What Next ?
Brinda Bose Kochi was the flashpoint, charged with rebellion after a violent police crackdown. Since then, Kiss of Love has danced, hugged, walked, sung, shouted, held hands, cheek-pecked, kissed and french-kissed in solidarity protests that have reverberated through many Indian cities in diverse locations, from around or on university campuses to streets outside RSS headquarters and places between. What Next? is the question already fermenting in protestors’ minds, perspicaciously enough. It’s a vital question for us to stop and think about, especially because the protesting must not, cannot stop – even while the fear of a wider movement congealing and de-fusing, through repetitive motions of protest, looms greyly on the horizon. However, such timely and pertinent self-questioning may be poised to be tripped up by what in football parlance is known, I believe, as ‘own goals’, losses conceded by one’s own team members that threaten to woefully undermine, if not willfully derail, the larger – and yes, dare I say it, political – impetus of the current chain of protest ‘events’. Hurdles are being placed along these already-always-treacherous paths of nascent youthful insurgencies not just by rabid ‘rightists’ (which we all expect, and know by now to field) but by the wise and the cautious and the skeptical in the very broad spectrum of ‘the Left’, all of whom one would have hoped were allies. This is the place, of course, where the Left has repeatedly begun to fail itself – and the reason why right-wingers will sit back and rub their hands in glee and wait for the opposition to self-destruct while they consolidate and close ranks in a frightening, calm repressiveness. And the broad Left has been consistently displaying a remarkable ability to self-destruct, splitting political and philosophical hairs ad nauseam and seemingly unperturbed about throwing out baby, bathwater as well as bathtub all in a single swing of the arm, perhaps content for having nuanced the argument sufficiently in the process. How does one alert one’s fellow-team-travellers to the urgent need of the hour: a huge, diverse, potent, sustained and ‘terrible’ coalition against the Right – one that will strike terror, not amusement, within their closed ranks –and lure one’s friends away from the dubious pleasure of being endlessly-argumentative Indians, chasing their own tails while the enemy watches, waiting to pounce? We have recently witnessed a round of this with Ranabir Samaddar’s critiques of the Hokkolorob protests at Jadavpur University, in which he dismisses the student protestors as the “articulate [read elite] class” who will remain irrelevant to the masses in West Bengal, comparing the present unrest unfavourably with student participation in the Naxal movement of the 1960s and 70s. Even as many (articulate) challenges to Samaddar’s left-conservative formulations have just been successful in decimating much of his contentions, a wave of strident evaluations of the Kiss of Love protests is clearly beginning to rumble and heave around our shores – in which the parameters of analysis are perhaps different but the upshot remains the same: this is not revolution, for revolution is something else, revolution is elsewhere – and of course, revolution is forever ‘to come’ even while revolution is desired now, today, this minute. In fact it is intriguing to seethe last kind, those invested in hastening a chiliastic, apocalyptic moment, worry about the spontaneous and morphing nature of movements and contribute toward a certain deferral on the grounds of preserving the purity of a movement.Of course we may well take constructive heed of some of the criticisms leveled against the Kiss of Love events. Leaders and participants of the protests are themselves reflecting and questioning and revising and planning; they are not unthinking players in a series of dumb rituals. But what we must consider now is the moot debate, which is double-pronged.First, that it is not about a divergence between the seriousness of issues of labour/class and the frivolity of the sexual transgression of public kissing, it is about how one may deploy a diverse range of political, social, cultural and aesthetic strategies in the long, arduous battle we have to wage now in the current censorious regime and climate. And second, since a pattern of protesting has begun to be adopted by a growing range of actors and the frequency of protests has increased, we must take into cognizance the scholarly evaluation that such protests are under threat of moving out of the sole purview of social movements and becoming ‘mainstream’, a part of everyday politics – because none of us would want the edge of rebellion to be blunted. We know that protest politics must not become the politics of ritual. But the point remains this: that while we should all put our heads together to devise new and fresh strategies of resisting the onslaught of the moral police, we must not self-flagellate or accuse each other of failing the ‘true’ test of revolutionary politics – because politics and its measures may be as diverse as its triggers, and responses must be variously sharp and immediate, contingent and rapid, passionate and sustained; they can, and perhaps should, twist and turn and morph daily but they must not fade or fall or fail until the task is done. The goalposts must not be allowed to be shifted. Yes, it is time now to ask some tough questions of ourselves. The Facebook page for the Delhi Kiss of Love protest outside RSS headquarters near the Jhandewalan metro station is instructive, both about the aggressive antagonism and condemnation from ‘the Sanghis’ and the continual strategizing, visualizing and implementation of plans by the protest’s organizers and supporters. The page is suffused as much by a sense of embattlement as by uncertainty, excitement, conviction, doubt – which is how it should be. A post-protest update by one of its organisers congratulates those who came to protest and reaffirms solidarity but cautions that the fight has merely begun as the oppressions start closing in. There is there, if I am not reading it incorrectly, a