New Delhi: Every year, at the end of February, Delhi University celebrates its Annual Flower Show by displaying multihued spring flowers and kitchen garden produces where participating colleges vie with each other for prestigious prizes. This year it ought to have been different, not because spring was late and laden with the remnants of a chill, but because the city was limping back to it routine, trying to recover from some of the worst days of rioting its citizens had seen after 1984.
The epicentres of the violence were just a few kilometres away from the university and, even in our ivory towers, the horror and the fear were palpable. I was almost sure that it could not be business as usual. The festivities would be low key and subdued or cancelled altogether. I was wrong.
However, what the administration’s apathy could not do was dampen the determination of young students who decided to protest against the communalisation of our everyday lives, the hatred on our streets and our politics of indifference.
Young and old, men and women, students and faculty, came to stand outside the entrance of the flower show, placards in hands, silently, condemning a callous disregard for the suffering of the people of our city. The placards were enough.
Some just carried one word: SHAME.
In another, the slogan said a bit more explicitly: ‘Under the smell of roses the stench of dead flesh’.
One student held up a page that said simply: 42 DEAD.
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Initially, the plan was to go inside the flower show and raise slogans. Then an even better idea came up. The students would stand outside the venue, near the entrance, silently, strongly, without raising a voice, just remain mute in protest. We thought that the overzealous security employed by the university, who were always video graphing protesting students and teachers, would drive us away.
A student holds up a placard. Photo: Debjani Sengupta
However, when we stood silent and firm, they did not know what to do. The men came out in twos and threes to stare at us, ready to wield the stick but the students, who did not raise a murmur or a slogan, were a great puzzle to them. Nothing in their rule-book had prepared them for this. The slogans perhaps that they were expecting were not uttered, nor a fist raised, not a stone was thrown.
Meanwhile, as the visitors to the flower show swelled, so did the ranks of protesting students who joined from the various campus colleges and the demonstration got off the ground. The students stood firm, holding up their plain placards for all the world to see. People gave us surreptitious thumbs-up signs, a middle-aged lady said loudly, “Wonderful”.
Others chose to ignore us. One woman, a visitor to the show, berated the students for wasting time. Someone else came and took a picture of us, a wide grin plastered on his face. Before he left, he said, “Shukriya (thanks)”, as if he had just been given a wonderful gift. Perhaps we had!
The three hours we stood there was a lesson in how not to agitate. But it was also a lesson about our times, a time so disjointed and disorderly and dislocated that it took the very young to teach it to me. What had happened in North East Delhi this week was a calculated pogrom, an orderly gesture of hate and intolerance that, every time it happened, shook the very foundations of our self worth as a nation.
We think, never again! But the cycle of violence continues and the poor become cannon fodder. In times like this, how can we respond to the hate? What can we do to set the clock back? What must we remember so that we never forget? As the questions buzzed around my head, I looked up to see a placard that a pair of diffident young hands were holding up to the crowd: Your Silence is Deafening.
A student holds up a placard outside the entrance of the flower show. Photo: Debjani Sengupta
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What did it mean to keep silent in times like this? What must it entail? What were its costs? In another violent time, a philosopher had written of the exiled Brecht whom he described as ‘a stubborn outsider,’ someone who critiqued the violence of his times and who warned his brethren to stand up before it was too late.
Well, I thought, that was easier said than to emulate. But try as I might, I could not rid myself of the image of an exiled poet and his message. In the ragged line of students and fellow colleagues, I felt it with every nerve of my body.
The time to speak up was now. The time to stand up was now.
Even if we did that in the privacy of our beings, the time was here; we could let our silent resistance do the talking. We would not let the silence be deafening.
Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, Indraprastha College For Women.
