Baba, a Sufi god nurtured in the garbage dumps of Rajasthan, the broom is used to brush away skin diseases through practices of jhada.¹ With a different genealogy and reinvention of caste, Bungri Mata, the broom goddess, also demands brooms as offerings. These references can be dismissed as remnants of a ‘folk’ anthropology, but they call attention to a basic fact that, for all its immersion in filth, there is something in the broom that resists filth, or else, it would not be a broom worth talking about.

There is a dissenting element, I would argue, within the materiality of the broom that contributes towards its efficacy, even as it appears to be totally unobtrusive, if not compliant to societal norms. This inner dissidence is not meant to last forever. Like all major social and political manifestations of dissent, there is a temporality built into the broom’s raison d’etre. Arguably, at some point, the broom becomes so embedded in the dirt that it is attempting to cleanse that it ceases to be effective and can be said to ‘die’, only for a new broom to continue its work.

 

Innately humble, the lessons of the broom are also startlingly radical. Against the theoretical biases of Giorgio Agamben, it teaches us that in the depths of ‘bare life’, where the downtrodden lie outside the reach of the law, and yet are imbricated within the mechanisms of modern democratic society and the sovereignty of the state, there is always the possibility of resilience and struggle. Long before the Aam Aadmi Party ingeniously appropriated the broom as its electoral symbol with a full embrace of its secular ordinariness and everyday significance, the broom has been used by dalit activists in political rallies where the very object of degradation has been transformed into a weapon.

Instead of bending down or squatting, in the usual abject position by which most brooms are used at ground level, the broom as weapon is held upright, not unlike the way in which the unknown, unnamed activist of the Aam Aadmi Party in Munirka transformed his broom into a blazing symbol. His fierce bravura in holding the broom aloft is the very antithesis of those camera conscious demonstrations of sweeping in public spaces by leading politicians and film stars affiliated to the Swachh Bharat Campaign, whose pseudo-naturalistic mimicry of the act of sweeping has resulted in laughable parodies of the real. What comes across is that many of these celebrity sweepers have in all probability never touched a broom in their lives. Or else, they are seriously out of practice.

 

For dissent to exist, the use-value of the object has to be subverted through an act of creative defiance. Let us learn in this regard from the Manganiar musicians of Rajasthan who, in the past, had their own practices of ‘disowning’ their jajmans or patrons, which would inevitably culminate in making effigies of their patrons with a broom tacked onto the rear ends of these figures.² Such irreverence is the very stuff of dissent. While our strategies in the metropolis are inevitably less robust – a solid whack on the backsides of politicians with a broom would be more rhetorical than real – we can never afford to forget the value of irreverence, even as we are compelled to circumvent the growing mechanisms of surveillance and intimidation.

Arguably, there is no place for political correctness in the culture of dissent. But provocation alone is not likely to catalyze the dynamics of a movement, which needs more than short-term shock effects. The strongest forms of dissent are invariably those which come out of long histories of humiliation, where the purpose is not merely to deny humiliation but to transform it through new languages of resistance. For dissent to have a long-lasting impact, irreverence needs to be supplemented with what Ritwik Ghatak memorialized in his last film – Jukti, Takko aar Gappo (reason, debate and a story) – all of which are exemplified in my next example, yet another moment in the political present.

 

He walks down the stairs of the university administration building casually, yet triumphantly, cheered on by a massive audience of supporters, who have been waiting for his release from prison with tense anticipation. This is the moment of celebration. However tenuous and conditioned by the implicit threat that he is out only on ‘interim bail’, Kanhaiya Kumar’s moment of freedom is seized with intensity by himself and the JNU community at large. No political theatre can match the performativity of this political moment, beginning with the transformation of space. The institutional sarkari architecture of the administration block has been transformed into a forum, not just a replica of those tedious experiments in Augusto Boal’s ‘forum theatre’, where the re-enactments of oppression by so-called ‘spectactors’, are invariably compromised with illusions of change and solutions to deal with problems.

