New to the scene

If we were to jog our collective memory to recall who we were at the cusp of a newly independent nation, Mehboob Khan’s 1957 cult classic, Mother India , is where we should pause for breath. The film reflected the odds and the aspirations of an emerging nation, largely poor and living in its villages. When Radha (played by Nargis) finds out that her son has hidden a gun in a haystack to help him kill the exploiting moneylender Kanhaiyalal, she momentarily convinces him to give up the path of revenge. A gun is of no use to harvest fields or feed them rotis, she points out. In the end, when she shoots her bandit son Birju (Sunil Dutt), her famous line, “ Main beta de sakti hoon , laaj nahi de sakti ” (I can give up my son, not my honour), sparked fierce idealism and a non-negotiable moral code in a new India — bandits deserved to die, even at the hands of those who birthed them, and even if fate had been merciless to them and injustice shaped their world view and politics.

Sixty one years after Mother India , and another Republic Day gone by, India isn’t the same, in demography or beliefs. Half our population is under 25 years. Two-third under 35. What does the republic mean to them?

This questions rings with scepticism on Quora, an online site where users pose queries and other users attempt to answer them: Is patriotism alive in the Indian youth?

“... you are questioning about our patriotism? We are so patriotic that you could be named Anti-National for questioning us, on such a sensitive issue...” writes Prakhar Singh, who also goes by the name of ‘Proud Indian!’.

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Kriti Kumar is preparing for her Std XII board exams at one of Delhi’s Army schools. The humanities student regularly takes part in youth parliament debates and performs in the nukkad nataks (street theatre) staged by her school troupe. For one of their recent shows, Kumar and her friends decided to do a play centred on the government’s cleanliness drive, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, to send out the message that it was everybody’s responsibility to keep their surroundings clean. “A guy who was watching our play keenly throughout, spat on the ground next to him just as we finished. Swachh Bharat sounds great on a billboard but, in reality, old habits die hard,” she says.

Like her peers, she gets 80 per cent of her news from social media. Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp are her primary eyes and ears to the world outside. Then, of course, there are her teachers, who act as fact-checkers to that information flow, nudging them to think further and question. Kumar’s biggest dilemma right now is deciding who to vote for in the next Lok Sabha elections — she and her friends will be first-time voters. “We’re starved of alternatives,” she says. “This is a rising concern. Where is our country headed?” Not interested in a government job, she wants to channel her creativity into a profession such as journalism or designing.

Thirty-two-year-old Vivek Chaturvedi is a public sector employee who feels “strongly patriotic” not just about the idea of India as a great nation, but also its heritage, people, expansive geography, and vast economic machinery. “As a public sector banker, I believe I have the opportunity to discharge my national duties as a citizen every single day,” says this senior manager at SBI Meerut, adding that his patriotism finds expression each time he pays his taxes and casts his vote.

For Ambika Khanna, a 27-year-old Delhi-based entrepreneur, patriotism also happens to make business sense. In 2012, she joined her father’s company, which deployed the bio-digester technology developed by DRDO to convert human waste into water and biogas. The Swachh Bharat initiative, which came much later, gave the business a major boost. “The Swachh Bharat campaign helped start a chain reaction that helped us get through to people who would have otherwise never made sanitation a priority,” she says.

“I feel that each of us needs to invest not just emotion but time in the country; we must get down to the task and get our hands dirty. If we want sanitation, we must adopt new technologies; if we want women’s safety we must change the ways of our patriarchal upbringing,” Khanna adds.

She believes that in this age of digitisation, where it’s easy for everyone to have an opinion and express it online, the real difference can only be made on the ground.

Her thinking is shared by many in the new generation of politically ambivalent older millennials, who appear eager to log out and find their “India connect” offline.

“Social media has the ability to amplify human intent — good and bad, as Facebook would put it. The original concept of the internet needs a massive design-upgrade. Fake news, hate speech, online populism, echo chambers and filter bubbles are getting people in a frenzy today. Governments and Industry both have their own agendas while using social media, and the ill-effects are beginning to hurt and polarise people,” says 33-year-old Rahul Batra, a digital industry professional based in Myanmar’s Yangon.

“I can’t talk for everyone, but I personally felt manipulated by the notifications,” says Shiv Tandan, the 27-year-old founder of Mumbai-based start-up Castiko, a project management tool for casting directors. “Online, one wrong word or awkward phrasing is enough to derail you,” he explains.

