A quick note before we start: this post came out of a long session of furious voice typing and a lot of back-and-forth with Claude. I used Claude to help me structure my thoughts and edit them.

The protests are back. This time, opposition parties, student groups and the CJP, the Cockroach Janata Party, are demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, over irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. There are protests in Delhi and across the country, and the government has reacted in a heavy-handed way on the eve of the big protest planned for 10 October, with petitions in court alleging that nearly 57 Delhi Metro stations were being shut and trains cancelled. So much so that the matter landed in the Supreme Court, which had to remind everyone that the right to association is a fundamental right, even as it insisted protesters get permission first.

Arrests, intimidation, deployment of thousands of security personnel in the national capital, as if the state were facing some invading foreign army, not young people making reasonable and non-revolutionary demands.

— Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Indian Express

An issue this political is going to divide people. That’s only normal.

On one side you have the supporters of the ruling party, the BJP. For them, these protests are a sham cooked up by the opposition and the CJP, a youth movement that sprang up after the Chief Justice called unemployed young people cockroaches. At the risk of compressing the views of an entire camp: they think the people leading these protests are morons in it for attention, that they don’t know the first thing about politics, that they’re politically motivated, funded by the CIA and Soros, and anti-national. You get the drift.

On the other side you have the anti-establishment crowd, who think the protesters are virtuous, doing God’s work, the saviours of democracy, standing up to a ruling party that has always had a thin skin and a tough time tolerating dissent. And so have its supporters.

And then there’s a large group of people who are ambivalent, simply because they don’t have time for any of this. They’re busy working their asses off to put food on the table.

It’s a caricatured overview, I know. But for what I’m about to say, it gets the job done.

Support them because you can’t stand them

So here’s my proposal. Let’s say you’re pro-establishment. You support the ruling party. I’m going to make the case that you should support these protesters’ right to protest, even cheer it on. Not because you secretly agree with them. Precisely because you can’t stand them. Because you think they’re wrong, that they’re anti-nationals and dimaagi naxals, cockroaches, to borrow the Chief Justice’s word, scurrying around causing problems for the virtuous men busy making India great and ushering in Amrit Kaal.

Why? As Rust Cohle says in True Detective, time is a flat circle. Replace time with history. If history is a flat circle, which is to say there’s no linear direction of travel, then what goes around comes around.

The problem with a lot of people, and I put myself in this camp, is that whenever monumental things happen in a democracy like India, we forget our history. For two reasons. One, we get consumed by the passion of the moment. Two, our blind allegiance to our side means we reason from emotion and not cold hard logic.

My contention is that you should support these protesters because you support the current government. These protests are proof that democracy is alive and kicking in this country. This is the purest form of democratic expression: the right to stand up to a government, ask questions and demand change.

A street procession of Indian National Congress supporters in white caps carrying banners through a crowded market street, New Delhi, 1937
An Indian National Congress procession, New Delhi, 1937. Picryl.

It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the demands. You might very well think these people are idiots, Soros and CIA funded anti-nationals out to destroy our great nation. But they’re protesting because they think something wrong has been done. In this case, the disenfranchisement of crores of Indians. The Election Commission has struck more than 13 crore names off the electoral rolls. It says it’s weeding out duplicates and ineligible voters. The protesters say it’s shutting out real voters, disproportionately the ones who’d vote against the BJP. And what is a democracy if not the right to vote? Voting is the most sacred democratic act there is.

Today you might feel a certain schadenfreude about all this. It’s okay, because it’s not your name that’s been struck off the list. It’s somebody else’s. But remember, what goes around comes around.

What history tells us

Think about our own history. Protest and dissent are at the heart of our national identity. Ever since the assorted varieties of white people landed on our shores, we’ve resisted them. And we didn’t win our freedom through a full-scale war or a bloody revolution. By and large, we won it through protest and dissent against the British. We all know the story of Gandhi, the Dandi March, the Quit India Movement and so on.

Gandhi walking at the head of a column of marchers during the Salt March, 1930
Gandhi leading the Salt March, March 1930. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

But those are the big-ticket items. There were countless other acts of protest and dissent: the mill strikes in Bombay, peasants refusing to pay revenue in Bardoli, women picketing shops, the Akali agitations in Punjab, forest satyagrahas, student strikes, the political mobilisation of Dalits and other lower castes, tribal rebellions, underground presses, banned poems, mutinous sailors, and thousands and thousands of local protests across the country that aren’t sexy enough to be remembered. Together they gathered force until the wave crested and won us the freedoms we cherish, enjoy and, if I’m being honest, take for granted.

Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel seated together during the Bardoli Satyagraha, 1928
Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel during the Bardoli Satyagraha, 1928. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Not all of it was peaceful, and let’s be honest about that. Some of it was violent, and it mattered. But the fact that a country the size of India won its freedom without an all-out war is a miracle in itself, and a testament to the power of keeping open the space for dissent. Not because our colonial overlords allowed it, but because we kept it open, taking blows from indiscriminate truncheons under a hail of bullets and every other kind of violence they used to assert their dominion over us.

And you don’t have to go very far back to see our own government swinging the truncheon. On 25 June 1975, Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, invoked Article 352 of the Constitution and declared a state of emergency. Her ostensible reason for this draconian move was “internal disturbance” threatening the security of India.

So what led to it? On 12 June 1975, Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice in her 1971 election, declared it void and barred her from elected office for six years. Jayaprakash Narayan, already leading a massive movement of students and opposition parties against her government, called for nationwide civil disobedience. And the country was in bad shape: the economic hangover of the 1971 war, back-to-back droughts, the 1973 oil shock, runaway inflation, food shortages and strikes, including the 1974 railway strike that paralysed India.

And what was her response? She suspended fundamental rights. The core freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to free speech, to peaceful assembly, even the right to go to court and seek legal recourse through habeas corpus, were gone. In 1976, in the ADM Jabalpur case, the Supreme Court itself agreed that citizens couldn’t go to court even if they’d been detained illegally. More than a lakh of her opponents, activists and journalists were jailed without trial under draconian laws like the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, or MISA. Strict censorship was imposed on the press, and editors had to get approval from government censors before printing anything.

This was one of those rare moments, probably an exception, when the Indian press showed its spine. In the first days of censorship, The Indian Express and The Statesman left their lead editorial spaces blank, and the government responded by banning blank editorials. When it was all over, LK Advani, who’d spent the Emergency in jail, said the press had been asked to bend and it chose to crawl. As somebody who once wanted to be a journalist, this chapter of Indian press history still has a great deal of romantic appeal for me. It’s why, even today, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, I still have great respect for the Indian Express and what Ramnath Goenka built.

Then there was the infamous mass sterilisation campaign spearheaded by Indira Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi. Large-scale slum demolitions. Power centralised like never before. Mother democracy was assaulted and violated.

And how did it end? In early 1977, Indira Gandhi called elections, probably believing she’d win. She lost badly. She lost her own seat, and the Congress was wiped out across north India. Twenty-one months after it began, the people voted the Emergency out. Battered as it was, democracy reasserted itself.

And this is 1975 we’re talking about. Not some distant period long consigned to social studies textbooks. This is our recent past. Many of our parents lived through the Emergency, and if you ask them, they’ll have memories of it, especially if they were politically active. This week, as the police detained CJP members, the movement’s founder asked why the government doesn’t just declare an Emergency. That’s how close to the surface that memory still is. Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Gandhi’s own cousin, fell out with her during those years. Now 99, she has a message for those fighting for India’s democracy today:

And remember who stood up to Indira Gandhi and the Congress during the Emergency. Among them were leaders from the Jana Sangh and the RSS, the very people who are in power today. The same people you support. They were on the other side back then. Your people were harassed, beaten up and brutally jailed. They lost the ability to speak up. They lost the right to dissent. All their democratic freedoms were stripped away and stolen.

And if your takeaway from that is, “well, that’s precisely why I support my camp, they can do no wrong,” then you’re not even learning the wrong lessons from history. That reading of history is an insult to the human capacity to reason.

This is why, when it comes to politics, it’s important to know your history. History doesn’t give you answers, but it does give you perspective. It opens up new vistas and gives you the ability to ask better questions.

And the Emergency is just one example. Look into history and the examples are legion. As I was thinking about this post and doing some reading, I came across one that stuck with me: the story of Martin Niemöller. Niemöller was a decorated World War I U-boat commander, a fierce right-wing nationalist and an anti-communist. Like many Germans, including much of the conservative Protestant clergy, he welcomed the Nazis in 1933 because he believed they would restore Germany’s lost values and national pride. He was a deeply complicated man, and he held many of the prejudices typical of the German conservative right at the time. Many of his views were antisemitic.

His break with the Nazis didn’t come because of the tyranny they’d unleashed. It came when Hitler tried to Nazify the Protestant Church and threatened its autonomy. That’s when Niemöller became a vocal critic of the regime, and a target of the Gestapo. He was arrested in 1937 and spent 1938 to 1945 in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, much of it in solitary confinement, as Hitler’s “personal prisoner.” After he was freed in 1945, he was one of the first Germans to openly admit his complicity and express remorse for the horrors of a regime he’d once supported so vehemently.

