Revolutionary Road

After the dastardly killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh on September 5, 2017, her first birth anniversary was observed in a big way at Bengaluru Town Hall on January 29, 2018. Popular youth speakers Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Shehla Rashid Shora, Jignesh Mevani, who were close to Gauri Lankesh, spoke to a capacity crowd. Veteran freedom fighter H.S. Doreswamy was the well-known local face, while Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna, who is very vocal about his egalitarian views,  played a few of his famous protest numbers. 

The mood was very anti-establishment with every speaker berating BJP and its policies ranging from demonetization of high-value currency notes to crackdown on various universities. Doreswamy’s open call to vote out BJP drew thunderous applause.

When the function got over, I hung around the Town Hall veranda waiting for a friend as the crowd spilled over to the streets. The main speakers had a tough time negotiating among fans and selfie-seekers. When Kanhaiya, Umar, Shehla and Jignesh reached the veranda, I overheard someone saying, “They need to be careful. After all they are the real opposition.”

These youngsters were far more vocal in questioning the government and its controversial policies than the dispirited opposition parties. Kanhaiya, Umar, and Shehla had earned their spurs after the JNU agitation in 2016, while Jignesh became the face of the protest movement following the flogging of four Dalit youths in Una, Gujarat. 

Kanhaiya belonged to All India Students Federation, the student wing of CPI, and later unsuccessfully contested Lok Sabha election from Begusarai in Bihar. Umar too came from a hardcore Communist background and is a professed atheist. Shehla belonged to All India Students Association, affiliated to CPI (ML). Jignesh was a lawyer and Dalit activist based out of Gujarat. He himself hails from the Dalit community. 

On the other hand the Opposition parties were seen as being inhibited in taking to the streets. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was still battling with the pappu image and even those who were opposed to BJP were not taking him seriously. The regional party leaders were seen as too weak with limited appeal and fixated to caste-specific and region-specific agendas. 

Under the Modi regime, the mainstream media had undergone an acute dumbing down with self-censorship taking precedence over speaking truth to power in most media houses. Outspoken Journalists and TV anchors were weeded out and only the pliable ones remained. They were so fully engrossed in singing praises of the government that they gave hardly any space to opposition parties, and lost no opportunity to belittle them.  

Different Trajectories

Now over six years after the Bengaluru Town Hall meet, the career trajectories of these youth leaders have moved in different directions. Kanhaiya moved to the Congress party after being associated with CPI for a few years. Jignesh too gravitated to the Congress party after being elected as an independent MLA from Vadgam in Gujarat. 

Umar continued to soldier on with atheism and ties with left-leaning organisations. He got arrested during the Delhi riots in 2020 as an alleged conspirator and was booked under the draconian UAPA. He has now spent over 1000 days in prison without a trial. The way his case is progressing, with numerous adjournments, is a classic case of ‘process as punishment’ – something that will make Franz Kafka blush.

His case hearing was adjourned on January 23 despite the court making it clear during the previous hearing that no further adjournments would be given. Earlier he was also denied parole during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic as he was a UAPA detainee. Khalid also contracted the virus in jail but survived.

However, all through his struggles, the deafening silence of his erstwhile comrade-in-arm Kanhaiya Kumar appeared very glaring. It is not clear whether there was any personal rift or pressure from the Congress party bigwigs. 

However, Kanhaiya has now become the face of the Congress party, holding press conferences along with senior leaders like Jairam Ramesh, and often regales journalists with his rhetorical flourish.

On the other hand, the Congress party has done little to tap Jignesh’s talents and he remains a nondescript MLA in Gujarat. The party could have projected him as its Dalit face and used his services during elections in various states.

Abject Capitulation

However, the most mystifying trajectory among this lot is that of Shehla Rashid’s. During the above-mentioned Gauri Lankesh birth anniversary function, civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, who was the MC during the function, had praised Shehla effusively. Teesta said Shehla is a Kashmiri, a JNU student, a Muslim, and a woman – in short, she ticks all the boxes that put her in the crosshairs of BJP’s troll army.

Shehla made an impassioned speech about how she was close to Gauri and what a blow her untimely demise was. She attacked the BJP government for throttling dissent and urged the audience to vote out the BJP in the assembly election that was to take place a few months later.

On social media, she was a stormy petrel. She was very vocal on Twitter with frequent jousts with the right-wingers over issues ranging from stifling of dissent to misogyny. 

When the union government abrogated Article 370 that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 and downgraded the state into two Union Territories, she was among a group of 23 petitioners who had filed a case in the Supreme Court in 2022 challenging the government ruling.

However, a year later Shehla sought to withdraw her name from the list of petitioners and it was granted by the apex court.

After that capitulation, she kept a low profile for a while and was conspicuous by her absence on social media platforms. Twitterati was abuzz speculating about her sudden disappearance.

