Why We Must Organise
By Varkey Parakkal
A considerable part of my first year in Bangalore was spent trying to overcome culture shock, as a student and as an activist. Eventually, it dawned on me that there were two worlds within this city and that they were pliable citizens of the state for two completely opposite reasons. There are the middle/upper-middle classes, these are your average IT guys, engineers, college students and so on, most of them migrants and immigrants. They mostly come from favourable caste-backgrounds as well. The news makes them uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable (yet) as to take organised political action. Coming to the streets in protest is seen as a sort of mild-taboo/inconvenience. Occasionally when conscience raises it’s head in the form of guilt, they tell themselves the age old apolitical mantra “All politics is bad. It’s better to stay out of all this.” and that makes everything alright again. Occasional candle light assemblies in front of Town Hall is acceptable, even encouraged, but workers/students unions and strikes are a big no-no.
On the other end of the spectrum lie the bottom-half of the working class, the wage labourers and the unemployed. They too have a fair share of ‘immigrants’, but immigrants of a different kind. An example of this would be the Powrakarmikas/sanitation workers of Bangalore, mostly comprising of women from the Madiga caste who’ve migrated from Andhra Pradesh. They are far more organised and politically charged compared to the middle and upper middle classes, but this is mostly out of sheer necessity that is caused by their socio-economic conditions. For them every day, every moment is a fight against systematised oppression. But the mechanisms of oppression paired up with the passive ignorance of the middle classes makes any form of protest extremely difficult. This often means that pressure within the system builds up and this head of steam bursts when uncontrollable discontent becomes chaos and violence. The garment workers riots in Bangalore is a recent example of this. The docile and apolitical nature of Bangalore’s populace, especially that of the students lets these socio-economic inequalities fester.
This condition of selective blindness and forced compliance has made Bangalore into a breeding ground of predatory capitalism and well-oiled mechanisms of oppression. This means that large IT companies can lay off and underpay thousands of employees with minimal resistance. This also means that the Bangalore Municipality can employ thousands of workers using illegal contract systems and pay them criminally low wages and expect minimal retaliation. Major educational institutions against which multiple cases allegations of sexual violations exist can function comfortably knowing full well that their students won’t put up a fight. Right-wing fundamentalists can shoot dissidents in the head and get away with it. The list is long.
When I came to Bangalore almost two years ago the Sangh forces were only beginning to flex their muscles at a national level. A fair share of my student life in Bangalore so far is riddled with vain attempts to organize its students in some form. But I feel that these failures on my part have in many ways helped me understand some gaping holes in the tactics that I’ve used in the past to bring students together. More and more I’m starting to meet students who wish to do something against “all that’s happening” but are not sure how to. There are also students who hide their discontent and will to react because they are overwhelmed and intimidated by the nature of their institute’s management. It’s easy to understand why. The last thing anyone who has access to near unlimited amounts of power would want, be it the college management or the central government, is for the people under them to organize. Because of this reason organizing within an educational institution in Bangalore is a near impossible task. And two years of failed attempts have led me to believe that the only logical conclusion is for us students to organize outside of our management. This need not be a union in the traditional sense, but a collective of students from all the colleges in Bangalore coming together to create a platform for discussion and action. We must do this is because we’re up against very organized oppressors, from the right-wing forces that have taken hold of the government to the college managements, and within this system there is very little we can do as individuals. I feel that time is ripe for such an initiative; for students to politicize and organize across campuses in the city.
