In May 2014, shorn of viable leadership, beset by

corruption allegations and governance paralysis, the

Congress plunged to an electoral nadir that few had
imagined possible, winning just 44 seats in the Lok
Sabha. The BJP, with 282 seats, won an absolute
majority: The first time any party had managed to do
that since 1984.
The result paralysed the party — which went into a shell,
still unable to resolve the leadership problem with
president Sonia Gandhi ailing and then merely Amethi
MP Rahul Gandhi waiting interminably in the wings.
Rahul finally became party president in December 2017.
There seemed to be some new sort of energy in the party
as its president fashioned an aggressive strategy to fight
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which led in
December 2018 to victories in Assembly elections in
Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. But the
BJP arrested the Opposition momentum in 2019, turned
it around and returned to power with a larger number of
seats — 303 — while the Congress managed to increase
its share marginally, to 52.
Students protest at Mumbai University on Monday. Firstpost/Neerja Deodhar
Then-Congress president Rahul lost in the family pocket
borough of Amethi and resigned from the party
presidency, plunging the Congress into a new crisis from
which it is yet to recover despite the return of Sonia as
party president. In the past five years, the Congress —
the only nationwide Opposition to the government, even
if only notionally — has not succeeded in mounting a
nationwide movement against the ruling party, which
has transformed itself, in the meanwhile, into a
ruthlessly efficient political and electoral machine that
brooks no opposition.
The other Opposition parties, all regional in character
save the Left Front, which is even more notionally a
nationwide entity, severally or conjointly, too, have
failed to mount a nationwide movement against the
ruling party. Being regional players has obviously meant
that most Opposition parties have succeeded in
mobilising only regionally by themselves. And
Opposition unity, whenever it has been achieved, has
been fleeting and usually for electoral purposes.
Opposition parties have neither tried to produce nor
accidentally produced a nationwide movement because
they have, as usual, been too cynically engrossed in
individual gains.
India's student community has shown the Opposition
that it is possible to challenge even this ruthless
government and the ruling party on a nationwide scale.
And they have done this with no nationwide
organisational structure or premeditated blueprint.
Students have risen spontaneously, throughout the
country, against the unconstitutional Citizenship
(Amendment) Bill/Act, 2019, and in some places the
National Register of Citizens (NRC). And suddenly, the
government and the ruling party doesn’t seem to look so
puissant anymore. Caught unawares, the Union
government's response has been knee-jerk, almost
panicky and, as a result, brutal, as events at Jamia Millia
Islamia University, Delhi, demonstrated on Sunday.
A quick recapitulation would help.
Student involvement began in Assam as protests erupted
in the state against the passage of the Citizenship
(Amendment) Bill, 2019, through both Houses of
Parliament and its enactment via presidential assent on
Friday, 13 December. The All Assam Students' Union
played a big role in organising the protests, despite
attempts to ban student participation in political
activities relating to the Act. The salient role students
played, and are still playing, in the Assam agitation,
should not have come as a surprise given that they have
played a huge role in the state's politics, especially over
the past four decades or so.
As the movement against the amendment bill spread
across the North East with the significant participation
of students from Meghalaya, Tripura and Sikkim,
Opposition political parties across the board were caught
on the wrong foot. The only party that responded to the
passage of the Act on its own steam was the Trinamool
Congress, which chalked out a programme of mass
rallies and meetings, including some headed by Chief
Minister Mamata Banerjee herself. The Trinamool's
programme gained urgency because of the violent
protests against the Act in some districts of Bengal,
which, by targeting railway infrastructure, significantly
affected quotidian life in the state.
The student movement, however, took off on Monday, to
protest not just the Act but the brutal police action
against students of Jamia Millia and Aligarh Muslim
University, the day before. On Sunday, the police had
barged into the Jamia campus, shot teargas shells at
various locations, including the library; caned students
after dragging them out of toilets, the library and the
campus mosque. They had switched off the lights in the
library to keep their illegal acts, including alleged sexual
misconduct, under wraps. Similar scenes unwound in
Aligarh Muslim University.
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At the time of writing, student protests had broken out
in Varanasi (Banaras Hindu University) and Lucknow,
apart from Aligarh of course, in Uttar Pradesh. Students
spilled out into the streets in Punjab and Madhya
Pradesh. In Delhi, of course, students of Delhi
University (DU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
joined the protests, students boycotting examinations in
the DU. In Kolkata, students (and faculty members) of
Jadavpur University and Presidency University staged
protests against both the Act itself and the police action
in Jamia and Aligarh.
Students across Maharashtra, including those in
Mumbai, and Gujarat joined the protests, as did
students in Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry,
Karnataka and Kerala. What was significant was that
students of elite specialist institutes, who normally do
not join agitations with boots on the ground, joined the
protests. Institutes included the Indian Institute of
Science in Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of
Management in Ahmedabad and Bengaluru, and three
Indian Institutes of Technology. A poster at IIT Kanpur
read: "They struck down the students' retaliation at
Jadavpur University. We didn't respond. They hiked the
MTech. fees, we didn't respond. Manhandled the
student protesters at JNU, we didn't respond. And now
its JMI and AMU. Our commitment towards the
students' community is under huge jeopardy if we don't
respond now. Therefore, let's come together for a
campus-wide march in solidarity with students of Jamia
Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University." Students
have called for a march on Tuesday. IIT-Madras
students also plan a rally and protest.
The student protests have also sparked off popular
protests in many parts of the country that had not
responded earlier to the protests: From Mau in Uttar
Pradesh, through Karnataka and Bengal to Congress
general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra sitting in
protest at India Gate. Students have unwittingly proved
both a catalyst and a glue for a nationwide protest that
the government is finding difficult to deal with. The
Union home ministry and Delhi Police's defence of its
panicky and unconscionably violent actions in Aligarh
and Jamia just don't cut the mustard.
The question with which we could end is: Why have
students succeeded in rattling the Union
government, several state governments and the BJP
and its allies, where no party, including the
Congress, has been able to organise a coordinated
programme on an issue so emotive and politically
charged as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill/Act?
The answer lies, possibly, in the grey area between
rhetoric and commitment, oratory and activism, and
clarity and prevarication. The students, in the periods
before the Jamia and Aligarh atrocities and after, just
took to the streets. They didn't waste time issuing
statements or just making on-campus speeches. They
could because they were committed to ideas relating to
justice and fair play, and, possibly, because it is their
future that is most at stake: What India will look like a
decade or a couple of decades down the road is an
existential issue for them in a way it is not for (often
geriatric) political leaders and parties.
Moreover, the students don't have elections to win and
constituencies, often socially and ideologically
contradictory, to pander to. They can, therefore, proceed
without prevaricating on issues vital to them and to the
political 'community' we call the nation-state. Most
parties are both so caught up making intricate electoral
calculations that they do not have the political energy
left over to organise a movement, as opposed to
strategising for elections.
We could have said that the Congress, though a national
party, has atrophied organisationally to such an extent,
that it lacks the sinews to mobilise on a significant,
nationwide scale, even if it has the will. But we would
then have to explain how students have managed to
spark a nationwide movement without having even the
rudiments of a nationwide organisation. It's a question
of commitment to causes and ideas, and India's political
parties have once again flunked the test.