Then she began appearing on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms with posts laudatory of the Narendra Modi government. The icing on the cake was an interview she gave to Smita Prakash of ANI where she hailed Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as being ‘selfless leaders’. She also spoke about her ‘flirtation’ with revolutionary politics and being in an ‘echo chamber’, during her days as a JNU student and how she has outgrown it. 

What caused this turnaround is a million-dollar mystery and hundreds of theories abound. She is not the first person to distance herself from a left-leaning outfit, many have done so in the past owing to various reasons. But the way she is dissing her erstwhile ideology has angered many of her former comrades.

She is now singing praises of the Narendra Modi government with the fervent zeal of a born-again religious convert.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Second Reads: New Insights

In his essay ‘Of Studies’, Francis Bacon remarked, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He was suggesting how a reader should approach books based on the quality and depth of their content. Those ‘tasted’ were worthy of a quick read, while those ‘to be swallowed’ contained important knowledge, like scientific facts, and those with philosophical ideas need to be ‘chewed and digested’.

However, during my reading experience, I have come across books that appear hardly promising while being ‘tasted’, but during a second read, they tell a different story – almost the opposite of what I had earlier thought. I then realised why critics have labelled them as classics.

I first encountered this while reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness during my college days, as it was a part of my course syllabus. I had never read a Conrad novel before, though books like Lord Jim and Secret Agent used to be prominently displayed at bookshops and libraries.

Heart of Darkness appeared much slimmer (150-200 pages) in comparison, but its structure and the main character Marlow’s narration tied me up in knots. I could barely figure out what the novel was about and gave it up midway.

Once the exams were over, and I had nothing better to do during the vacation, I picked up the novel again. Probably because I was in a much more relaxed frame of mind, Marlow’s narration appeared much more comprehensible and the horrors brought about by Western colonialism in Africa became palpable. I immediately realized that I was holding a masterpiece in my hands.

The novel was later adopted by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola to make Apocalypse Now. Coppola changed the setting to Vietnam to narrate the horrors caused by the US military misadventures.

Interestingly, in both the novel and the film the villain's name is Kurtz. He subjugates and rules over the local population. The main protagonists (Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now) are given orders to eliminate him.

Another such book is James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I had tried to read this novel during my college days but gave up halfway as it appeared too dense and convoluted. The stream-of-consciousness narrative for which Joyce was famous for appeared a hard nut to crack.

This writing style rests on the premise that we never think chronologically. Hence the writers try to capture the randomness of the thought patterns of their characters, and the readers are allowed to “listen in” to the characters’ thoughts.

I found this narrative style a big turn-off and became wary of its practitioners – Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and others. However, I also used to get baffled by the accolades the critics used to shower upon them. Joyce’s Ulysses is often rated as one of the best books of the previous century.

After a long hiatus, my interest in Joyce got rekindled while reading a piece on Ernest Hemingway’s advice to an aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson. The Nobel laureate had provided him with a list of books he needed to read before deciding to become a writer, and James Joyce’s Dubliners figured in it.

Since Dubliners happened to be a collection of short stories, I decided to revisit Joyce. The brevity of short stories made them less daunting. While trawling through second-hand books I came across Dubliners and the price was low as the book appeared somewhat soiled.

I bought home the book and took the plunge. What struck me was the incisive characterization. Joyce takes us into the minds of the protagonists and brings out their eccentricities and quirkiness. However, the endings often were somewhat vague, a far cry from the dramatic O’Henry twist. Some stories even make the reader wonder whether the story is really complete.

I didn’t read all the stories in Dubliners, but after reading a few I began to see Joyce’s writing as less intimidating.

A few months later I did see a copy of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man at a second-hand bookstore, but baulked at buying, as previous experience weighed heavily in my mind. However, while going back home I thought maybe it was a mistake. I made amends during my next bookstore visit.

As I waded through the first chapter that recounted the childhood of Stephen Dedalus, the timid and precocious alter-ego of Joyce, I began to see the book in a new light. In fact, it came across as a very vivid picturisation of the insecurities and anxieties while growing up, and makes you wonder: Isn’t this similar to what we all underwent during our school and college days.

The dinner table discussion after the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a polarizing Irish freedom fighter, with the elders of the Joyce household getting divided into two camps, reminded me of similar discussions my father and his friends used to have during the Emergency. While most saw Jayaprakash Narayan as a great white hope, some were wary of his intentions.

Though Joyce spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Dublin remains the muse for all his works. In Portrait too he recreates the sights and smells of the city and eccentricities of its people. Those were the days of gas lights, as electric street lights had not made their appearance.

It was also before the advent of telephones. I often wonder how Joyce, a master stylist who experimented with the language and coined new words, would have approached the present-day SMS lingo used by mobile phone users. YKWIM.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes