Anatomy of activism, as it were

Much as we love Anupam Kher as an actor mdash barring perhaps the one time he played former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh like a penguin mdash his performance that left many baffled once was in 2015 He got on the streets of New Delhi to march from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhawan to submit to the President of India a memorandum roughly arguing that Indians were incapable of intoleranceAnd that nobody had a business stating otherwise Which is strange because protests are usually held to speak truth to power Except Kher had audience with Prime Minister Narendra Modi no less after the march Of course weve seen infinitely more preposterous counterprotests on streets since mdash including ones held in favour of rapeaccusedBut I just had to ask Kher on an ABP news television show then exactly what did he intend to achieve by ratting to the government about 75 equally accomplished artistesintellectuals who had returned their state awardshonours reacting to reported cases of religionbased crimes in India These private citizens had actively given up something they owned He had got on the street against themCiting an author on that list of awardreturnees who wasnt on the show to defend herself he said she received a prize by the government in 1986 Where was she when 1984 antiSikh riots in Delhi happenedWhere were you whenhellip is a phrase sometimes thrown when there is no argument left to defend the indefensible You could be factchecked on where you were when you were not even a thought in your parents headAnd lets say you were even an adult at the time mdash what a common question like this indicates is if youve not publicly protested about something then you have forfeited your right to protest about anything else all your life thereafterThe other barb thrown at protesters is But what abouthellip Implying if you have grouse against one thing you must hold equal and opposite grouse about everything else Fact is you may be more moved by minority rights and I cant stop caring about climate change This is called personal choice not hypocrisyGoing back to Kher who held no public office in 2015 to the best of my knowledge He said he had started the India Gate march against private citizens intending to lead 500 people but ended up with 15000 Unsure if these were political supporters and volunteers which is what any party would like its voters to graduate towardsEither way never in the history of independent protests and nonpartisan demonstrations has gathering thousands of people been easier than with social media over the past decade or so Its something the Indian government was first shaken up by in 2011 seeing the shape Anna Hazares anticorruption campaign took on the national stage Serial faster Hazare up until then used to be a running joke among Maharashtra journalistsBut the bigger shock for the government was watching Indias 25 percenters mdash thin toplayer that pays income tax mdash andor their kith kids and kin braving water cannons at the India Gate protesting against Nirbhaya rape in 2012This is when news anchor Arnab Goswami told me Pranab Mukherjee cabinet minister then called him to say presumably in Bengali Are you turning India into Misr Referring to Arab Spring mdash series of antigovernment protests through Asia and Africa in the early 2010s That started from Misr which is what Egyptians call Egypt The fact is that TV was merely reporting albeit 24x7 social medias spillover to the streetIts best example before my eyes is probably the NotInMyName street protests spread over a crazy number of cities from Bombay Bangalore to Boston against religionbased violence with Indias upperclass mdash that mysteriously identifies itself as the middleclass mdash even holding placards to say Even we cant believe were hereThis began with an ordinary Facebook post by one Saba Dewan in June 2017 as actoractivist Swara Bhasker points out in her lengthy foreword to the Harper Collins book Inquilab which catalogues speeches and letters from mainly nationallevel protests over the past decade Its a decent scrapbook given that its impossible to keep track of protests per minute online mdash over a random KBC quiz question to a perfectly innocuous jewellery adWhat social media has done is turn most people I know into activists of some kind mdash whether or not they hit the streets for what they believe in although they do You can sense activism not so much in their social media posts as what they press likedislike button to in an alternate world where retweetsshares are definitely endorsements and RT is the new charityNone of these people I know holds aspirations to public office Neither do they have political parties or propaganda machineries behind them What chance do they have against a state for instance that is gazillion times more powerful than their vote once in five years And even more fellow citizens actively trashing everything they sayI recently heard two journalists with an activist bent or vice versa Ravish Kumar and Aakar Patel propose victorychange as being immaterial as an outcome Kumar says its simply about showing up at the proverbial battlefield Patel compares writing unpopular opinion to being that dissenting judge in a Supreme Court bench PointMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paperKeep scrolling to read more newsCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news crime news current affairs and a complete guide from food to things to do and events across Mumbai Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates MidDay is now on Telegram Click here to join our channel middayinfomedialtd and stay updated with the latest news