This forum is a vibrant instance of democracy in action, where every step, every little space on the pavement, every position negotiated in the mass of bodies, is consolidated not only by slogans and bursts of laughter, but by deeper moments of engaged listening. In this palpable act of collective listening, thousands of ears are picking up on each word delivered by Kanhaiya in what is now widely recognized as an ‘electrifying’ speech. Arguably, it will go down in the history of the student movement in India as a moment of critical reckoning with Hindutva politics and its direct assault on intellectual autonomy and political freedom.

 

How does one measure the performative force of a political speech? From Kanhaiya’s example, I would say that it can be measured through the sheer fluidity of his discourse, which is cast in the most voluble and colloquial of idioms, firmly and confidently rooted in the colour and immediacy of Bihari Hindi. At one level, the speech exudes a sense of being entirely ‘spontaneous’, but, listen more carefully, examine the structure of narrative in the speech, and you will realize that it has been rigorously prepared – not through a written script, but through hours of silent rehearsal so embedded in the volatility of struggle that it cannot be separated from life itself. And yet, for all its veneer of extempore improvisation, what comes through is a ‘performance’ – an embodied articulation and encapsulation of precisely the three terms that I had alluded to earlier: jukti, takko aar gappo.

Kanhaiya may be vilified for his slogans, but it is not slogans that animate his speech. In the JNU tradition, slogans frame a political speech, pre-facing and ending the speech with a volley of repetitive words, the chorus supplanting the speaker’s voice. While Kanhaiya relishes slogans – this is very obvious from his body language as he elongates the words of the slogan, supplemented by a slight lurch of his shoulders as he raises his fist upright – the form and content of his speech are not built around slogans. Rather, what animates the speech and holds it together is reason – not academic, ideologically burdened reason, plodding along with a predictable syntax and causality – but political reason, sharp as a knife.

Along with this faculty, there is argument – often confrontational, but never just confrontational, Kanhaiya has the strategic capacity to argue against himself, or at least give us the illusion that he is doing so. And, finally, what makes this speech riveting is Kanhaiya’s capacity to tell stories through the evidence of first-hand experience, not just the experience of being in prison (‘primary data’, as he describes it ironically, so valued in the empirically grounded tradition of research at JNU), but rather, the more long-term experience of poverty, casteism and social exclusion, whose pain can never be taught but which can be addressed, haltingly, reflexively, within the academic priorities of ‘critical thinking’.

 

Dominating the speech, and serving as a leitmotif across its multiple contexts and shifts in argument, is the resonance of azaadi. With a deft juxtaposition of two prepositions, Kanhaiya gets his point across in one sentence: ‘We are not seeking freedom from India but in India.’³ There has been some media coverage on the genealogy of azaadi since Kanhaiya’s speech, where there have been attempts to tacitly distance the usage of the word from the right to self-determination in Kashmir with which the word is inextricably linked. This distancing is problematic, as is evident in the fierce criticism that Kanhaiya has received from self-identified Kashmiris for whom any deflection of attention from the democratic right to self-determination simply plays into ‘progressive hypocrisy’.⁴

Certainly, there is truth in this criticism if one considers the sheer volatility of multiple references to azaadi which shift the attention from political self-determination to different affirmations of personal and social freedom. Kamla Bhasin, veteran of the women’s movement in India, for instance, has called attention to her own chants going back to the early 1990s, where the slogan of ‘Meri behane maange Azaadi’, first heard at a feminist conference in Pakistan in 1985, served as a base for an incremental spate of slogans: ‘Meri bachhi maange Azaadi, naari ka naara Azadi’ (My daughter wants freedom, every woman’s slogan is freedom’). ‘From patriarchy: azaadi; from hierarchy: azaadi; from endless violence: azaadi; from helpless silence: azaadi.’⁵ Likewise, for Kanhaiya, the cry of azaadi in India applies to hunger, corruption, casteism, and in one of his many mischievous twists of phrase, it also extends to freedom from ‘the Sanghis who tweet false statements.’ From manipulations of facts and fake encounters and false accusations of anti-nationalism, we need azaadi.

Arguably, the diffusion of azaadi in these multiple references risks a depoliticization of what it means to free one’s self from India, and not just in India. Without confronting this specific struggle, Kanhaiya engages with what he views as the false divide between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ in the vicious binaries of border politics adopted by politicians on the Right. In this politics, the claims of nationalism and patriotism are consolidated through hypocritical references to those heroic figures of the ‘country’s youth who are dying on the border.’ Against this martyrdom, the ‘anti-national’ public university student, chanting pro-Kashmir slogans and wasting the honest Indian taxpayer’s money in the process, is seen as an aberration.

