As a student at Assam University, one thing that bothered me most was the mundane, non-political structure of student life that we were forced to have. We had our share of protests over lack of water and poor quality hostel food. We did break a few glass windows of the administration building, and fought verbally with the Registrar, but all of that was never really for the greater common good. These were just instances of individual anger to meet basic needs, in collaboration with fellow hostel-mates and classmates. Most of us were naïve enough to pride on being apolitical.
I think the protest for a better road from Silchar to Irongmara was probably a political protest. But most of us were not very serious about it, and so across the two years of my Assam University life, much of the road remained the same.
I do not blame you when you take pride, as I used to, in describing yourself as apolitical. I understand the mistrust the word ‘politics’ has created for years, thanks to the corrupt practices of politicians across parties. So much so that the term itself has become a synonym for hypocrisy, nepotism and spreading rumours. But I must tell you this — that politics does not mean joining a political party. Politics does not mean hypocrisy, nepotism or spreading rumours. Politics does not mean you have to raise a slogan or bear a torch.
As a basic exercise, all of us, including me, must recollect the correct meaning of the word. And, to make you feel better, I would define it as a social science that deals with the polity or the nation-state, something that makes us think beyond our own lives — something that makes us study history, economics, sociology and science, and inspires us to make this world a better place to live in.
I believe every individual is political.
You, who are reading this now, might laugh out loud and say, I have absolutely nothing to do with politics. But this denial itself makes you a part of the larger political system. What we do not realise is that our being apolitical helps the people who are in power. Also, in those instances in your life when you stood up for your rights or for the sake of others (your family members, friends…) you were political. Politics in that sense is the essence with which we can love each other, even if we are strangers. Politics is what makes you cry when you walk by the slums of Kali Bari Chor, and makes you angry when you see people fighting in the name of religion or language.
Politics is in Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry, in Kazi Nazrul Islam’s songs, in Ritwik Ghatak’s frames, in Pink Floyd’s Animals and in Bob Dylan’s Harmonica.
If I had a time machine, I would have taken you all to the 1960s. It was the decade of protests and love, the decade of a mass uproar for love. From Berkeley to Kolkata, university students were jailed for writing poems, for painting on the walls, for saying whatever they wanted to say. It was when those rich white kids left their rich fathers and married poor Afro-Americans from the west coast and the Delta, when Rock, the music form, was born, when documentaries were invented and science ensured we had electric guitars (even if the moon footage was staged).
The hippie and student movements across the world brought in half the issues we now study in social science and humanities: economic equity, gender issues, civil rights, free speech, environmental concerns, the concept of the welfare state, and even new styles of poetry. (Beats in Greenwich Village and then in San Francisco, Hungry Generation and other young writers in Kolkata.) The entire world was brought to a standstill through the rage of university students. To quote Allen Ginsberg, I am talking about those “…who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war…” (Howl, 1965-66).
Around the world, from Cambridge to Berkeley to Jadhavpur, students were thinking the same thoughts, talking the same words, singing the same songs. But they did not know about each other for long. These events happened mutually exclusively. Back home at Silchar, it was mostly the college and university students who participated and died in that historic protests against language politics on May 19, 1961 and helped protect the rights of people who spoke Bengali in Assam.
Where is that anger now? Why do you think our universities do not speak? How long can we be numb about things that affect people around us? I am not asking you all to start a march right now, neither am I asking you all to begin sloganeering at every small incident that affects you. All I am proposing is that we need to be more politically conscious and take politics seriously.
University life is an experience that changes how we look at society and life in general. How we accept each other’s culture and deny what our parents/ relatives had taught us since childhood, about other communities. It is an experience through which taboos and stereotypes are broken. It teaches us the essence of politics and pluralism, the ability to be inclusive and liberal. The externalities of which may even transcend your own self and reach your friends and family.
Let us hope we all will try and perceive the term politics in its original form, rather than the distorted form it has acquired today.
