Young people need not have all the answers before they earn the right to question
Subrat Ratho
A thoughtful response to my recent piece on Neha Bora, from someone I respect for his integrity, experience and practical wisdom, made me pause.
While appreciating my enthusiasm, he posed questions that I think deserve to be taken seriously: if young people are angry about unemployment, inequality, paper leaks and the deterioration of education, do they have any concrete plan of action to solve these problems? If not, is the movement anything more than a platform for venting frustration?
I acknowledge there is substance in the criticism.
I do not know whether the CJP has a comprehensive programme for employment, education or economic policy. I certainly would not expect that Neha Bora—or Abhijit Dipke, Saurav Das or Ashutosh Ranka—has all the answers to the country’s problems.
But I am not sure that this is the right test by which to judge any of them.
There is a difference between governing a country and questioning some of the ways it is being governed.
A person who points out that there is unemployment does not become irrelevant because she cannot produce a ten-year employment-generation strategy. A student who protests against examination paper leaks does not need to arrive with a blueprint for reforming the examination system before she earns the right to protest.
We should, of course, expect more from political movements than anger alone. At some point, protest has to evolve into ideas, and ideas into workable alternatives. If the CJP aspires to become a political force, it will eventually have to answer the difficult questions of policy, implementation and trade-offs.
But that is a different question from whether the anger that produced the movement is legitimate.
In fact, I would argue that anger is sometimes the beginning of politics, not its end.
Many important changes in society did not begin with a perfectly drafted policy document. They began with somebody saying: This is not right.
There is another point in the response that I found particularly interesting: the suggestion that these young rebels will eventually “join the System”, become part of the “haves”, settle down and perhaps make the usual compromises later in life.
Perhaps many will.
But if that happens, it will not necessarily prove that their present convictions were insincere.
A young activist may become a civil servant. A protester may become a corporate executive. Someone who once stood outside the System may eventually find herself inside it. That is not necessarily hypocrisy. Sometimes it is simply life.
My original piece was not an endorsement of every position taken by Neha Bora. I was responding to something more basic: the willingness of a young person to step out of a comfortable cocoon and engage publicly with questions that matter.
That quality is worth recognising even if one does not endorse a particular ideological preference.
Indeed, I would be uncomfortable if my praise of Neha were interpreted as saying that she is right about everything.
I spent a substantial part of my own life inside the System. I have seen how difficult it is to convert a good intention into a workable policy. I therefore have sympathy for the argument that criticism is easier than governance.
But having been inside the System also taught me something else.
Governments need people outside the System to question them.
They need citizens who are inconvenient. They need young people who ask uncomfortable questions. They need critics who are sometimes imperfect in their arguments, and sometimes offer no solution at all.
The answer to a protester who says, “This is wrong,” cannot always be, “What is your alternative?”
Sometimes the appropriate response is first to ask:
“Is it, in fact, wrong?”
If it is, the protester has already performed a useful democratic function.
Of course, the next question must eventually be: What should be done instead?
That is where movements mature—or disappear.
Perhaps the CJP will eventually develop concrete ideas. Perhaps it will remain primarily a vehicle for protest. Perhaps some of its young participants will enter electoral politics, some will join the administration or civil society, and others will eventually walk away from politics altogether.
We do not know.
But I am reluctant to dismiss a young person’s dissent today because of what she may become twenty years from now.
To my mind, there is something almost unfair about demanding that a seventeen-year-old, or a twenty-five-year-old, demonstrate the practical wisdom of someone more ‘experienced’ before taking him or her seriously.
Young people are allowed to be unfinished.
They are allowed to be angry before they provide solutions. They are allowed to question before they know the answer. They are allowed to get some things wrong.
And perhaps, occasionally, they are allowed simply to remind the rest of us that we have become too accustomed to things that should never have become normal.
That, rather than any particular political affiliation, is what I find worth celebrating in Neha Bora and youngsters like her.
I may disagree with her or the CJP tomorrow, but I am not apologetic about my enthusiasm today.
I would rather engage with a young person asking difficult questions than a generation that has stopped asking them altogether.
One factual/editorial point worth noting: CJP is already publicly presenting demands and campaigns around education and accountability, so Ratho Sir’s careful wording—“I do not know whether the CJP has a comprehensive programme…”—is exactly right. It does not claim they have no programme; it asks whether they yet have a sufficiently developed policy framework for governing. Recent reporting also shows the movement continuing its education-focused campaigns and facing criticism about its politics and leadership, which makes this essay’s distinction between protest and governance particularly timely.