 

Kanhaiya complicates this jingoist spiel by calling attention to where these soldiers are coming from in the first place. Arguing on the basis of a primary allegiance to the youth dying on the border, Kanhaiya confronts his BJP opponents arguing, ‘Is that youth [dying on the border] a brother to you? The thousands of farmers who are committing suicide, who grow grain for us and our youth on the border; farmers who are fathers to these youths – do you have anything at all to say about them?... [T]he farmer who works in the field is my father, and it is my brother who joins the army.’ Clinching his argument, Kanhaiya affirms that ‘those who die for the country die within the country and also on the borders of this country.’

While this argument could be considerably more complicated by addressing the deaths of those Kashmiri youth fighting for azaadi, who would seem to have a different epistemology of the ‘country’ in the first place, Kanhaiya, one should reiterate, chooses to locate the political within the larger struggle for democracy in India itself. Political democracy, he argues, is incomplete without social democracy; this premise, attributed to Babasaheb Ambedkar in the speech, animates Kanhaiya’s language of dissent, enabling him to communicate way beyond constituencies in JNU and the student body in general.

With some necessary qualifications, I would argue that this language of dissent almost takes on the quality of what Jacques Ranciere has formulated as dissensus. In the activation of dissensus, the purpose is not merely to ‘reorder the relations of power between existing groups’ through an act of ‘institutional overturning’; rather, the purpose is to generate an activity through what Ranciere describes as a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ which ‘cuts across forms of cultural and identity belonging, and hierarchies between discourses and genres, working to introduce new subjects and heterogeneous objects into the field of perception.’⁶

I must qualify that this allusion to dissensus has its limits because, unlike Ranciere’s arguably disillusioned Left politics bordering on liberalism, the politics of Kanhaiya is solidly grounded in the oppositional energy of the Left, whose framework is provided by political parties, government, the legal system, and, above all, the Constitution. He is, if anything, a thoroughly national subject demanding social justice on the basis of reservations, but open to forging new relationships with other constituencies seeking multiple levels of dignity and self-respect.

 

To pursue the interstices of the social and the political in Kanhaiya’s speech, let us examine how he engages with a most unlikely talking partner: the ‘police’. Given the vicious targeting of students by the police in the Occupy UGC movement, one would almost expect Kanhaiya to engage in a diatribe against the police; it would be some kind of political obligation. Instead, he does something remarkably different by engaging in a dialogue with a particular policeman whom he gets to know during his imprisonment. Instead of playing the role of the political guru by lecturing to the police on his role in civil society, Kanhaiya chooses to have a chat with the policeman, a guarded jugalbandi in which both the activist and the police have ‘voices’ in their own right. Kanhaiya may be writing the script of this dialogue, but the policeman has his own intelligence to question its premises.

 

The overall result is deeply insightful. What Kanhaiya finds is that this ‘enemy’ is not exactly a ‘friend’, but they share the same context of deprivation and gamble of social and economic opportunities. At one level, the humour of the exchange is what contributes towards its pedagogy, with Kanhaiya deconstructing slogans like ‘Lal Salaam’ and ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ for the policeman, while learning about his absence of overtime, despite working eighteen hours daily, in addition to his meagre uniform allowance of Rs 110 which almost makes corruption mandatory for his survival.

This is a different kind of jocular exchange from the more philosophical references to the ‘police’ in Rammanohar Lohia’s incomparable account of his imprisonment and torture in ‘An Episode in Yoga’.⁷ For all his incisive observations about the sadism and bestiality of the police, who are active participants in daily torturous acts inflicted on Lohia like sleep deprivation, there is no possibility of having a dialogue with these assailants. At best there is some kind of enlightened tolerance of their ‘rustic souls’. As Lohia puts it, ‘In spite of their obvious lack of any social thought – they were after all simple men – but the air of torture that they breathed every day seemed to have calloused their souls.’⁸

 

