The Thing About Cockroaches

THIS IS JUST HAPPENING outside Kafka’s pages. As the disgruntled Indian youth awoke one cheerless morning from uneasy nightmares, they found themselves transformed in their wretched country into gigantic cockroaches. This metamorphosis was the most natural thing that could have happened in a place where hope was abandoned long before national examination papers were leaked, and where the young who dared to dream were bracketed as deplorables depleting national resources. The Cockroach Janta Party was bound to be born.

Really?

The immortal cockroach as the new shape of dissent is an idea that warms quite a few drawing-room hearts in India. Who doesn’t want a Dirty Harry when most of us are too reluctant to dirty our own manicured hands? During the halcyon days of AAP, the middle-class endorsement of the apolitical political movement came from a similar impulse. Now dissent, we are told, has a satirical content. Maybe some of them out there trolling as dissidents in the world’s ‘largest autocracy’ have a different meaning of satire. Laughter can be rejoinder, and its literary and political tradition cuts across cultures. Laughter without moral content—and as a replacement for argument—is an unserious activity. Cockroaches crawl in empty corners.

Maybe the zeitgeist needs a footnote, even if comic. We need not travel back to the Sixties to be thrilled by the breached barricades and streets erupting in the romance of defiance. Gaza brought them from the classrooms to the angry squares of conscience-baring, turning the bombarded Palestinian territory into a four-letter invocation of freedom. The isolation of Israel in global opinion, and many governments getting tentative in their relationship with Netanyahu’s Israel, is indebted to the moral atmosphere created by a generation once written off as snowflakes by the cynics. Latent anti-Semitism may have darkened the moral part, but the generational swell of anger has certainly shifted the argument.

In retrospect, it was the morality of the crowd that powered the youthful dissent in Tahrir Square and elsewhere. (And in Tiananmen, tanks answered the slogans, and we still don’t know who that lone figure walking towards martyrdom was.) Liberation didn’t come along when the squares were emptied and the jails were filled up, and that was mainly because a crowd doesn’t make a movement. There was no revolutionary-in-chief promising a tomorrow; there was only the polyphony of anger. It nevertheless succeeded in instilling fear in dictatorship—even re-humanising power in some instances.

Apolitical movements become subversive politics when they have a moral cohesiveness and clarity about the future. The road to freedom always had someone in the front, as the chosen interpreter of resentment. Apolitical politics had its most rewarding moments when Václav Havel was there as the protagonist of the Velvet Revolution of 1989, with We the People as its retort to totalitarianism. What began as an amateur’s pledge in a theatre called Magic Lantern in Prague would become a winning argument against communism. There was a leader to frame the morality of dissent, to explain what it meant to be an apolitical politician, and to show what it was like “living in truth.” In India, the AAP story, for a while in the beginning, had that apolitical resonance of a new political beginning. Power killed the ideal.

Is it that the cockroaches are what dissent gets in the age of digital free-for-all? When arguments require not more than an X-long onslaught, and when the anonymity that trolls can afford makes free speech a festival of bad taste, dissent becomes a moral circus staged in the autonomous cyberspace. The Cockroach Janta Party (the name drawn from the chief justice’s less-than-elegant metaphorical flourish), by turning a mockery into a memento, aspires to be cool. The messaging is hardly cool or coherent. It is not their demands, in their bullet-point brevity, alone that add an unseriousness to this digital festival. It is more about how they, the disembodied voices in the digital echo chamber, place themselves in a democracy.

Democracy itself is a sham in their India without justice. And such a portrait of the country is inevitable whenever cause goes out in search of context. When there is none, they create one. We have been here before. We have seen the “end of imagination” after India’s nuclearisation, perhaps like Adorno saw the end of poetry after Auschwitz. There was no exaggeration in Adorno: the reality was too overwhelming to allow poetry. Nuclear India killing imagination was a different case of dissent. We the Cockroaches is not a war cry in a land without justice. Maybe it’s how democracy indulges the digitally armed youth who are yet to get the grammar of dissent right.