February 2016

My last post was about how the present times feel like the first few weeks of the Covid pandemic. But, then my mind went back to the winter of 2016. I had returned to India after finishing my Master’s in Holland. In January, the Dalit student Rohit Vemula had taken his own life a few months ago after months of harassment by the university administrators in Hyderabad. His death had sparked protests in several central universities, which were at the time bastions of the ‘left’. And, then, the Modi government targeted India’s premier social science institution, JNU. It detained the head of JNU’s student union on charges of sedition, the same British-era law used to target revolutionaries. JNU was convulsed with student protests. I was visiting friends in Delhi at the time, who were also harbouring some students on the run from the police. I participated in a march too, my first student march ever. Such was the fervent in the air, such was the sense of outrage among all left-progressives that even stoic cynical me couldn’t remain untouched. I contemplated applying to JNU for my PhD studies. That phase passed and in a few months I was thrown into the most challenging period of my life. Trump’s fascist onslaught against students feels much more audacious and ferocious than Modi’s, but the parallels are unmistakable.

Events in India would continue to singe my heart over the coming years, but from a distance. And, then they would pale in comparison to the genocide in Gaza and the monsters that it unmasked.

If India offers lessons on how fascism in the US will unfold, they are lost on me. India is a right-wing society led by a far-right government. The US, for all its considerable ills is not. Maybe the fascist here are moving at breakneck speed because they know they have limited time.