Clearly, the colonial brutality of the Lahore Fort prison offers a different scenario and context from what Kanhaiya experiences in an altered set of circumstances. While the anachronistic charge of ‘sedition’ continues to be imposed on Kanhaiya, suggesting that the laws of the colonial past do not die easily, he is able to negotiate the immediacies of his environment and strike a chord with his subaltern guard: ‘The policeman, like me, comes from an ordinary family; like me, wanted to pursue studies; like me, wanted to understand the systemic ills of the country and fight against them; wanted to understand the difference between being literate and educated, yet is working as a policeman.’ In contrast, Kanhaiya is only too aware that he is at JNU doing a PhD in a state-sponsored, reservation-determined education system, which enables him to study in the first place. To his credit, he upholds this fundamental right to study without wallowing in needless guilt, even as he extends this right to the possibility of ‘the son of a peon and the son of a president studying together.’

Many commentators have pointed out that it is this very contiguity of diverse social classes, communities and castes in JNU which poses a threat to the monolithic demands of the Hindutva agenda, which would like to see the student body homogenized and disciplined within an increasingly privatized academic environment. While there is no reason to romanticize the rough conditions on the JNU campus, let us acknowledge that this does not stop the largest diversity of the student population in the Indian subcontinent from sharing the same space in non-segregated living conditions. It is in this space that women, dalits, minorities, middle and upper caste students from Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala and almost every state in the North East, have the possibility of sharing differences to either consolidate or restructure their cultural and political identities. This is the space where it becomes possible to actually organize a movement like the Occupy UGC movement, where the implications of the UGC scrapping the non-Net fellowship, can be actively resisted at local and national levels.

 

Moving beyond the specificities of such movements, Kanhaiya finds the time to dream of much larger alliances in which dalits and the forces on the Left can fight together. To be sure, this is not a new dream; one obvious invocation is Anand Patwardhan’s stirring film Jai Bhim Comrade. At the same time, one cannot afford to under-mine the serious differences that exist between dalitbahujan activists and ‘savarna revolutionaries’, still unable to fully acknowledge their own ‘internal caste colonialism’.⁹

Without confronting the multiple levels at which caste can function even within the ranks of the Left, Kanhaiya posits the necessity of forging broader alliances across sectors of the marginalized in the larger struggle against Hindutva. Once again, the prison becomes the site of illumination, as Kanhaiya confronts two vessels in which he is served food – one blue, the other red. With disarming idealism, which even the most jaded of communist ideologues would have to acknowledge, Kanhaiya adopts the first-person narrative, normally eschewed in political speech: ‘I kept looking at the colours and thought to myself that although I am not a believer in destiny, nor do I know god, but surely something good is about to happen to this country now that these two colours are here together, side by side.’ And, mind you, in a prison.

Without beginning to spell out the hard work that goes into the consolidation of such an alliance, there is a socially inclusive imaginary at work here, which makes the rumours of Left insularity, despondency, if not melancholia, something of an illusion. With this imaginary in mind, let us turn to a third moment in the political present, which is initiated, inevitably, by the tragic life and death of dalit activist, student and writer, Rohith Vemula.

 

With Rohith, what remains is a letter: a suicide note, at one level, but also something much larger: a gesture of protest with the widest possible discursive, emotional and political outreach. This letter is not addressed to any one specific constituency.¹⁰ Unlike the AAP supporter holding the broom in Munirka, and Kanhaiya delivering his speech at JNU, Rohith’s letter, I would argue, is not addressed to any one particular social or political group – neither to his comrades in the Ambedkar Students’ Association, nor to his family, nor to the student body of the University of Hyderabad, nor to the university authorities who arguably were implicated in what has been designated as ‘institutional murder’, nor to any friend or enemy or the Indian public at large. What gives his letter an excruciatingly painful legitimacy and truth is its openness to the entire world. Rohith does not exclude anyone from reading his letter. It is written to be read by all who have access to it. It is not surprising, therefore, that the opening words of the letter are not addressed to ‘Comrades’ or ‘Friends’, while the slogan ‘Jai Bhim’ is included towards the end of the letter (‘for one last time’). Instead, the letter begins with the two most innocuous and heartbreaking of everyday salutations: ‘Good Morning’.

