Where’s Our George Flyod

Context: Lack of popular protest despite a comparatively higher degree of repression points towards India’s lost urge to consistently relate to injustice as an assault on democracy.

Reasons for Democratic failure to Encourage Protest against Injustice

• Generic issues of democracy: its paradoxical nature

• Has “demos” in its name, but is rather narrowly constructed.
• Produces layered citizenry: sandwiched between the individual identity and as a group's identity.
• Works as a agency of interference by the ignorance: which started as an investing agency
• Democracy inspires ideas of rights: but allows taming of rights for purposes of maintaining order.
• Tensions as a mark of life in democracies: between the elite and the masses, between active citizens and obedient citizens, between rights and order.
• Adopting formal democracy: Democratic politics needs to be carved out with effort, as it does not automatically ensures vibrant democratic practice.

• Issues associated with the historical nature of the Democratic Indian state

• Idea of Citizen Participation based on Ignorance

• Overemphasis on the idea of law and order: limits citizen participation (role as active agents) and negates the idea that people’s agency.
• Syndrome of government as caretaker/parent: waiting for leaders to mobilise, guide, and supervise citizen's actions. 

• Legislative imagination, judicial interpretation, and public perception as against the idea of the citizen as a protestor.

• Legacy of the freedom movement, democracy, and popular participation: seen as both theoretically and legally inconsistent/opposed to an orderly society.

• Issues arising out of the contemporary movement (systematic mechanism of silencing citizens)

• Subdued rights discourse and de-legitimized agency of the people: considers criticism and claiming rights for marginalized sections as a seditious act against the state (UAPA).
• Narrative of subverting reality into its opposite: denies the existence of suffering, injustice and victimhood, gives utmost importance to the idea of nation and considers all else as fragmentary and divisive.

• Any coalition of the marginalized by definition assumes an anti-national tenor.

Democracy can afford the co-existence of multiple injustices and a quiet citizenry: thereby silence is a result of the popular acceptance of reconstructed reality and adherence to an alternative morality.

Conclusion: There is an urgency of aligning with the victim, realizing systemic bias against the marginalised, crossing the threshold of “we” and “them”  by fixing not only institutional bias against a community but the dishonor caused by the protests.