“It’s low stakes and we all learn in the process,” says the young businessman, who prefers to call himself a humanist rather than a patriot, adding that his views were influenced by Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on nationalism. “The poor guy wrote and spoke so much against nationalism, and we ended up using his lyrics as national anthems. In two countries,” he says.

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In the bastion of all things young and patriotic — the Indian army — something is awry, if retired major general Bishambar Dayal is to be believed.

“The army is no longer the same. The number of young people volunteering is low. The quality of intake is low,” says the recipient of the Vashisht Seva Medal.

“The army I joined was led by people who had fought for the idea of India. That relevance is lost today. The youth are more driven by economic progress than anything else. The passion to join the armed forces has dwindled because nothing fuels it any longer. The willingness to go into the army has to be embedded into your brain and heart from childhood, by your parents and teachers. Else, it becomes the last option,” he says.

Rural areas remain thriving centres of army recruitment, mainly due to the lack of alternative jobs. But even there, the aspiration is gradually shifting towards employment in urban industries.

“The army is losing its mass appeal because of the lack of a strong political leadership and bureaucracy. Justice and respect for the ordinary jawan is out of reach,” says Dayal, who also terms the seventh pay commission a disappointment for army youth. The struggles of the jawan on the border are often cited to justify everything from the strain of standing in ATM queues after demonetisation, to standing for the national anthem in a cinema theatre, but the jawan is someone nobody wants to actually become, he points out.

Krishna Prasad* is a 25-year-old Bengaluru-based techie, who quotes Piotyr Dirk and Thomas Jefferson to spell out his view of patriotism — ‘a patriot is somebody who protects his country from his government’; and ‘dissent is the highest form of patriotism’, respectively. He pays taxes, keeps his environment clean, makes “a conscious effort to not exploit the weakness of others”, and sponsors education for the underprivileged.

And he fiercely defends the public right to protest.

Towards the end of 2017, the founder of the Facebook group Humans of Hindutva, known for its satire and political humour, received death threats and was bullied into shutting down the page. Recently, there’s been a low-intensity revival of sorts, by way of the launch of another Facebook page called Human of Hindutva (HoH) Returns.

“Since the original page was pretty successful in exposing the comic side of extremism, we wanted to continue its mission. HoH Returns is an attempt to critique the present fundamentalist crises we face today, whilst keeping the spirit of the original page,” explains its founder, who remains anonymous, in an online interview to BL ink .

“Among all former European colonies, India is one of the rare countries to have enjoyed a sustained democracy... Yet, 70 years down the line, history is being distorted and intolerance is growing.

“The duty of a citizen starts with aiming to provide every person their basic needs, and it never ends until that is achieved,” he adds.

His words find an echo in the Oxfam International survey, released recently, which showed that the richest one per cent in India has cornered 73 per cent of the wealth generated in the country last year, presenting a worrying picture of rising income inequality. Moreover, 67 crore Indians comprising the population’s poorest half saw their wealth rise by just one per cent.

In the final scenes of Anurag Kashyap’s latest film, Mukkabaz , Shravan Singh, aka ‘Uttar Pradesh’s 29-year-old Mike Tyson’ (played by Vineet Kumar), rescues his wife from her manipulative uncle, Bhagawan Das (Jimmy Shergill). Das is the image of everything that repulses Singh and others like him — a local tyrant who uses his privileged upper caste identity to abuse and exploit, using his influence to ruin both Singh’s promising boxing career and marriage. In a fit of rage, Singh grabs Das and knocks him down. He has resisted for far too long. The landing of each punch finishes with a “Bharat mata ki jai”, intoned slowly, with disgust, almost as if the words themselves carried in their syllables Kumar’s vilest of abuses.

As a viewer, something breaks in you then to know that for a large number of young Shravan Singhs, holding stellar potential and drive, the country is the beast in front of which they stand powerless, trapped and stripped of all dignity.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” said the US President John F Kennedy famously. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, has chimed similarly, asking the country’s 1.2 billion citizens to take responsibility for solving national problems. In the Republic of 67-crore Shravan Singhs, that sounds like not just a tall, but unreasonable order.

*Some names have been changed to protect identities

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