Hokkolorob: The Bengal Revolution Hashtag

The Jadavpur University protests—that have linked up with sympathisers across the world—are evidence of the triumph of social media as a weapon in the hands of young people. God bless the children.

 By now, all of India knows about the police brutality against students at Jadavpur University (JU) on September 17, the events that led up to it and the unprecedented student protests that have been happening since then.

On the same day, halfway across the world, the Principal of the Neshaminy High School in suburban Philadelphia removed the editor of the Playwickian, a student magazine, and suspended their adviser and journalism teacher for two days on leave without pay. The offence they had committed was to refuse to use the word Redskins in their newspaper, even though that was the name for the official mascot for the school. The magazine’s editorial board had made a collective decision to stop using the term Redskins since they believed it was offensive and disrespectful to Native Americans. The Principal was not amused. He went ahead and docked $1200 from the magazine’s budget as extra punishment. The Philadelphia Enquirer noted that

“The disciplinary actions appear to represent more ripples in a seemingly unending battle between administrators and members of Neshaminy’s student newspaper, the Playwickian, over whether students can ban the name of the school mascot from the paper.”

In Kolkata, we have seen protests of the kind Berkeley and the Sorbonne saw in the sixties. Spine-tingling YouTube videos of the early hours of September 17 show students jostling with police, the atmosphere crackling with the tension of events yet to unfold. Over the weekend, thousands of students marched on the streets in pouring rain demanding the dismissal of the Vice Chancellor of JU, firstly for failing to take action on a group of young male students accused of molesting a young female student on campus, and secondly, for inviting the police into the campus to deal with protesting students and failing to prevent the violent beatings that the students fell victim to. The story continues to unfold and #hokkolorob is trending on twitter.

Hok Kolorob, the protestors’ slogan that is sweeping the web, is the title of a song by Bangladeshi musician Arnob Shayan Chowdhury, enormously popular among Kolkata’s college students. Hok Kolorob  is the equivalent of the popular Hindi cry “halla bol”—“let there be noise”. You can hear the original song here.

Now Rupam Islam, a young star of the contemporary Bengali music, has recorded his own version of the songto show his support for the students. You can hear it here.

At Neshaminy, the students took to social media rightaway in protest. They launched a campaign overnight on a crowdfunding site, Indiegogo, to raise awareness about the incident and appealed for funds to replace the budget gap and to compensate the journalism teacher for loss of pay.  As of writing, they had raised $ 5,585 against a goal of $ 2400. Their T-shirts and other merchandise are all sold out. Mainstream–and not so mainstream—media has taken up their cause and everyone from Salon to the Huffington Post have reported on this incident, mostly in favour of the student editors at Neshaminy. Student magazines across the country are expressing their solidarity with the Playwickian. My own daughter, who is on the editorial board of her school magazine, plans to run a feature on this incident in their next issue. Her school changed the name of the mascot from the Redskins to the Redhawks in 1984.

This is not the only recent controversy over the use of the term Redskins. Dan Snyder, a billionaire owner of the Washington Redskins, a football team, has been under pressure to drop the use of the Redskins name or sell the team.

The Principal of Neshaminy High School is yet to back down from his position as of writing. In Kolkata, the Vice Chancellor has issued a pathetic apology, referring to the disaster as his inevitable destiny, and the Education Minister for the state was featured in a bizarre interview where he repeatedly denied he was indeed the Education Minister. The students have the overwhelming support of the masses. Some of my own friends have participated in the protest marches in Kolkata, some hand-in-hand with their own college-going children.

I am not going to address the moral and legal issues of either case here. The story that is far more interesting to me is that in both cases, it is social media that will call the eventual winner of the battle – that much is foretold. Public opinion today is all about who has more followers on twitter, how many likes on Facebook, and how quickly they can mobilize mass support using the many digital platforms available.  Middle-aged high school Principals and Vice Chancellors have no chance. In today’s world, they are hopeless Luddites and hapless deer in the headlights, caught completely unaware by the oncoming steamroller of a million millennial opinions collaborating and conspiring on digital platforms that most people above a certain age cannot even comprehend.

And they are connected across the world – instant friends bonded by a common cause today, on to another cause tomorrow. Their bond is a mere hashtag. Before we knew it, the JU protests had been linked with Hong Kong student protests through a simple hashtag at the end of an innocuous tweet. YouTube is aflame with all kinds of videos and the flames cannot be put out by any amount of apology and restitution. This is the future we need to get used to, where political and formal authority are powerless against an onslaught of liberal public opinion that defies authority and permeates all national borders.

Dare I call this the age of revolution by social media?

Change can come about very rapidly in today’s world where everyone is on social media and has simultaneous access to news that spreads at the speed of light. Change is also likely to be forced by collective action mobilized through social media, and is more likely to be led by millennials who are suspicious of authority and are scarred from the prolonged recession in the West that has considerably dimmed their career prospects. Incidents like Neshaminy underscore a deeper discontent with the state of affairs. Intractable principals are merely unwitting actors in a grand theater production they do not understand yet.

Neshaminy High School finds itself and its embattled Principal in the middle of a storm they cannot see the end to.  And halfway across the world, Jadavpur University turns into a seething cauldron of student protest as the Hok Kolorob movement gathers momentum like a dark storm.

Thankfully, student activism lives. God bless the children.