# Ajayan | As Europe burns with youth-led fury and governments bludgeon dissent into submission, India’s youth movement remains remarkably peaceful - yet faces no gentler hand. Here, the streets may not be aflame, but young consciences are; and a government allergic to dissent is hell-bent on snuffing out their voice. Apparently, even peaceful defiance is intolerable when power has mistaken silence for consent.
The youth’s grievances in Europe find echoes in India - unemployment and exorbitant education costs. And here increasingly, disenfranchisement. A student uprising over the entrance-exam fiasco forced a ministerial scalp. Now, as skeletons tumble from the electoral cupboard and the promise of free, fair and inclusive elections lies battered by a questionable SIR, the demand to show the Chief Election Commissioner the door is hardly youthful insolence. It is democracy’s future generation refusing to let its custodians become its undertakers.
In chilling contrast to the street battles spilling out of France, Albania, Portugal and Italy, India’s youth march with placards, folded hands, joyful slogans and Gandhi’s gospel of non-violence. Yet, to a government gripped by fear, even the Constitution held aloft and the tricolour fluttering become threats to be crushed. So, the peaceful are dragged, lathi-charged and abused; proof that when power trembles, even folded hands can look like clenched fists.
If not fear rattling the citadel of power, what explains the authorities’ nervous refrain that India is no Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bangladesh, where youth uprisings toppled governments? From farmers’ victories to the recent revolt over the entrance-exam fiasco, people’s power has repeatedly sent tremors through the corridors of authority. Yet this youth uprising seeks no governmental scalp; it seeks to haul democracy back from its dangerous detour into exclusion, with religious undertones threatening to further poison the republic’s secular soul. To mistake this corrective for a coup is perhaps power’s most revealing confession of fear.
Fear has now padlocked Jantar Mantar, democracy’s familiar theatre of dissent. Once the protest ground of leaders whose party now occupies the seat of power, its barricading reeks of historical amnesia and the unmistakable stench of the Emergency. Today’s young agitators may not remember yesterday’s rebels, but they can readily recognise Today’s jailers. In the new order, history’s lesson is simple: those in power reserve the right to remember their struggles and demand that everyone else forget.
The striking kinship between India’s stir and Europe’s is a youth unshackled by religion, caste, gender or party. Opposition support in India cannot strip the protest of its essentially apolitical soul, nor can sneering at politicians, especially the one exposing the rot, bury its message. The spirited march of young women embodies a progress that jars with the ruling class’s worldview. Hence, perhaps, the convenient refrain that progressive ideals are Western imports; as though equality and freedom came with foreign passports, and regressive mindsets were home-grown virtues.
Tailpiece: So relentless has been the regressive march that politics now arrives at the dining table, too. If beef was the opening course of the regime, Keralam’s Lok Bhavan serves up sanctimony with an all-vegetarian menu. Ancient relics are invoked to dress dietary choices in religious sanctity, while inconvenient puranic and mythological tales are conveniently left off the menu. When politics polices the plate in the name of religion, the trouble is no longer about food; it is about an ideology hungry for control, for power.