After Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka: What India’s Mass Agitations Lack

As a youth-led movement in Nepal becomes the latest to topple a South Asian government, it is worth reflecting on the sharply different trajectory mass movements have taken in India in the last decade. While commentary in India has focused on congratulating the Indian state on having avoided the violence and instability that has accompanied regime changing protests in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, and on the question of whether toppling governments through street protests is democratic, these analyses miss the key difference that is emerging in the subcontinent.

In all of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, seemingly innocuous single-issue protests have snowballed into demands for a change in government, while in India, some of the largest and longest political protests of the last decade – including the farm law agitations – asserted that they were not concerned with electoral politics and limited themselves to the issue they started with.

Mass agitations have not disappeared from the Indian streets. Far from it. Recently, Maratha leader Manoj Jarange Patil successfully brought the city of Mumbai to a standstill to bring the government to the negotiating table for his demand for reservations. What has fundamentally changed in Indian politics is the tendency of these mass agitations to snowball into larger political threats to the ruling government. Far from toppling governments, they have not significantly impacted the elections that have followed them either. 

Understanding why these issues failed to snowball is critical to understanding the current trajectory of Indian politics. While the fear of state repression has remained a factor in all post-colonial Indian politics, and likely plays a role, the real shift has been in the imagination of the nation itself. 

As we move from an idea of the nation rooted in bonds built across diversity to the Hindutva idea of the nation rooted in exclusion, we see the emergence of a political discourse where groups no longer see their concerns as part of a collective national political discourse. This is worrying. 

Nationalism and inclusion

After the first World War, while it became clear that colonisation was in its last stages, the form that liberation would take remained tightly bound to the Western imagination of the nation state. Liberation movements around the world therefore faced a dual challenge.

First, they had to obtain political freedom from colonial rule. Second, and more importantly, they had to reconcile the social contradictions of their largely pre-industrial societies into the form of a modern nation-state, to be recognised as a legitimate demand for liberation. 

India was no exception, and intellectual attempts to reconcile the existing society into a nation state produced a diverse range of answers. Hindu nationalists (and Muslim nationalists for that matter) both believed, to differing degrees, that the post-colonial nation state could be unified by religion. In that sense, their imaginations of the nation were already closer to the European model.

There were however two problems with this. First, the subcontinent held a diversity of religions, and no solution based on territorial division and segregation would ever be fully satisfactory. Second, as pointed out by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the idea of the Hindu nation was challenging in itself.

Hindus, for Ambedkar, simply did not have the ability to extend fraternity and sympathy beyond the barriers of caste. Without addressing the evil of caste, the construction of a “national” Hindu identity, solely based on the exclusion of non-Hindus would always be unstable, and liable to fragment into a multitude of more organic caste and region-based polities. 

Secular Indian thinkers, both Hindu and Muslim, recognized that Europe’s model of militant nationalism rooted in homogeneity and exclusion would not work in a land that was home to a diversity of peoples. They turned instead to ideas of compassionate co-existence. While some, like Rabindranath Tagore, rejected the idea of the nation state altogether, others like M.K. Gandhi believed that the human instinct to care for the immediate more than the remote, was natural. His idea of self-determination, or Swaraj, was therefore rooted in this. The unit of self-determination in Swaraj is the individual and can encompass the village, the region, the nation or even humanity as a whole, based on mutual sympathy.

Amar Sohal in his recent book on Indian Muslim secular thought in the period points to thinkers including Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Azad who attempted to theologically reconcile the universal humanism of Islam or “insaniyat” with a secular nation state, rooted in diversity and ethical reciprocity.

Empathy was therefore to become the practical foundation of the post-colonial state. A diverse population would be united not by the imposition of homogeneity but by actively caring for groups beyond the limits of their organic social groupings, as if they were their own. 

The role of empathy in the creation of a national political discourse

The practicalities of independence immediately placed limitations on the deployment of this empathy. First, a series of legal and political decisions on citizenship laws, the forfeiture of property and the return of abducted women and children, that were necessitated by partition, all revolved around religious exclusion.

Second, the integration of the princely states into independent India was not smooth. It involved force and, in cases, extreme brutality, and the silencing of the will of the people being integrated. Finally, as warned by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the failure of Hindu society to dismantle caste meant that the building of empathy across caste groups also, by and large, remained elusive. 

However, even with these limitations, empathy remained valuable in grounding the Nehruvian nation. For this, the state did not rely on centralised lecturing or propaganda alone. Several practices originating from the national movement were institutionalised after independence to grow this empathy.

