India’s oscillating opposition and the dynamic evolution of protest politics

With the ascent of a majoritarian government and concerns about dissent’s impact on policy, the social imaginary of protest politics is changing.

April 1975: Morarji Desai, flanked by K. Kamaraj and Jayaprakash Narayan, breaks the indefinite fast he had embarked on over the issue of holding elections to the Gujarat Assembly, which had been dissolved. Gandhian modes of mobilisation were reflected in his ideas of passive resistance, but that also disallowed rebellious assertion. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVES

India has always been understood as a land of paradoxes; dissent is not beyond it. The historian Romila Thapar, in her book Voices of Dissent, argues that dissent was always part of the “collective sub-conscious” of the subcontinent. The shramanic tradition of the ascetic renouncers represented a robust tradition of questioning beliefs that spread across ages, from the Buddha to the Bhakti movement, and is best represented in contemporary times when Kabir and his rebellious poetry are invoked. Amartya Sen, in his celebrated book The Argumentative Indian, assiduously reminds us of the great practices of intellectual pluralism, public debate, and public reason that have existed since ancient times.

Both scholars emphasise that dissent not only questioned power in its search for truth and reason but was also quintessentially non-violent.

LISTEN: The idea of the opposition in post-Independence politics continues to be marked by this uncanny combination of loyalty and resistance.

However, the sociologist Barrington Moore Jr, in his classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, analyses the interrelation between suffering, endurance, and rebellions in a comparative frame and how political forms were in the “last instance” decided by the relationship between landlords and peasants. In this regard, he finds Indian peasantry to be more obedient than rebellious in comparison with other premodern transition economies. He finally traces this social, and by default political, behaviour to peasant religiosity and belief in the karma theory. Hinduism’s hegemonic framing of sin and suffering allowed for a belief system that linked suffering to rebirth and past lives.

This effectively made Indian peasants loyal and obedient. Moore further observes the success of Gandhian modes of mobilisation as “striking a chord” with a Hindu “way of life”. It got reflected in his ideas of passive resistance but that also disallowed rebellious assertion. In a strangely paradoxical way, “passive resistance” attempts to combine passivity as disobedience with resistance.

How much was it about loyalty and how much about resistance? The idea of the opposition in post-Independence politics continues to be marked by this uncanny combination. Gandhi’s continued relevance and growing irrelevance both go back to Gandhian methods. He remains the elephant in the room invoking the “collective conscience”. He is routinely rejected by oppositional mobilisations but fondly and rather desperately remembered in times of irrevocable crisis. In current times, while the regime has converted Gandhi into a symbol of swachhata (cleanliness) alone, he continues to remain the soul of protest politics. His portraits were held as protest placards during the anti-CAA protests, the farmers’ movements, and the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

Yet, critics have pointed to “the Gandhi everyone loves to hate”. Gandhi is disliked for his position on the Khilafat by the Right, the Left has problems with his ideas of trusteeship, the liberals dislike his religious symbolism invoking “Ram Rajya”, feminists see his views as gendered and not throwing a direct challenge to gender hierarchies, and Dalit-Bahujans find him too patronising.

During Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Halol town, Gujarat, on March 8. | Photo Credit: AMIT DAVE/REUTERS

In this context, one could note that Kabir to Buddha to Rumi have landed up as coffee-table books in the drawing rooms of socialites. Historians from the South have alerted us to the fact that “the Shaiva (Nayanar) and Vaishnava (Alvar) bhakti of Tamil Nadu was a state-sponsored ideological initiative that served to legitimise political power in the Pallava, Chola, Chera and Pandya realms”. Buddhist regimes in Myanmar and Sri Lanka have spearheaded the worst genocides of our times. While the Buddhist philosophy came to represent the “mezzanine elites” amongst the Dalit-Bahujans, the swathes of marginalised within them never took up the Ambedkarite anti-caste strategy of conversion and gradually moved towards Hinduisation as a more appealing and feasible mode of achieving inclusion and empowerment.

