Student Activism: Narratives for Protest Cultures
Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ rang with a chiming echo in the vicinity of multiple college campuses, as students popularized its verses during anti-CAA protests, transforming it into an unmistakable protest symbol. Protest parlance adopted the social media’s dynamics to not only register their anti-fascist sentiment, but to also lay bare their resilience against deterrence from police excesses, gunshot firing, violence and unexplained detentions.
The youth of our country have increasingly absorbed their college campuses and streets into blank slates, imprinting strong shades of protest in favor of democratic ideals, and opposing State autocracy and misinformation. While there have been innumerable, failed attempts to paint spaces like JNU, New Delhi as a breeding ground for so-called anti-nationals, the students here have time and again proved that an intellectual arena is not supposed to be synonymous with an apolitical space. The JNU, Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) and the University of Hyderabad secured their positions among the top 10 in NIRF 2020 university rankings. While mainstream media has infamously painted these universities as riot hotspots, these have been ranking fundamentally well in university rankings at home and abroad. The students here choose to channelize their education into awareness and principled opposition, whenever the need is felt. As student activism has been garnering ever-expanding support across the nation, it also begins to factorize emerging protest cultures. Thus, it becomes imperative to understand how these protest spaces look.
These spaces manifest in themselves the intrinsic realm of college campus’ intellectual acumen, and student community’s oneness, making these spaces largely safe and also radical at the same time. In this sense, student-led political activism erects a classic facade of inclusivity and intersectionality in developing protest culture. Public universities in particular are devoid of discriminatory gate-keeping — so, when marches and sit-ins are organised at places as these, it is relatively easier for students of all contexts and backgrounds to not only find an accessible platform of voicing dissent, but also create a culture and narrative of aware and informed speech.
Accordingly, student activism has penetrated deep into, but not restricted itself to chiefly employing social media platforms for raising important concerns. They’re thus able to not just reach out to a bigger audience, but also cut across multi-layered differences of culture and class, and navigate through privilege to make every opinion heard. And hence, informed and academia-backed dissent is an important narrative being put out for protest cultures to adopt, besides intersectionality and accessibility.
Beyond this, a major feature of student-led political activism is the simultaneous employment of a wide spectrum of protest methods. From sloganeering to silent sit-ins, campaign memes to wall graffiti, dissenting poetic verses to explanatory illustrations on roads, the ambit of tools used for opposition has been significantly widened. For those, who can’t walk into marches with placards in hand, or can’t abandon class attendance in protest (sometimes simply for the moral commitment to their parents), novel tools and methods of protest have been reinvented in students’ opinion pool. What’s more significant is, that while various methods and art forms had continued to exist as effective tools for voicing discontent or opposition, its impact gets amplified the moment it is translated from an individual opinion to a piece in the consolidated effort of an entire community (students, here).
The permeation of this resourcefulness in student activism is again a strong marker of attempts at inclusivity in their protest movements. The youth have made it amply clear that an inclusive and unified approach to opposing the wrongs and seeking redresses and can go a long way in establishing the significance of your movements.
By Riya Gangwal