What did the students achieve?                 

The protest movement by the students across Tamil Nadu seems to have abated after almost a month. Even if one cannot rule out any further eruption, it looks as if the form of protest such as mass sit-ins and relay hunger strikes are over for now. That we are now closer to the end of the academic session and examinations are just a few weeks away is one reason why the protest actions must be suspended.

It is, however, important to note that the protest actions during the weeks that went by had let in a whiff of fresh air into the political-scape of Tamil Nadu that had turned stale in the couple of decades after the 1980s. A perverse mindset had dominated the culture in the college and university campuses across Tamil Nadu in this period. Those in the professional colleges were behaving like rats in a race and simply chasing call centre jobs as the means to liberation. All that mattered to them was a H1B visa even if it meant a torturous wait on the pavements aside the US consulate in Chennai.

The student community in the arts and science colleges, meanwhile, were victims of a conspiracy that sought to pervert all aspects of life in the college. Eve teasing, caste based mobilisation and celebration of bus days were turning into acceptable forms of collection behaviour by the students; cinema’s contribution to this distortion was immense and none of the political parties in Tamil Nadu cared to criticise this onslaught. It is a fact that the mobilisation that was witnessed in recent weeks was not expected by many who watched the political-scape in Tamil Nadu with a sense of dismay.

It was refreshing to see students voicing their concern for the cause of Tamil speaking people in Sri Lanka and demanding that their own government stand up for the cause in a UN forum. Well. It revived the spirit of 1967 when students marched on the streets, in all big towns in the US,  against their own government’s ugly war in Vietnam. Here was a moment in Tamil Nadu where the students expressed their concern for the rights of human beings in another part of the world; for a people whom they did not know; on issues that concerned the rights of fellow human beings.

The `national’ media, rooted in New Delhi made a fetish out of `friendly’ relations with Sri Lanka to deride the protests. And rather than seeing the protests as a manifestation of a vibrant democracy – because democracy is all about collective mass actions in the cause of others as distinct from conspiratorial and self centred moves by sections of the people for their own preservation and vested interests – many pundits were busy deriding the whole movement as merely the product of machinations by the DMK and the ADMK.

True that there were politicos, mostly from the fringes, who reached out to the students. Some even sought to guide them by posting lessons on the social media sites. But that was all. The dynamics of the protest and the slogans that were expressed in the banners that the students held were evidence that the students were not playing into the hands of any one of the parties and they were there, on the streets, with a mind of their own.

As for the media rooted in New Delhi, they saw the whole epoch as a manifestation of Tamil Nationalism. Well. If concerns for the human rights of the Tamil speaking minority and a protest demanding that the Government of India spoke out against an act by the Lankan army which ended in the massacre of a huge number of Tamil speaking people and also the inhuman torture inflicted upon a set of people because they spoke Tamil is to be reduced to Tamil Nationalism, it is tantamount to saying that sympathy to the Palestinian cause is Arab nationalism; or to speak out against the crimes in Guantanamo Bay is Iraqi Nationalism. That is incidentally the doctrine of George Bush and it is sad that the New Delhi based media peddled.

And there were sections from Chennai too who were peddling this agenda. They were insisting that the mass murder that the Lankan army carried out was not called genocide until the whole thing was inquired into. Well. These were also the same people who stood up for Mahinda Rajapakse while his forces were throwing bombs across the Tamil majority Northern and Eastern province; some of them even praised him for having ensured peace in the Island after three decades of war. Well. These are also the people who are known to have stood up for similar acts by the Indian State in Chattisgarh, in the North-East and elsewhere. They do not care for human rights as long as their own lives are secure.

All this lead to one last question: What did the students achieve? Well in tangible terms, the movement did not succeed in forcing India to stand up and speak against the genocide in the UN. It did not even lead to India staying out of the Commonwealth meet. But then, movements are not judged by tangible gains. If that is to be done, Spartacus did not succeed in his own times. Slavery continued even after he revolted. But then, Spartacus sowed the seeds of liberation from slavery. Likewise, the protests were only a new beginning and it certainly brought in a whiff of fresh air in Tamil Nadu.