If the performance of the AAP activist in Munirka is grounded in gesturality, and if Kanhaiya’s speech is inextricably linked to the psychophysical dynamics of voice, Rohith’s letter is linked to written words on a page. More specifically, these are hand-written words, meticulously spaced, and not printed from a computer. There is an entire paragraph in the letter whose words are individually scratched out a number of times with the comment, ‘I myself strike these words off.’ Overall, there is a graphic and almost visceral feel to the letter, especially when one keeps in mind that Rohith had, in all probability, carried it with him in the pocket of his trousers for a couple of hours before he took his life by hanging himself in a friend’s room with a union banner.

 

Unlike the AAP protester in Munirka who stages his protest in silence, and Kanhaiya who wins his audience with a virtuoso command of colloquial Hindi, Rohith chooses to write in English. I have to say that it is an English which is so stark and yet so full in its expression, so matter of fact, yet lyrical, in its repetition of phrases and motifs, that the letter demands to be read, over and over again.

In whose voice do we read the letter? I have no specific awareness of Rohith’s voice, and I have not been able to access any recording of his earlier statements in Telugu or English on the campus of the University of Hyderabad, which is very different from the sheer dissemination of Kanhaiya’s voluble speeches on prime time TV and social networks. At one level, it does not matter that we do not have a recording of Rohith’s voice, because the letter leaves us free to imagine his voice as we read his words to ourselves, and in public gatherings.

 

One thing can be sure: the rest is not silence. Rohith’s letter is going to haunt us for the longest time to come. With no accusation whatsoever, not the slightest hint of rancour or bitterness, even to his ‘enemies’, this letter articulates a condition that is a ‘curse’, which is dogged by the ‘fatal accident’ of ‘birth’ itself. Shifting back and forth between his own person and a much larger condition, which is never once defined by the categories of ‘dalit’ or ‘SC’ or ‘dalitbahujan’, or any of the nomenclature associated with the politicization of caste, the overwhelming reality is that the letter is embedded and steeped in the anguish, humiliation and moral bankruptcy of caste.

Finding his own words to articulate this condition, Rohith declares, ‘My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child of the past.’ And then, a few lines later, ‘All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child of the past.’ The repetition of these words, and refusal to use a rhetoric in which ‘some people’ can be reduced to a ‘vote’, to a ‘number’ to a ‘thing’, which is the obligatory demand for writers of social justice, is what enriches the poetics of Rohith Vemula’s dissent.

In the final analysis, what his letter demonstrates in the actual performativity of the act of writing is the primacy of the life of the mind. Therein lies its most extraordinary quality of dissent. ‘Never was a man treated as a mind’ is what Rohith affirms in his letter, protesting against the ubiquitous tendency to reduce ‘the value of man’ to ‘his immediate identity’, with all the obligatory quantification of votes and numbers. It is against this reduction of man to a ‘thing’ that Rohith affirms the mind as an efflorescence of ‘star dust’. If there is a kind of surreal quality to this image, one needs to keep in mind that Rohith is unabashedly a fan of Carl Sagan, and that he loves ‘Science, Stars, Nature’ (all in caps). It is in this constellation of inspirational forces that Rohith acknowledges, ‘I always wanted to be a writer.’ The painful irony is that he is a writer, even as he acknowledges ‘this is the only letter I am getting to write’, and later, ‘I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter.’

 

I see Rohith performing an act of dissent through the writing of this letter by resolutely refusing to be circumscribed within the categories of the state that attempt to ‘define’ him. Was he a dalit or a Vaddera? Does it matter? To whom does it matter? If the caste certificate proves that he was a Vaddera, does this mean that the ministers and authorities who have been charged with abetting his suicide are likely to receive a legal reprieve? Does the fact that he represented himself as a dalit in everyday life and struggled with the ‘fatal accident’ of his birth have no legal resonance whatsoever? Would the humiliation and injustice inflicted on Rohith and his comrades be more of a crime if it is proved that he is a dalit? What if he were both a Vaddera and a dalit? Does he cease to be Rohith Vemula who hanged himself because of the injustice, humiliation and violence inflicted on him and his friends? The law, it could be argued, does not work with ambivalence or contradiction; it enforces political identities at a unilateral and homogenized level. You are either this or that. Therein lies its incapacity to deal with the complexities of human tragedy.