The Handicrafts Board (disbanded by the Modi government in 2020), for example, was set up in 1952 and allowed Indians in multiple states to both provide raw materials to, and purchase products made by, women in refugee camps who had been displaced by partition.

Community fundraising by the state also allowed people to demonstrate their solidarity across regional lines. In January 1948, the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF) was set up to collect funds to provide for people displaced from Pakistan. In the decades since, the PMNRF has been used to provide immediate assistance in natural calamities. While the amounts raised helped materially, what was more important was the implicit recognition it fostered on the ground that disasters anywhere in the country were affecting people whom we considered our own. 

Nehruvian India, while far from perfect, successfully created and rooted the idea of a nation, with a collective political discourse, in which the concerns of a diversity of Indians would find space. The establishment of this national polity in the people’s minds meant that the government (both at the centre and in the states) became the focal point for blame for suffering within the population. Nehru, for all his stature in the independence movement, was very much the target of public anger when the economic promises of independence were slow to materialise. 

Hindutva and the rationing of empathy

The rise of Hindu nationalism in the last decade has shifted the dominant political discourse back towards an imagination of the nation rooted in homogeneity and exclusion. Politics has revolved around deciding who belongs in this nation and finding ways to exclude those who do not. Electoral campaigns have centered around allegations of mass infiltration and demographic change, laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act have revived religion as a criterion for citizenship, and the use of targeted demolitions on the property of Indian Muslims as a form of extra-judicial punishment has become common enough for the Supreme Court to order an end to the practice. This imagination of India does not require empathy to sustain itself. On the contrary, it can only be sustained if human empathy is strictly regulated. 

This regulation takes two forms. First, any empathy that is expressed for people or categories of people who are sought to be excluded from this state is treated as “anti-national”. From advocates who have appealed to the Supreme Court to investigate and prevent the deportation of Rohingyas, to parties seeking to protest the genocide in Gaza, the immediate response has been to wonder if their empathy could not be better directed at issues within the state.

As dozens of the poorest and most marginalised Muslims have been picked up by the executive from across the country, branded “Bangladeshi” without due process and pushed across the border, the mainstream media has either cheered on such deportations or turned a blind eye.

The mainstream discourse has moved so far away from empathy that most news outlets chose to focus their coverage on the garbage disposal problems in the national capital after Bengali speaking migrant labourers fled to their hometowns en masse in fear of these arbitrary executive actions. The lack of empathy for those seen as outsiders is so marked that in a recent Delhi election, the removal of young Rohingya refugees from government schools was even made an election promise. 

The second is the erasure of any coverage about regions that aren’t seen as “friendly” to the Union government from the mainstream news. As surges of the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej have caused what is being described as the worst flooding in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir since 1988, the Indian mainstream news coverage has remained muted.

By the end of August, 26 people had been killed, 1400 villages had been submerged and cut off from each other and over 3 lakh acres of crops had been affected in Punjab alone. While coverage has picked up somewhat since a visit by the Prime Minister on September 9, it is telling that many channels have still chosen to focus on bizarre angles like the timing of Rahul Gandhi’s vacations.

The 2018 Kerala floods, the 2024 Wayanad landslide, and the disturbances in Manipur have also been covered with similar disinterest, with debates on whether Kerala should be allowed to accept foreign aid offers taking up far more primetime space and time than the welfare of the victims. Far from mobilising national sympathy and urging donations to victims, as used to be the norm, the news has focused on isolating the victims from the rest of the nation. 

Consequences

The removal of empathy from the national political discourse, has meant that groups that once sought to bring their grievances into the mainstream political discourse, where they could reasonably expect to find a measure of solidarity or interest from other groups, now prefer to address their grievances in siloed negotiations with the state.

In such protests, each group stands alone, limits itself to its own concerns and ends agitations when they are met. Without inter-group solidarities there is little chance of any issue snowballing into collective demands for a change in government, either through or outside the electoral process.

In this system only groups that enjoy dominance have a chance of having their grievances addressed by the state. Agitations involving marginalised communities, or populations already demonised in the security discourse like Muslims and Adivasis are put down with brutal force, without sparking any empathy or outrage in the mainstream. As long as the government in this model negotiates with, and addresses the grievances of, dominant groups from time to time, it rules unchecked. 

While it may be tempting, as visuals of destruction emerge from Nepal, to believe that the containment of protest into these rigid silos is good because it ensures stability, we cannot ignore that over time, these rigid silos of political action reduce the belief of the population in the existence of a national polity altogether. As more and more people treat the Union government as one would treat a colonial Sarkar – to be placated and negotiated with, instead of a government that must be held accountable to the weakest of its citizens through collective political action, we drift further away from democracy. 

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