Is this an illegitimate appropriation of opposition or the internal social character? That is a question at the heart of the character of oppositional politics in India. This is akin to a jubilant middle-class intelligentsia typifying the Anna Hazare Movement as a “social revolution” only to realise later that it had ideological and possibly organisational links to the conservative Right. This story also goes back to the JP Movement and his call for Sampoorna Kranti, or total revolution, which was organisationally, if not ideologically, buttressed by the Jana Sangh. Movements against corruption across the globe, and not just in India, have always somehow swept right-wing parties to power.

Nature and character of opposition in India

This then is the story of the nature and character of the opposition in India. It struggles to become and be identified as a legitimate opposition in the first place. There is resistance when one least expects it or in dire situations, but obedience and complacency are routine. To understand dissent and opposition in India, we need to make sense of endurance and suffering, tapasya, as revered values, and obedience and seva (service) as celebrated ways of life—not eschew them for being non-modern.

Gandhi probed their subversive potential, as the current right-wing regime explores its hegemonic strength. The difference being that the current regime’s experiment happens through the Gandhian idiom, explaining why Prime Minister Narendra Modi can frame the caste question by washing the feet of Dalits even as he makes repeated attempts to do away with caste-based reservation.

One could again ask if this is an appropriation of Gandhi or a possibility in the modes of protest he envisaged. Outside of this, dissent and obedience remain on the margins and never assume significance. The underlying cultural codes in India seem to make Indian society deferential; it resists without rebelling. It is as difficult to organise a resistance as it is to hold on to an unquestioned hegemonic position. The interface between the sacred and the profane remains porous.

The development economist and social activist Jean Drèze asks an intriguing question: why did the country’s migrants, during the COVID pandemic, prefer to quietly walk thousands of kilometres back home but not indulge in food riots as in many parts of the world from Africa to Europe? Is it because they had a “home” to return to that marked an emotional and cultural sense of belonging? Or that they owned small plots of land that carried the imprint of provincial thinking and rural isolationism, as Ambedkar remarked about Indian villages? Urban poor, Dalits, women, and scores of other invisibilised social groups remind us of Victor Frankl’s celebrated memoirs—Man’s Search for Meaning—of Jews in concentration camps who endured suffering as symptomatic of hope.

Endurance brings not just obedience but hope. It is the harnessing of this memory of hope in the collective consciousness that the current regime mobilises in its elusive promise of acche din. Neoliberal growth has only further entrenched conformist optimism rather than a repulsion of obscene inequalities and exploitation.

The civil rights activist K. Balagopal, in a personal conversation, once remarked that public activism and protest politics by and large are on a decline in India as idealism requires a quotient of “innocence” that modern societies and ways of living cannot sustain. Notwithstanding his observation, India continues to be a land of protest politics of various hues. It ranges from localised struggles for the right to information in Rajasthan to violent Maoist insurgency in central India.

Irom Sharmila, who was on an unbroken fast for 16 years <EP>to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Manipur, secured fewer than 200 votes when she contested for an Assembly seat. She is seen here, campaigning at Thoubal in March 2017. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR

Rarely do protest politics manage to be incorporated into the policy frame; they remain on the margins with particularistic appeal and a tiny social following. Many of these are often forged and led by middle-class activists. For instance, the robust civil rights movement in India, whose history goes back to the colonial period with the formation of the Indian Civil Liberties Union by Jawaharlal Nehru, went through different phases: civil rights protests in the 1970s, fighting within constitutional limits; democratic rights protests in the 1980s going beyond constitutional provisions; and the human rights phase in the late 1990s assuming a more universal and moral imagination. However, it was essentially limited to the urban middle class and depended on state response for its effectiveness.