At one point in his letter, Rohith candidly refers to himself as a ‘monster’ – not a killer, but simply a human who is increasingly aware of ‘a growing gap between my soul and my body.’ Later, in the letter, with a ruthless lack of self-pity, he acknowledges, ‘I am not hurt at the moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic.’ The words come through with a muted force. ‘Pathetic’ is not what Rohith Vemula is about, or wants to be. That’s what the administration of the state would like him to be: a pathetic victim. No, he is meant for better things, and he says so with no qualifications whatsoever: ‘If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars. And know about the other worlds.’

 

Rarely does one encounter in actual words, and not just in distant theory, such an emphatic surrender to the immeasurable. Rohith compels us to look beyond what can be measured, quantified, and enumerated in the name of social justice, to posit a different state of equality and vitality. This is no empty utopianism; rather, it is a crystallized realization of what he needs to do. ‘Know that I am happy dead than being alive’: I cannot deny that even as these words challenge and confound the necessity of struggle, there is a burning, implacable clarity in Rohith Vemula’s decision to take his life that raises more questions about democracy, social justice, sacrifice, and, above all, the hypocrisy of the state, than what one could hope to receive from any fact-finding report about caste discrimination on Indian campuses. In his death, Rohith challenges our conformity to statist norms, which exist on paper, often in the name of democracy and social justice, but which, in actual practice, mock the basic premises of what constitutes the human in the first place.

 

Performances are never meant to last forever. In some articulations, they can be said to be dying in the very moment of their utterance. This death-in-life quality of performance can be said to get to the roots of what continues to make it so turbulently relevant and alive, both at corporeal and virtual levels. A harder question to probe is whether performances have any lasting effect on the hearts and minds of people, even those who may not have ‘experienced’ it in the immediacies of the here and now. It is unlikely that the AAP activist holding onto the broom in Munirka is likely to be remembered, if he was ever recalled or recognized in the first place, beyond the perfunctory documentation of his presence in this essay. We cannot deny that his performance, in its public solitude, contributed, like the actions of all other unnamed cadres of the Aam Aadmi Party, to the resounding victory of the party, which swept the polls with decisive power. However, one is compelled to ask: Would this broom wielding cadre, if, indeed, he is still with AAP, be willing or ready to hold the broom again? Or is he disillusioned with the party in whose name he imagined a transformed future? Does his possible disillusionment under-mine his earlier act of dissent? I can still see it burning in my mind’s eye.

Unlike the lone sentinel of AAP, Kanhaiya is more than likely to be remembered as he remains in the news, a national political leader in the making, whose popularity is inevitably going to be exploited and occasionally trivialized (as is only too evident in the recent parody of student protest in a television commercial selling airline bookings). This kind of appropriation, I would argue, is inevitable if one acknowledges (as Kanhaiya emphatically did in his speech) that the sunny side of being maligned is to gain prominence on prime time TV. While this kind of media recognition can no longer be rejected by the Left on purist grounds, it is a double-edged sword: the media can kill you even as it loves you.

 

In contrast, one could juxtapose the tiniest snippet of news, which was not on television, and which was barely reported in the print media: a 32-year old woman, placed under a seven-year ‘house arrest’ by her parents for falling in love with a man from another community, found inspiration from Kanhaiya’s speech on azaadi by finding the courage to seek help from the Delhi Commission for Women.¹¹ This is a small instance of how the political can mutate in unprecedented ways, even as the larger debate on recognizing the primacy of azaadi as the right to self-determination in Kashmir and elsewhere cannot be silenced. This would amount to another kind of censorship.

On Rohith Vemula, it is much harder to read the long-term effects of his death beyond the obvious need to make him into an icon of dalit heroism and all-India student protest. His memory is not going to fade so easily. However, if it is to be mobilized at an all-India level, it will inevitably need to be framed within Babasaheb Ambedkar’s incisive political agenda, which reiterated, more than once, the necessity of activating a three-point agenda of ‘educate, agitate and organize.’¹² Instead of seeing these three words as heuristic categories demanding specific degrees of specialization in the fields of education, activism and politics, respectively, it would be more productive to see these categories as interdependent, non-hierarchical, one catalyzing the other not through causality but a similitude of differences.