He’s most famous for a short confession he wrote after the war. In it, he lists the groups the Nazis came for, one after the other, and how he said nothing each time because he wasn’t one of them. Then they came for him, and there was no one left to speak up. This is the best-known version:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Learning about Niemöller sent a chill down my spine, because across the vast sweep of history, stories like his are everywhere. It’s the curse of every generation to forget, and then relearn, the lessons learnt by the one before. The freedoms we enjoy today weren’t available to our forefathers. They fought to get them. And yet, out of an impoverished understanding of history, wrong readings of the past, and being seduced by sweet-talking politicians and others with vested interests, we become sheep.

Not all politicians, but the good ones know exactly how to do this. Their ability to tell a masterful story, strip out every discordant element, and craft it into a narrative arrow that goes straight to the bottom of your brainstem is unparalleled. It’s very hard to resist those sweet tones. It’s very easy to give in to the charm and the charisma, become an unwitting accomplice, and sign up for whatever they’re selling in that moment. Listen to them long enough without questioning and you lose your ability to think critically and reason logically. And by sorting ourselves into camps, this party or that one, left or right or centre, we do ourselves a great injustice. We end up condoning outright wrongs. We follow the Pied Pipers until we all become Niemöller.

Writing this reminded me of that line, “he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” It’s often credited to Franklin Roosevelt, though there’s no solid evidence he ever said it. Nowhere is it more relevant than in politics. We’re all guilty of it, me included. We say the politicians in our camp might be bastards, but they’re our bastards. And sooner or later, as Niemöller found out, they come for everyone. They came for everyone around him, he said nothing, and then they came for him. That’s when he learnt the truth: your allegiance to one camp or the other gets you nothing. Unless, of course, you’re crafty enough to get your cut as a party apparatchik.

There are no saints

Things are more slippery than we realise. In politics, nobody is virtuous and nobody comes out uncorrupted. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Give anyone power for long enough, and even saints become sinners.

Here’s a thought exercise. A charismatic leader is cheered into power. Before that, he spent years railing against the corrupt incumbents: their decadence, their weakness, their servility, how they were beholden to vested interests and outright bought, how they were trampling on freedoms that earlier generations shed blood to win. For saying so, he was harassed, beaten up, sometimes jailed. Then he comes to power. Fast forward a decade, and he’s doing the exact same things he once fought against.

Now replace “he” with whoever you like, from the left or the right. Erdoğan, jailed in 1999 for reciting a poem. Chávez, jailed after his 1992 coup attempt. Orbán, the young anti-communist firebrand. Sheikh Hasina, arrested in 2007, who came back to power in 2009 and spent the next 15 years crushing dissent until protests drove her out. Or, closer home, Indira Gandhi, who took on the old guard of her own party and won a landslide in 1971 on Garibi Hatao. Four years later, she declared the Emergency.

Not every story ends this way. Mandela served one term and walked away. But it happens far more often than it should.

There’s a name for how things slide like this: normalization of deviance. It comes from the sociologist Diane Vaughan, who studied the Challenger disaster. She describes it as “a long incubation period with early warning signs that were either misinterpreted, ignored or missed completely.” NASA engineers kept seeing damage to the O-rings on earlier flights, and because nothing blew up, each deviation quietly became the new normal. Until one day it did blow up, and seven people died. Nobody decided to accept the big failure. They just stopped noticing that each small one was a failure at all. Politics works the same way. If we keep letting the small things slide, a heavy-handed crackdown here, a few names struck off a list there, they become the benchmark for bigger violations tomorrow.

Smoke trails in the sky after Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart, 28 January 1986
Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart, 28 January 1986. NASA / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

So that’s why I’m saying you should support these protesters, begrudgingly, gritting your teeth. You might be happy today because you think your camp is doing the right thing and you’re safe, because it’s always somebody else on the receiving end of the injustice. But time is a flat circle. Today it’s somebody else. Tomorrow it’s you. And until your rights and freedoms are actually taken from you, you’ll never imagine it could happen, because you think your side can do no wrong.

That’s shoddy, irrational reasoning. If you’re a participant in a democracy, you need to be able to hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time. Your side might be virtuous, and it’s still capable of making mistakes, capable of evil, capable of visiting great harm on ordinary people.

You may hate the issue they’re protesting about. You may think they’re idiots and what they’re doing is pointless and utterly wrong. But they’re keeping open the space for dissent, and you still need to support their right to protest. If tomorrow they come for you, you’ll want that space open. You’ll need the right to scream that you’ve been wronged, that a grave injustice has been committed. And if it’s not you, it could be someone you love. A friend.

Four photographs from the Quit India Movement: Gandhi writing beside Nehru, a procession with flags and banners, a long column of marchers in white caps, and a seated gathering in front of a stage
Scenes from the Quit India Movement. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

It’s them today. It may very well be you tomorrow. And if you think that can’t happen, then you don’t know your history.

All of this history is just one search away.