When the state heeded them, they looked productive, and when the state looked away, they were restricted to tiny press releases. They depended more on press coverage than their ability to organise mass protests. Such protests are now facing an intergenerational crisis. The young are eschewing active and sustained participation in collective struggles. Some protest movements forged in earlier decades continued to be headed and followed by previous generations and senior citizens. Why the imagination of collective struggles is falling out of the lifeworld of the young is a serious challenge plaguing many protest movements.

Highlights

• The civil rights movement in India, led by middle-class activists, has gone through different phases, focusing on constitutional limits, democratic rights, and human rights.
• The rise of a majoritarian government has changed the social imaginary of protest politics in India, with social activists aiming to bridge the gap between the social and the political.
• The Eddelu Karnataka campaign in 2023 and the Jago Telangana campaign in Telangana had a reasonably visible impact on electoral outcomes. This could be a new phase in the history of protest politics in India.

Protest politics

One of the enduring aspects of protest politics is that it works within the social domain and does not have a significant influence on electoral outcomes. Protest politics and popular politics work with different local idioms. With the state devising newer methods to restrict protests, including confining them to designated spots (Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, for example), their visibility too is restricted. Many social activists lose when they attempt a foray into electoral politics.

Medha Patkar, a well-known name fighting against the Narmada dam, lost elections in Mumbai. Irom Sharmila, who was on an unbroken fast for 16 years to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Manipur and known to be widely respected in north-eastern India, secured fewer than 200 votes when she contested for an Assembly seat. Electoral mobilisation and popular politics have remained pragmatic and about service delivery, while social protest politics have followed the language of constitutional morality. They have not managed to bridge the gap.

The endemic divide between the social and the political was mapped to the North-South divide. While the North witnessed an eclipse of social protest politics with electoral dynamics consuming all available space, the South continued to hold on to independent social protests, be it the Dravidian variant in Tamil Nadu or Telangana becoming known as Udyamala Gadda (land of protest politics).

Amit Ahuja, in his recent book Mobilising the Marginalised, argues that while in the North, Dalit politics did well politically to forge political parties and pull the levers in power circles, it did not lead to an observable improvement in their socio-economic status. In contrast, in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, Dalits failed to be electorally effective but achieved far better socio-economic indicators than their counterparts in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

The Telangana Joint Action Committee during its Jago Telangana campaign. It is one of the rare examples of the changing texture of protest combining the social and the political. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

With the unprecedented rise of a majoritarian government, the social imaginary of protest politics is changing in India. Social activists seem to have realised the need to close the gap between the social and the political. In the Karnataka Assembly election in 2023, 100 social organisations came together under the Eddelu Karnataka (Wake up Karnataka) campaign. They distributed lakhs of pamphlets, held hundreds of public meetings, and did six-month-long door-to-door campaigns against growing communalisation, rising prices, and unemployment. They did not work for any party but worked against the party in power. This campaign seems to have had a fair degree of influence on voters.

Changing texture of protest

It is one of the rare examples of its kind and a reminder of the changing texture of protest and oppositional politics in combining the social and the political. The experiment was later repeated in Telangana, with the Telangana Joint Action Committee launching the Jago Telangana campaign. Again, around 50 social organisations working on education, health, famine, and so on, came together to highlight social issues that are important to vote on to beat political pragmatism. Activist accounts say this had a reasonably visible impact on electoral outcomes in Telangana.

This could well be a new phase in the history of protest politics in India. Social activists carry a great degree of credibility but have limited reach. There are scores of activists doing a thankless job working for the larger collective good without expecting anything in return. This spirit has often been cramped by the local appeal and limited visibility of their efforts. But the new process of forging greater alliances in order to influence electoral outcomes could emerge as a long-term trend.

The Bharat Jodo Yatra was also imagined along these lines. It offered social relief, but one does not know if it has had an electoral influence. This, however, will bring us back to the questions we began with: will this turn in protest politics enlarge its influence in opening up the congealed pathways of high politics in India or will it get consumed by the pragmatism of power politics?

Ajay Gudavarthy is Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.