Apart from being the title of one of my most favourite hymns, not least because of its compelling melody and searingly relevant lyrics, it aptly describes my state of mind. 2019 is the year when our cries for a miracle grew increasingly desperate, when our assurances to each other that “that hour is darkest which is just before dawn” seemed like a hollow joke, when a disconsolate nation, divided horribly unequally between the few haves and the vast majority of have-nots, just forgot the significance of digging in for the long haul.
Then we woke up, said f#%k the CAB, we’ll take the bus, and watched in delighted disbelief as millions clambered on board. Not just that, they are all actively involved, looking for ways and means of employing their particular talents to the job at hand, which seems to be (dare we now say it!) the actual repeal of the CAB turned CAA.
The protests against CAA and NRC have now settled in (dug in) for the long haul. So furious are people across the complete range of diversity and demographic, at the betrayal of Constitutional secularism, that the end result seems actually achievable and the realisation gets ever more and more heady. This is what we have been missing for the past five years, the feeling that power has passed out from the hands of the People to the Government. This is now a fight to put Power back where it belongs in a secular Democracy.
So we spend our days looking for information on where today’s protests are being held and many of us actually go for them. Increasingly across the spectrum, the awareness is dawning that this is no ordinary movement, that people are suffering and sometimes dying for their conviction that getting political is a good thing, that in the end, it comes down to oneself to chase after and secure real freedom for all. To express oneself, follow different cultures, to worship in one’s own faith fearlessly, to eat what one wants and love whoever is suitable, and to achieve all this through the right to quality education and work. This is what we are fighting for, in the end.
No longer can we expect others to take up the burden of a movement that we all expect to enjoy. So it is with joy that we learn of armies of activists, lawyers, even a few policemen and, more and more, members of the judiciary, who have laid down for themselves the task of keeping us safe in the face of great hostility from our self-appointed rulers whom we only set up to lead. But this does not absolve us from the task of taking responsibility for ourselves.
As 2019 winds down, make no mistake; things are going to get harder, this darkness shows no sign of ending anytime soon. What makes it different from the darkness of hopelessness is that now we know that a dawn is possible.
To all those who pick up water bottles and jholas and head for the closest protest, there to make up the numbers, chant and sing, I say, thank you for all you are doing. For the lawyers who have formed their own collectives and groups all over the country to rush from police station to police station, demanding that personal rights and freedoms be upheld, I say, we remember you and thank you.
To all our activist leaders, including Prashant Bhushan, Harsh Mander, Ramchandra Guha and others, to the Kanhaiya Kumars and Umar Khalids, to the rare Raveesh Kumars of journalism, (and there are more than we thought), we say thank you.
And to all those who thought it might never happen but that the Good Fight needed to be fought, we say thank you for your bravery, your persistence and your dogged determination not to go down without trying, we say thank you for showing us how to do it. “And now, let the weak say I am strong, let the poor say I am rich,” the lyrics of the hymn say. It is because we are together.
Give thanks.
