Dissent And Drama: The Five Schools CAA And NRC Protesters Come From

At this point, it appears that the discussion around the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) has engulfed more people than the population of Europe and the United States put together.

Since the Rajya Sabha passed the Bill over a week ago, each new day has come with its own set of rumours, protests, violence, and challenges for law and order.

However, the bigger question is who are the protesters, where are they coming from, and what do they want?

To answer this question, one has to look at the five different schools these protesters come from. These are not schools in a literal sense, but schools of political thought and ideology, for the CAA protests have more to do with fictitious assumptions than factual realities.

Here are the schools, arranged in the ascending order of the danger they represent to law and order, and where they stand now, more than a week later into the protests.

Firstly, there is a school that wants to sound cool or woke. These include most social media users. The protests began with them claiming how Modi was a reincarnation of Hitler, of how saffron was taking over the flag of India, and how CAA was going to expel legal Muslim citizens of India.

The students of this school will never get to the streets since they have colleges to attend, offices to reach, and parents to answer to, but peer pressure compels them to take a stand.

However, the same peer pressure doesn’t enable them to dig up facts or read. So, they’ll go as far as attributing a slowdown in the economy to the CAA. These are the ones who are the ones to jump the ship, and as of today, all of them have. Now that the issue has lost relevance in the woke circles, they’ll be happy going back to discussing their drinking plans for the New Year.

Second, there is the school of ‘influencers’. Their digital bios carry the tag of them being social media ‘influencers’ which they wear with far more arrogance than with which Donald Trump runs his Twitter account.

The students include actors, social media celebrities, bloggers, comedians, web-stars, and so forth. They operate on a higher level of ‘wokeness’, looking up to the likes of Farhan Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap as their school principal. So, with the help of their PR agencies, they’ll use their digital reach to propagate their political inclinations and incorrect information.

They’ll take to the streets, call the nation North Korea, abuse the Prime Minister and his party, and mock the supporters of the government.

However, if they or anyone they love is ever threatened, they shall be the first to tag everyone from Modi’s cabinet to get all the help they can. Their arrival at the protests will be covered, and often, they return after making a fool of themselves before the media.

As of today, most of them have gone back to their ‘puppet for hire’ life, some are disregarding a release about the NRC from the government, and some are doing explainer videos about India being North Korea.

Things start getting a little dangerous and more dramatic as we approach the third school.

These include students from JNU, AMU, Jamia, and so on. They also like to be known as ‘innocent students’ even if their idea of a peaceful protest includes pelting stones, hurling abuses at the police, calling for the end of Hindus, sympathising with convicted terrorists, or posting radical views on Facebook.

Their dramatic skills can give actors in Ekta Kapoor’s TV shows a run for their money. They live for the camera, especially if that camera is that of a renowned journalist infamous for brokering deals or giving away strategically important locations.

Some of them make it to primetime debates to shout, yell, and showcase their ignorance on national television.

The students of this school are no minors, and yet, they want to be treated as such. They want a revolution but they do not want the lathi. They can be usually found at Jantar Mantar or in some university at the ripe young age of 30 where they present a thesis on critical subjects like what penguins on the South Pole think of Modi’s push for Aadhaar. Their facts are as real as fascism in India.

As of today, they are busy looking for their next reason to bunk classes and sit at Jantar Mantar.

Four, we have the politicians, the CMs and MPs from the opposition parties. They just want to protest, and thus use the students from the third school as a foundation to stage a protest so dramatically in its appeal that foreign newspapers and journals take notice.

Their issues are not against the Bill but against Modi. Hence, they will make deranged threats like not implementing CAA in their states, stopping critical governance programmes, and so forth.

As of today, they are looking for reasons to bring down the government. These are the same people who claimed demonetisation had ruined the economy forever, of a genocide happening in Kashmir, and of Modi changing the Constitution as per his whims and fancies.

Today, they have no political credibility left and will be seen using students from the third school to cause chaos. The sinister students of this school, however, collaborate with the students of the final school, the most dangerous one.

The fifth and final school is that of the ‘dara hua musalman’ or the ‘frightened Muslims’. Even though the more educated and hardworking counterparts from their religion will go on to become top scientists, officials, and even president of the country, for them, India will always be the country that shall be ‘unfair’ to their cause.

They’ll listen to the notorious elements of school four, take to the streets, vandalise public property, burn buses, threaten school kids, call for the slaughter of people they disagree with, and hold the entire country hostage because of their ignorance.

As of today, some of them are being made to answer for the violence they chose to indulge in.

These are the five schools of CAA protesters. While the law and order challenges they present are subject to different cities and localities, what unites them is their lack of credibility which today stands at zilch, at zero.

This is 1 per cent dissent mixed with 99 per cent drama.