politics of exhaustion

the average person is tired. they were tired of the previous government in power when they voted for change in 2014. they are tired today too. in 2019, anna hazare declared that the bjp & aap used the anti-corruption sentiment he laboured to generate in people in 2012. that they rode that wave of dissatisfaction with the status quo straight to power. so it does beg the question, what legacy do we want this one to leave?

two years ago, completely disillusioned with iit roorkee, where i was doing my btech, i had a phase where i was plotting, from my bedroom, how to revolutionise the education system. i had come across secmol, sonam wangchuk’s school, around that time. i had wanted to go & volunteer for the longest time, but something or the other always got in the way. the man is loved. & for good reason, at that. there is consensus that he does good work. which is why it was not enough that other students had been hunger striking for weeks by then, that 20 students killed themselves over this fucking exam, no no, but now that sonam wangchuk is fasting, we will see. now that chatur ramlingam has put a reel, we will see.

what does it take for a cause to gain visibility in this country? is it not the cause itself? why does our attention almost seem to run on a second set of hidden variables? while it is true that this feels something like a tipping point in public sentiment about the current administration at the very least, i would be lying if i didn't say i also sense a strange feeling in my stomach.

imagine the numbers that are turning up on the streets to demand the resignation of a ‘democratically elected’ minister. & imagine that he still doesn't resign. to see the people's explicit will to take away the power we gave him & him still not budge. what a fickle foundation, no?

the most common retort to any criticism of cjp’s lack of organisational skills, for instance, is “well, atleast they're doing something!” i hate the framing of ‘they’ because it implies a third party ‘they’ when, for all this to mean anything, it has to be a ‘we’. & don't get me wrong, i admire hopecore as much as the person next door, but to speak as though nobody else does ‘something’ undermines both the rich tradition of dissent & activism that we inherit & also dedicated local struggles across the country.

the specific site of potential in this moment is creating a crack in the image this government has sold of itself as invincible. nobody expects the resignation of one guy to actually fix the structural problems with the meritocratic entrance exams in this country. 1cr compensation for the families of students who were killed by the system is the bare fucking minimum. but maybe maybe maybe just maybe this could be the beginning of the bare minimum.

if there is any hope here at all, the hope is that this memory leaves a permanent scar on our relationship with the state. if it is so easy for a state to simply not listen to its people, to brutalise its bodies & then lie about it, then maybe power never had our best interests at heart.

because when even the most sanitised protests are not given the dignity they deserve, change can begin to look like the addition of another exhausting endeavour to our already exhausting lives. which is dangerous because exhaustion becomes hopelessness quick. & hopelessness is useless to revolutions.

the question that remains in my head is: where are these numbers when those marginalised within the oldest & most robust structures of our country are on the streets begging for the bare minimum? & the only answer i get is exhaustion. the wearing out of bodies living under capitalism. when we say we’re ‘picking our battles’ but really, all we do is look away.

i see this tendency manifest in two ways. one, the obvious, is with anybody in this country who has actively identified with the hindu nationalist identity in the last few years especially. identity is a social construct & what the status quo has done today is literally construct the hindu identity into something that being a citizen of this country somehow automatically compels you to protect. brutal programs of violence have been carried out against our own citizens who have been systematically pushed to the ‘outside’ of this identity. & the creation of these false enemies actively works to distract the majority from the real source of their own exhaustion, while those in power quietly sell their souls to the same fucking billionaire pigs who we should be blaming.

hopefully, the events of the last week have revealed the true colours of this government. look at the bodies of students martyred to that end. what national consciousness do you speak of that it betrays those who pin their aspirations on the promises the nation makes to them?

& second, god, fuck, this annoys me on a personal level sm: the form chronic exhaustion has begun to take among leftist activists in the last few weeks. & i’m gonna put this one all on the brahmin ones (because that's the kind of identity politics i can get behind). these are people who've read all the right theory, who can spot fascism from a mile, who have different types of oppression sorted in neat boxes in their heads & can be ✨ intersectional✨ when the need arises. lately, these ones have been all over the place, dismissing any and all critical conversation about the legitimately confusing situation we are in to supposedly protect the mass character of these protests. & to be clear, leftist infighting is an oxymoron. what they actually want to say is that all their recently awoken eyes reading history & theory about structures they actively benefited from had made them a hopeless mess & they’re finally seeing hope. they're clinging on to the spirit of the people that is suddenly hyper-visible.

what i hope is that they can situate that hope better. because what i really have a bone to pick with is treating voices that have been tirelessly working towards their own causes for years as if they are suddenly irrelevant right now. brother, their point is that it’s relevant because ✨exhaustion✨ makes it very easy to only organise for a cause when it's convenient. they've earned their “told you so”s precisely because these are all symptoms of the same rot. while the children are still on the streets, let them see that the rest of us fight tooth & nail for our own versions of hope every fucking day.

let them learn that only the exhausted wait for revolutions, as though they are some external horizon. that actually revolutions happen everywhere, everyday. they could happen in your house, in the schools, on the streets, hell, even in a temple. they happen when the last thing we can afford to do is wait. & if you find yourself feeling that you were waiting for this? know that it has only just begun.