India’s famed demographic dividend is currently up and down the forlorn street.
The so-erudite prime minister often tells them how to take examinations, but he forgot to tell the examiners how to plug the leaks.
One reason may be that those who conduct examinations are cosy private parties, operating from cloistered venues of safety. Causing exposure to them could not but upset the privatising, crony applecart, could it?
In seven years gone by, there have been 70 leaks, and Gurudev Modi has not spoken to the calamity in any single one of his celebrated, even if sophomoric, Sunday morning radio perorations.
India has never had a prime minister who disliked unpleasant things as much as Modi.
Think of how Manipur, a caved-in Ram Path, a collapsed airport terminal, a leaking Ram Temple roof, bridges falling apart even as they are built, and much more, are all waiting to be spoken to by the magical Modi ji.
Not to speak of the chunks of home and hearth usurped by China, or continuing killings in Kashmir despite an interminable denial of popular, representative government.
They are always other people’s concerns, aren’t they? And, other people’s responsibility too.
Podsnappery par excellence.
So some five million of our higher demographic dividend preparing for examinations at the highest levels of aspiration and suffering, keep encountering leaks, and keep remaining desperately humiliated and unemployed.
What could suit the privatising crony regime more than keeping the demographic dividend out of remunerative work? Which is where the leaks help.
Having sold off the bulk of the state-sector economy to the burgeoning billionaires, where are the jobs? So leaks are patriotic; they assist in the sell offs.
Leaks are nationalist instruments too.
Often, they benefit subjects with close ties to the establishment, thus assisting in the macro objective of furnishing doctors, bureaucrats, law-enforcement people, academicians, vice-chancellors, and sundry other employees, all of one dependable hue.
Not to forget that leaks are money-loaded too; they procure much-needed cash to loyal aficionados who are then enabled to be of use in other ways, even if electoral bonds have been foolishly shut down.
So leaks help in more than one way.
Times were when students were a force to reckon with. Their unions raised questions about the plight of India’s labouring men and women who have had no schooling. And they could not be double-spoken to, or fobbed off with talk of “development”.
They braved lathi and water cannon and brought about sweet transformations.
Indeed, now that the Emergency of the mid-Seventies is sought to be resurrected to dilute Modi’s undeclared Emergency, our rulers may recall how that old one was brought down most by sentient and organised student power, of which establishment satraps of today were a part.
Is it then conceivable that the current agitation by students, however marginalised, could call out the doublespeak of the day by giving to Caesar his own of 50 years ago?
Will the streets speak where, as before, parliament is silenced, ostensibly because decorum and discipline on behalf of those who would address the issue must take precedence over the unconscionable misery of a five million demographic dividend?
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
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