Generational Revolt Against Mediocrity

A scene from the protest site

In Maxim Gorky’s 1901 play, The Petty Bourgeois, the Russian middle class is portrayed as timid, stagnant, and incapable of leading change.  His characters symbolise three responses to social crisis. Pyotr represents bourgeois mediocrity, Nil working-class vitality, and Teterev intellectual cynicism. Today, in Delhi, young students protesting corruption in the academic sector echo this symbolic triangle, but with a distinctly Indian twist.

Pyotr is the typical “petty bourgeois” in the play. He is weak, indecisive, and fearful of change. Today, the supporters of Modi and his ideology belong to this category – of conservative middle-class people who form the majority of the population and are yet terrified of the minority and a lot of other things and hence require the putatively divine prop supplied gratuitously and eternally by religion and its excreta.

Nil is a young worker with a lot of aspirations. He symbolises strength, independence, and revolutionary potential. The young students protesting on the roads of Delhi these days demand accountability for exam leaks and irregularities embody Nil’s vitality. Their sit-ins, hunger strikes, and marches toward Parliament show a refusal to accept the brazen mediocrity of Modi Inc. These students are the agents of change, insisting that justice and transparency are non-negotiable.

Teterev, the cynical intellectual, mocks society but refuses to act. His detachment is mirrored by present India’s commentators (including too many bloggers I know pretty well) who ignore the student protests altogether, or dismiss it as futile or disruptive. This cynicism corrodes hope and reinforces the divine inertia that Modi has put to use successfully in the last 12 years of his reign as PM. Teterev represents those who see corruption as inevitable and activism as pointless.

The symbolic triangle of Gorky’s characters helps us see Delhi’s protests not just as a local event but as part of a larger struggle: the clash between mediocrity, vitality, and cynicism in shaping society’s future. If India’s middle class that votes for Modi Inc rather mindlessly remains complacent, it risks imminent irrelevance. That’s what the young students are telling them. Your gods won’t save you in the end. They never did, in fact. Your political ideology did, and that has an expiry date.

Rahul Gandhi arrested from the protest site

Recently, Sanjay K Jha wrote an article in The Wire arguing that the students’ agitation is not just about the resignation of the education minister but about the deadly cancer that has eaten into the country’s governance. If the foreign minister S Jaishankar resigns, will India’s policy towards US or Israel change? Is the commerce minister responsible for the American pressure in India’s trade negotiations?

“The duopoly of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah who control every Inch of the political and administrative systems” are responsible for India’s current sociopolitical cancer, Jha argues. It is a political mafia that governs India now, not a constitutional government, Jha adds.

How to deal with a mafia? That’s tough. You can deal with a government, a system, an institution. But a mafia? Well, you’ll just be crushed. That’s what Modi Inc did with various protests that took place in Delhi ever since 2014.

When Gorky’s character Pyotr says, out of his typical bourgeois cowardice and inertia, that he wouldn’t fight anyone for his ideas or ideology, Nil the revolutionary answers that he would because “Rights aren’t given, they’re taken. A person’s got to win rights for himself if he doesn’t want to be crushed under a weight of obligations.”

A weight of divine obligations is what Modi Inc has imposed on the nation of a billion mediocre Pyotrs. The young students in Delhi are saying that they’re sick of these holy cows of antique mediocrity. It’d be better if the mafia of the duopoly listens to the emergent youth.

PS. I was rearranging my personal library when my old collection of Maxim Gorky’s writings (ten volumes in all) caught my attention. I’m going through some of that once again. And I’m aroused, so to say, at the age of 66.