Countering right wing and liberal positions that education can only exist outside the demands of agitation (which has no place in academia) and organization (which is best left to trained bureaucrats), the pedagogy of the Left in India has long since drawn on slogans like ‘padhai aur ladai’ (study and struggle). Or is it ‘ladai aur padhai’? Instead of ‘educate, agitate and organize’, would it be more productive to shuffle the words and seek a different sequence? ‘Agitate, organize and educate’?

In my view, the most radical word to activate in these slogans is the conjunction ‘and’ (‘aur’). How does one fight and study and organize at the same time? Rohith’s life and death compel us to realize the difficulty of attempting to metabolize these triple tasks simultaneously, in the same body and life of the mind. Without under-mining the near impossibility of these tasks, which are at once distinct and yet part of the same epistemic framework of struggle, let us pursue a politics of the possible, trying to put potentiality into practice, without forgetting Rohith Vemula’s resolute yearning to reach ‘from the shadows to the stars.’

 

Footnotes:

1. For documentary evidence on Jhadu Baba, see Jhadu Katha, directed by Navroze Contractor, for which I was the script consultant. The film was part of a three-year project relating to ‘Arna-Jharna: The Desert Museum of Rajasthan’, which began its work with a focus on brooms inspired by Komal Kothari.

2. See chapter on traditional hereditary caste musicians like the Langas and Manganiars in my book Rajasthan: An Oral History: Conversations with Komal Kothari. Penguin India, New Delhi, 2003.

3. All references to Kanhaiya’s speech are drawn from Chitra Padmanabhan’s ‘English Translation: Full Text of Kanhaiya Kumar’s Electrifying Speech at JNU’, The Wire, 4/3/2016, accessed on 16 June 2016.

4. ‘Progressive hypocrisy’ is the title of Idrees Kanth’s deft and precise critique published in Raiot, 12 March 2016; see also, Suhas Munshi’s ‘Left Drops Kashmir: Did Kanhaiya Kumar Leave his Azadi in Tihar Jail?’, Catch News, 14 March 2016. I am grateful to Brahm Prakash for calling my attention to these inputs.

5. Media coverage of Kamla Bhasin’s position can be read in Nirupama Dutt’s ‘Hum kya chahte? Azaadi!’ Story of slogan raised by JNU’s Kanhaiya’, Hindustan Times, Chandigarh, 5 March 2016, and Sukant Deepak’s ‘Kamla Bhasin on why "azaadi" was never Kashmir’s alone’.

6. Read Steven Corcoran’s introduction to his translation of Ranciere’s Dissensus. Continuum, London and New York, 2010, p. 2.

7. Arguably, the strongest piece of writing on prison life in India, with a specific focus on torture, and ways of countering it through a discipline of the mind, Rammanohar Lohia’s ‘An Episode in Yoga’ is included in Interval During Politics. Rammanohar Lohia Samata Vidyalaya Trust, Hyderabad, second edition, 1985, pp.72-87. I have briefly addressed this essay in my monograph The Question of Faith. Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1993 and Enigmas of Time. Visthaar Trust, Bengaluru, 2001.

8. Ibid., p. 77.

9. Rahul Sonpimple, ‘When is the "revolution" going to come for Dalit Bahujans?’, an open letter addressed to Umar Khalid, student leader at JNU, Round Table India, 17 May 2016. Thanks to Brahm Prakash for calling my attention to this article.

10. All references to Rohith Vemula’s letter are drawn from the complete text available on ‘My birth is my fatal accident: Full text of Dalit student Rohith’s suicide letter’, The Indian Express, Express Web Desk, 19 January 2016.

11. Maria Akram, ‘Seven Years of Emotional Solitude’, The Hindu, 14 June 2016. I am grateful to Mohan Rao for calling my attention to this news item.

12. While these three words are often identified with their articulation in the All-India Depressed Classes Conference (18-19 July 1942) in Nagpur, and later at the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation (6 May 1945) in Bombay, they have earlier incarnations in Ambedkar’s discourse. My gratitude to Gopal Guru, Valerian Rodrigues and Rakesh Pandey for their inputs.