INDIA’S DEMOCRACY THREATENED
How does a country go from democracy to autocracy? The socio-political situation in India today is an example of this transition happening in real-time. The threat it poses to minority communities is no secret, however, what is being overlooked is the direct attack on the livelihood of the proletariat under this regime. According to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), unemployment in India is at 6.9%, with an urban unemployment rate at an all-time high of 8.3%. With the onset of the pandemic, the question has not been “if”, but “when” a mass uprising will come up against the state. However, the unemployed are not the ones creating any major social unrest. In an interview, Mahesh Vyas, the director for CMIE, said that labour force participation is decreasing in some Indian states, as people have given up their search for jobs. Surprisingly, January 24 and 25 this year saw something different. Angered by the state’s inability to conduct examinations of job vacancies on the railway, mounting since 2019, thousands of railway students staged a sit-in protest at railway stations in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP). They have been disrupting social order and resisting all law-enforced pressure, to ensure that their demands are met. Yet, the Indian government’s reaction to this protest gives way to its transformation from democracy to autocracy.
BEGINNINGS OF A RIOT
The crisis involves at least 2.8 million people who had applied for vacancies in the railway back in 2019. The notification for the exam needed in order to work there was issued by the government at the beginning of 2019, however, those who had applied then had to wait an entire year for the exam to be held, with a further year of waiting for the results to be released. Inconclusively, some results were declared flawed in several categories, and new exams had to be proposed for those affected. This created chaos among the applicants, with no appointment letters having been issued to these groups, who, at this point, had been waiting for jobs for almost three years.
Noted politician and scholar, Yogendra Yadav referred to these individuals as “virtually unemployed”. They spent years preparing for jobs that in the end had minimal vacancies, with no defined exam or result release dates set. For example, people in the railway protest today are the same people who had applied for a basic trainee level position, for which the government had stated there were 90,000 vacancies. Almost 2.8 million people applied. The story is the same for people in other categories and departments in the country. The Group D Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) exam and Non-Technical Popular Categories (NTPC) exam, for example, were due to be held in 2019, so their delay cannot be attributed solely to the pandemic.
In situations like these the logical pathway for a democratic government to take is to seek clarification and then open a dialogue with those heading the protests to arrive at a solution. However, their first response was a police clampdown on protesters, brutally battering the students with sticks. On both days of the protest, they were viciously attacked and beaten for exercising their right to protest and asking for employment. If the police crackdown was not enough, the only official communication that came from the Indian Ministry of Railways, was a statement claiming that all job aspirants who had indulged in “unlawful activities like protesting” are “misguided”. The notice claimed that videos of the protest will be examined to identify those involved, to preclude them from getting a railway job for the rest of their lives. To defend its ideological apparatus, the government deployed such notifications to deter and prevent any kind of dissent from taking hold against the Indian state. The government did not attempt to address the issue, nor dispute the agenda of the protesters. There was simply no other type of official communication given.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE PROTESTS
The state’s suppression of dissent in such a manner is neither new nor recent. In the last four years, the government has particularly strengthened its stance against public protests. More recently, in the last two years both the CMIE and the state have passed legislation, banning people from protesting. By forcefully passing a bill in the parliament, the Centre passed legislation called the Essential Services Bill, 2021 which prevents ordnance factory workers from striking, funding a strike, or supporting one in another capacity. The bill specifies a fine and imprisonment for the workers who had recently started raising their voices against the privatisation of their department. States like Bihar have passed rules where people who have protested will never qualify for an executive position. The same goes for the state of Haryana, which went a step further and included a clause preventing family members of people in government services from attending protests. It increasingly seems like the legacy that has been inherited by this nation is no longer that of Gandhi and the freedom struggle, but that of the British and the freedom struggle, as there is increased, reactive usage of anti-terror laws against protesters and dissenters.
The newly erupted railway protests show no signs of slowing down, with no way to predict the path they will take. However, if history is to be repeated, groups of people who held similar movements back in 2019 were washed away by nationalist agendas. In the interactions I witnessed as a journalist with these protesters, I realised the extent to which these beliefs have been ingrained in their minds. Many of these protesters belong to impoverished families, barely making ends meet, and were still wary about raising slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Concurrently, they were objecting to other people doing so, to avoid tarnishing his image. They were asking for their rights, without the clarity of knowing who they were speaking up against, or who was responsible for fixing the problem. Herein lies the problem for the country’s future. By deterring the unemployed through a lack of transparency, India has begun to erode their own pillars of democracy.
Shubhangi Derhgawen is a research journalist with New Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV). She is also pursuing her masters in Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany.