Tamil Nadu: Articulating pro-jallikattu protests in socio-political perspective

When something apolitical suddenly electrified the Marina sands in Chennai for about a week from January 17, 2017, - it actually began with a small group of ten people coming together in front of Vivekananda House nearby and raised the slogan, 'We want jallikattu', with the protest gathering on the historic beach swelling to a massive 20 lakh people over that week, it was a shuddering, yet refreshingly new spectacle.

The protests, for a larger cause to defend and reaffirm Tamil ethos and culture, technically 'leaderless', but thanks to telepathic wonders of the social media brought an unprecedented number of students, youth, professionals including women and children, cutting across castes and religions, until it met with an unexpectedly ugly violent end, was a many-sided anti-establishment efflorescence in recent civil society action.

In this thought-provoking work, 'Occupy Marina!', Ms. Swapna Sundar, who earlier taught Constitution and Administrative Law in the University of Kent at Canterbury before moving to India and now heads a company that provides intellectual property services, has chronicled the pro-jallikattu protests in virtually all its dimensions to give a sense of the big picture of what this massive demonstration of youth energy could mean for Tamil Nadu, socially and politically, and to the Indian polity as a whole.

Going beyond a factually and legally circumspect narrative weaved around the timeline of the protest, the author has also dared to dive deeper into the much wider issues. These range from the proximate causes of the stir, the context in which it burst forth when Tamil Nadu has been going through a crisis in political leadership since the demise of former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in December 2016, the simmering anger and frustration, particularly among the educated urban middle class in the wake of last November's dramatic demonetisation by the BJP government at the 

Centre that brought all classes of people to the streets as banks and ATMs' went cashless, and intense angst that neither the then O. Pannerselvam-led state government nor the Centre did anything to ensure 'jallikattu' was allowed during the 2017 'Pongal' season.

The author has also explored some of the structural similarities the protests shared with global trends like 'Occupy Wall Street' demonstrations and the legacy of peaceful 'satyagraha', a non-violent weapon that Mahatma Gandhi bequeathed to the Indian freedom struggle and to the world at large.

The author looks into puzzles whether today's youth and civil society would respond in equal measure to much bigger issues like the agrarian crisis, farmers suicides, growing inequalities and whether the pro-jallikattu protests, though enabling the outcome it fought for, was yet seen more as a consolidation of the OBC upper castes to the exclusion of Dalits and other marginal groups.

A considerable number of pages are also devoted to the role of the social media that played a big role in these protests, besides analysis of how different segments of the media, including print and television, went about their reportage, as public discourse got sharpened by the new 'Hindu nationalism' or 'Hindutva' as it is reverentially called.

Surely, given a canvas of about 300 pages, Swapna Sundar's work, which also peeps into the historical, cultural and anthropological origins of the traditional 'bull-taming' sport, known by various names in Tamil Nadu and in the other southern states, the role of global organisations like 'PETA', which says it operates on the principle that “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment”, - one of the core demands of the protesters was to ban PETA - may not be a tightly structured work.

Instead the author brings in a range of voices to record their impressions on each one of these issues, including the democratic rights of citizens and sweeping powers of the Police in ensuring Law and Order, and the disjointed way the protests were brought to an “inglorious” end, given that promenade along the Marina is also the arena for the Republic Day celebrations on January 26. Thus the scope of Dr Swapna's work is too vast for a precise compression, and understandably so as a host of variables are at play.

 Apart from the positive aspects the flowed from the pro-jallikattu protests, like the sense of camaraderie, the usually insular urban middle class taking food even in fishermen's ramshackle homes, the spontaneous give-and-take attitude that was reminiscent of how people helped each other during the 2015 December deluge in Chennai - the author herself had worked with Rotary Club relief operations then -  this format of multitudes of people including women and children voluntarily occupying a vast, significant space to “get the government's wheels to move” on critical issues, the public health and other risks involved in such an exercise, leaves several questions unanswered. But as the author rightly points out, it was the “protest' that mattered even if it was much easier with an issue like 'jallikattu'.

In summing up the impact of the pro-jallikattu protest, Dr Swapna Sundar writes, “As new thoughts and ideas turn up, strong status-quoist forces are also gaining in strength. Contesting visions for a new society are jostling for political space-one, smart cities and bullet trains with cow-belt values; and two an inclusive and equitable social order characterized by federal autonomy. Whatever may have been its limitations, the Occupy Marina protest gave voice to the latter.”

The philosophical undertone with which Dr Swapna signs off her book, only reflects the predicament that there are no easy answers, as politics is a much bigger power game. Yet the book commends itself for its immense research and optimism in people's goodness.