The problem with deification

India has always loved a good saviour. We have always been a country waiting for the one. This intrinsic affection leads us towards personas that are confident but do not necessarily possess an ideology beneficial towards the upliftment of the citizens. We latched onto Gandhi, Nehru in the past. Many latched onto Modi in 2014 hoping he would be the one to bring about acche din. Hoping he would wield his unwavering sword and magically make corruption disappear. Hoping he would be the one to finally make us stop saying that India is still a developing country. People's hero worship blinded us to his past and made us believe in an unfounded utopia just because he regurgitated statements that were politically correct. People hoped that he would suddenly become our messiah even after knowing what happened in Gujarat.

We are so desperate for finding god that we are quite liberal on seeking god in genocidal maniacs.

And we are repeating the same mistake with Wangchuk and Dipke. They are protesting for a good cause. They also appear to have good intentions. But putting them on the pedestal and outsourcing your thinking and your actions to their whims is not a sustainable way to make the government take accountability. We are very quick to put a singular face to any movement. On 20th of July, there was supposed to be a march towards the Parliment. Dipke called it off. How are we giving one person that authority over a protest that affects the entire nation. People with hardly any monetary backing, from all over the country, have reached Jantar Mantar to make their voices heard, to disrupt sleep of the ones who think they are demigods. Giving the reins to such a crowd to a singular "saviour", with no strong revolutionary ideology backing his actions, is no different from people falling for Modi.

This makes the crowd act as a tool for the messiah to enact his whims. We become the bones and muscles of the brain. This makes any movement unstable and unsustainable, since a head can always be cut off. Take for instance, if they jail Dipke and Wangchuk at this moment, there will be chaos and confusion in the minds of the protesters. Or we would either start looking for the next messiah.

It is also not far-fetched to say that Dipke himself could potentially be on the side of BJP or even worse be a liberal-centrist. What will we protesters do if this actually turns out to be the case? Should the protests conclude when Dipke or Wangchuk wish? Or should they conclude when our demands have been fairly met. Who decides what demands need to be met? Who decides the flow of the protests? After the barrage of lathis and sexual assaults on protesters by the Delhi police, why is Dipke putting out lukewarm statements about peacefulness and co-operation? What will we even get by cooperating with these goons? Why was Dipke not on the frontlines facing the lathis? Why is he distancing himself from those who fought back?

We don't just need to snatch accountability from the government but also expect better from our protests.

Right now the protesters have to spend valuable energy and time just in convincing the non-protesting crowd and uncles watching the news that asking accountability is not an act against the nation but for it. That asking our government to do better is not anti-national rather being complacent with bad governance is. Sold out media outlets keep running anti-protester propaganda and discrediting the heads of the protest. Because they know how most Indians are. They know that people will be reluctant to join a protest whose head is or was associated with some political party. It thus becomes incredibly easy to discredit a protest when there is a singular face to it. Most Indians are scared to be associated with the likes of Kamra and Umar Khalid, even if they might be in the right. This again ties back to the deification of "saviours". Are we following Wangchuk because of his credentials? What if the man did not have any? Does that make the protest or the cause any less important?

So what's the way forward? Unfortunately for our instant gratification demanding brains, it is strong community building. There must be proliferation of education; proliferation of strong ideals that help us decide what's revolutionary and what's reactionary. As slow as that sounds, that is the only sustainable method for any protest to work out and have lasting impact after the protest is done. The government recognizes this and has been thus taking steps towards sabotaging our educational systems right from the CBSE history books to exams like NEET. They have been working towards sabotaging any critical thinking and the ability to raise important questions by keeping us in the colosseum of entertainment. They work on demonizing far-left ideals whilst normalizing and promoting far-right terrorism under the garb of nationalism. The government realizes the value of education more than us, which is why they are so keen on sabotaging of what's left.

Therein rises the need of forming unions and communities that are driven by ideals and ideologies and not just hero-worship. Therein rises the need for protesting with strong ideals supporting your demands. Citizens need to be on the same page. Governments are not rulers, they are not our monarchs. They are our service providers. They are answerable to the public for all of their actions. They need to know that they can't hide in their palaces or the palaces will be burned to dust. Their job is to be accountable or be thrown out. They need to know that their palaces are leased.