March with hope, but verify

IT’S always uplifting to be hopeful, more so when the young ones give us an elusive glimpse into their hope. But youth is not a worldview or an ideology. Young ones have handed us despair too. They’re on the march against America’s alliance with Zionism. But they’re also part of the 90 per cent Israelis who advocate genocide in Palestine. Closer to home, the RSS cultivates youth as did the Nazis. To belong to the young communist league in the USSR was to embody the future of a dream that faded too soon.

Young activists invoke mixed responses in South Asia where politics has suspended its left-right discourse for something called centrist and pragmatic politics. Pragmatism is too often a ruse for putting lipstick on the pig. The posture is worrisome but there are other reasons to be prepared for a determined pushback from the state if the wayward rulers with their monopoly over the means of coercion feel truly threatened, say, by the youth as glimpsed partly in Delhi’s Cockroach event.

Consider the facts carefully. Twelve Latin American countries have recently veered to the right, reversing the region’s previous ‘pink tide’ of left-leaning governments. A wave of election cycles has fundamentally altered the region’s political landscape. Notable among the renegades are Colombia, Peru, Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras and Paraguay. Factors are not too different from South Asia’s. High inflation, social inequality, corruption and post-pandemic economic stagnation are listed as driving the massive anti-incumbent sentiment. The ‘Trump Effect’ is cited as a factor even if the enduring impression in Europe and Asia is of the US being evicted from its comfort zone in the oil-rich Gulf.

Many leaders in Latin America are actively copying the ‘Bukele model’ of mass incarceration and hard-line security borrowed from the El Salvadoran dictator. South Asia has not remained untouched. The deposed leader of one country is languishing in jail and that of another country is a fugitive from those who drove her from office with street power. The right-wing Indian prime minister has coined a new description for what could be his next target — the thinking youth. So, who are the “dimaghi Naxals” Modi has warned the country about? Che Guevara and John Keats lived a century apart but they may have offered a likely pointer to who exactly could be in Narendra Modi’s crosshairs. “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine,” said Che. “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow,” mused Keats, describing the human condition to a bohemian nightingale.

Has the new generation found the courage and the commitment to face the consequences of a massive pushback?

Before joining the jubilant crowds at the resignation of Modi’s powerful education minister whose removal the Cockroach protesters had sought, it would do no harm to remember that Indira Gandhi was similarly forced to remove two of her chief ministers — Chimanbhai Patel in Gujarat and Abdul Ghafoor in Bihar — in the run-up to the Emergency. With her back to the wall after a court verdict sought her removal from power, she went for the trigger and jailed her opponents. Mrs Gandhi was essentially a democrat, not the best in the world but also not the worst. There was no other valid reason for her to hold elections after having vanquished the violent surge against her. How can we know that Modi would not consider harsher measures should things come to the crunch?

The political circumstances seem a lot more fraught today than they were in 1975 on the eve of the Emergency. A commission of inquiry probed Indira Gandhi’s excesses following her defeat in the 1977 elections (which she had called in the alleged belief she would sweep the polls). Whatever the Shah Commission found on her was not enough to send her for more than a night’s stay in Tihar Jail. But look at the list of excesses called out by Modi’s opponents today. Moreover, there are deeply entrenched domestic and foreign interest groups who dread the Modi government losing power.

What would become of the TV channels and their ace anchors that have become a platform for hate speech and servitude to the government? What would become of the temple heist probe? At an international level, what would become of the $250 million corruption charge slammed on Gautam Adani and the opposition’s claim that after Donald Trump took office, the US Justice Department contrived to drop the cases. This reversal allegedly came after Adani hired a personal lawyer of Trump (Robert J. Giuffra Jr) and extended an unusual offer to invest $10 billion into the American economy to create 15,000 jobs.

Opposition leaders claim Modi actively “covered up” this corporate corruption during high-level US diplomatic meetings. What would be Israel’s reaction should the Modi government ever be stuck in the political doldrums? The entire Western world rose up in arms against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency not least because she was identified as a Soviet ally. Today, the West is silent over a raging genocide in Gaza; how would it find the courage to speak for Indian democracy, particularly when the Modi government is “doing the job” for them?

Therefore, the question is, has the new generation found the courage and the commitment to face the consequences of a massive pushback? Pakistan, in India’s neighbourhood, has seen momentous changes, including coups as well as the eviction of usurpers. But it is equally a fact that when Ziaul Haq hanged an elected prime minister, there was­n’t the mass upheaval against his tormentors that ZAB had hoped for. Tariq Ali underscores the irony in his play The Leopard and The Fox. While localised street clashes occurred in places like Rawalpindi, Lahore and Sindh, protests against Bhutto’s hanging remained fragm­ented. Therefore, when the “dimaghi Naxals” and assorted “cockroaches” ponder their next brave moves, they might want to blend with their abiding hopes a dose of prescribed preparedness.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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Published in Dawn, August 25th, 2026