Deep into the Republic Day parade’s telecast, the news ticker on my television screen read, “Violence in North West Delhi”. Urban Indians understand city geography in terms of class, not cardinal directions, so I had no idea where this violence was happening. Then it became clear that the authorized march-past had segued into an alternative peasant parade. Instead of tanks trundling down Rajpath, our screens filled with tractors turning into Delhi.
One of the side-effects of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s domination of Indian politics is the besieged desperation that marks the reactions of desis who oppose its brazen communalism. Every assembly election feels like a drawn-out Test match, thanks to multi-phase polling. Every campaign of popular resistance seems like a lopsided war with citizens dug into trenches trying to face down Narendra Modi’s juggernaut, the Hindu rashtra that he has fashioned in his own image.
The interesting thing about the farmers’ protest against the Central government’s agricultural laws was that for once these political roles seemed reversed. Large-scale mobilization in Punjab and Haryana had seen tens of thousands of farmers mass on Delhi’s borders; it was the Central government and its policemen who seemed besieged as they dug trenches across highways to keep the farmers out of the capital and then hunkered down, hoping to see them off.
So, on January 26, when this contemporary take on trench warfare morphed into a more mobile confrontation, it became a political contest tailor-made for television. As sections of the tractor rally turned off the agreed route and headed towards the heart of Delhi, news television’s prime time artists snapped into their flak jackets and became (with one or two exceptions) the ruling party’s war correspondents.
Up to that point, it was possible for even a critic of the government to debate the wisdom of this tractor breakaway. While the official parade was over, the prospect of protesting farmers being set upon by tense policemen or vice versa was a worry. You could be simultaneously concerned about a confrontation and sympathetic to the idea of farmers asserting their right to assemble and demonstrate in their nation’s capital.
But watching the coverage, it was hard not to take sides. One embedded reporter had been chasing the tractor procession, microphone in hand. Every so often, he told his viewers that it was wrong to describe the demonstrating farmers as protesters because they were actually anarchists or terrorists. Then, greatly daring, he approached one of these anarchists and asked him a question. The strapping young protester ignored the question but took the mike anyway and made the most of his moment on prime time by calling out his political enemies with an audible obscenity. Terrified, our war correspondent snatched the microphone back and rushed away, complaining like an outraged uncle that the protest had been hijacked by “drunkards” and “drug-addicts”.
When the tractors reached the Red Fort, the tractor parade seemed to turn into a carnival as jubilant protesters clustered around the August 15 lectern in what looked like the final scene of a movie called Farmers’ Day Out. And then, when a protester shinned up a flagpole and flew the Nishan Sahib, the next day’s headlines practically wrote themselves.
‘Religious Standard Flies on Nation’s Ramparts’ was the general drift of the social media reaction. Opposition politicians and non-feral anchors felt compelled to distance themselves from this unforced error, this own goal, this unpardonable trespass on the sacred ground of India’s secular nationhood. Or words to that effect. ‘I have been a staunch supporter of the farmers’ protests but this...’ was the throat-clearing preliminary to many triangulating tweets.
You might have been forgiven for wondering where these hem-raising secularists had been earlier in the day when a massive float featuring a model of Ayodhya’s Ram Mandir had been a much-touted part of the official Republic Day parade. The majoritarian triumphalism of that tableau was staged on the central vista, the stretch of road on which the republic had been celebrated for over seventy years. And yet it went unremarked in the flank-covering stampede to censure the improvised flag-hoisting.
But even as you rehearsed these arguments in your head and called out the patent hypocrisy, you realized that there was something decadent about your voyeuristic solidarity. 24x7 news television has made politics a competitive spectacle. If elections are Test matches that go on for days and weeks, this Republic Day confrontation had been successfully turned into a One Day International with a result required by close of play. Given the channels telecasting this particular contest, there was only ever going to be one winner.
To rehearse arguments about hypocrisy or to defensively grade the kisan-police skirmishes on some scale of comparative mayhem was to be sucked into a trap. This was the trap of believing that this massive, months-long mobilization against the State, this sustained act of civil disobedience, could be discredited or vindicated in a single day. If there’s one lesson we ought to have learnt during Modi’s ascendancy, it is this: the revolution won’t be televised; reaction most certainly will.
Too many of us have become virtuosos in the fine art of frantic spectatorship. Real political solidarity isn’t complicated; it means organization, fund-raising, making plausible arguments in a language people can understand, picking sides in politics as it is, not as it ought to be, and then actually participating. The main reason the sangh parivar runs the pageant on Rajpath today is because it has done all of the above for a hundred years. It is past time that its opponents did the same.
The lesson of Shaheen Bagh and the great kisan sit-in on the capital’s borders is that civil society movements that capture the national imagination need both party-political allies and self-evident, ready-made ways in which sympathetic citizens can support them. Without such networking and engagement, even sustained forms of civil disobedience are likely to remain self-limiting, single-issue spectacles, forever being broken on breaking news. There is nothing that the gargoyles who anchor news channels would like better; we shouldn’t oblige them.
