Becoming an Activist
(Whether I Wanted to or Not…)
For the longest time, I have rolled my eyes at the word ‘activism’. I may not have said it in so many words, but activists, as far as I was concerned, were pesky misfits who needed to calm down, find a job and get a life.
If you had asked me to define them, I might have said half-jokingly they (Indian activists, at least) were a community of placard-wielding, slogan-shouting, traffic-blocking communists with their knickers in a twist over some issue or the other. Foreign activists were about the same, except they also boarded whaling vessels on the high seas and picketed meetings of the World Trade Organization.
In other words, they were people not like me.
I remember rather clearly an April morning in 1989 when the university I was studying in suddenly erupted in protest. A young theater personality called Safdar Hashmi had been brutally assaulted the day before in broad daylight by a bunch of goons for staging an anti-establishment play called Halla Bol in the neighboring industrial township of Ghaziabad. He succumbed to his injuries the next day.
The young man’s death bothered me. How can you kill someone just for expressing a different point of view? But it also confirmed a suspicion I had nursed for a while — that activism is much more trouble than its worth. The status quo will change if it has to, when it has to, and without my help, thank you very much.
Somehow it didn’t dawn on me that the young man who had just died had paid the ultimate price to make the society I lived in more just and equal. Somehow I failed to make that connection. For some reason, I saw myself as part of a different reality.
And then, as if to underscore my conclusions, barely a couple of months later, the Chinese government shocked the world by sending in tanks and heavily armed soldiers into Tiananmen Square and killing almost three thousand pro-democracy protestors and bystanders in cold blood. I remember shuddering as I read the news that morning.
A couple of days later, one of my professors observed a minute of silence in class, in memory of those who died fighting for democracy. I bowed my head along with the rest of the class, of course, but wondered if maybe our teacher was taking the solidarity thing a bit too far. These were, after all, students in another country.
Again, I had failed to make the connection. These young men and women had died trying to make the world I live in a more democratic place. Yes, it was a different country, but those students who were killed were not much older than I was at the time.
To make a long story short, a couple of decades later I ended up doing what I never thought I would — joining the world of activism. It didn’t happen from one day to the next, of course. I recently came across a thought-provoking essay by author and human rights activist, Frank Barat. In it, Barat talks about people who ask him how he became an activist. He responds by saying,
“We do not become activists, we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. But we have a problem. A big one. We live in a society and an epoch where we do not have time to think any longer. We live in a world where the mainstream education system teaches you to obey and listen to authority from the earliest age and does not offer you the chance to think for yourself.
Our minds and our souls are constantly corrupted by ‘materialistic nothingness’ that is billboarded in front of our eyes and imprinted on our consciousness by advertising, marketing and vulture capitalism.”
He then goes on to say,
“I ‘became’ an activist through books. After having worked liked a ‘good citizen’ doing my nine to five, enjoying my life for the reasons I was told were needed to enjoy it, fulfilling the potential I had been ‘allowed’ to have by society and its ‘leaders’, I stopped. I quit my job and started studying again.”
Barat says he started reading books by Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, John Berger, Kurt Vonnegut and Naomi Klein, books that changed his vision of life and what it was supposed to mean. In his own words,
“A book will mark you like nothing else.”
As I read these lines, I realized that my experience had very closely echoed Barat’s. I too had walked away from a job that I had done for a long time, and I too, in an attempt to make sense of my life and the world around me, began reading and studying again.
That period of personal and professional disillusionment helped me to start asking larger questions about the nature of hierarchies and power structures in society, about leadership, and about the appalling lack of ethics and empathy in the world around me. There’s nothing quite like having to leave a comfortable structure and one’s place in a predictable hierarchy to help you take a good, hard, objective look at it.
Like Barat, the more I read, the more I began to be shaped by what I read. I realize in hindsight now that seven books in particular, had a profound impact on me –
· Looking Away — Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India by Harsh Mander
· Why Gandhi Still Matters by Rajmohan Gandhi
· Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
· The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William R. Shirer
· The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer
· Brokenness and Community by Jean Vanier
· A Different Drum by Scott M. Peck
Reading gave me a broader view of my place in the world and more specifically, in my country. I started to understand how disconnected I had been from India’s realities. It also changed my view of what ‘an activist’ is. My definition is now the same as the Oxford dictionary, namely “a person who works to achieve political or social change.”
I realize now that activism doesn’t only mean marching down a street with a hundred or a thousand other people, holding a placard and shouting slogans, although there is most certainly a time and place for that too. It also means consciously and deliberately doing what you can where you are to strengthen your democracy and everything it stands for. There are many ways of doing that.
For example, I am a teacher by profession. Now when I teach, I try and help my students become more sensitive to the fact that that they are part of a country which has huge social and economic disparities, and that they have a major responsibility towards those less privileged, towards democracy, towards equality and towards societal harmony.
I also try to remind them that learning is much more than the gathering of grades and life is much more than the acquisition of things. I tell them that standing up for the right things will make them unpopular but that there are things in life that are more important than popularity.
I also write, blog and go on protest marches.
If you are amongst those who are increasingly bothered by the direction India has taken politically and socially over the last few years, then you are probably called to be an activist as well, whatever else you may be doing. Citizens of a secular democracy have a responsibility to speak up against bigotry and prejudice, to defend the values of the Indian Constitution, and to speak facts in the face of untruth and propaganda.
Most of all, we are called to be a living example of the values we stand for. It’s easy to preach, it’s very difficult to practice. But as we can see from history, only those who walked their talk ever went on to make a lasting impact on it.
Admittedly activism, like secularism, has been turned into a bad word over the last five years through nonstop linguistic and social engineering. It helps to keep in mind that independent India was born in activism. Gandhi was above all, a dissenter. So was every single participant in India’s freedom struggle. We who have partaken of the fruits of that struggle have a responsibility to keep their legacy alive.
To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, fascism flourishes when those who believe in democracy do nothing. Those who not believe in secular democracy have wasted no time tearing it down. It is high time those of us who do believe in it do everything we can to build it up again.
