Wokay!

United Students conducted a protest march against the extension of OBC reservations to central universities last week. I was there to photograph it. Sorry about the delay in putting the photos up, I’ve not always been at home since then.

Photos and commentary follow below the cut.

I came to know about the march from an email forward. It was being held at the lawn outside Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium at 5 pm on Tuesday (also Mahavir Jayanti). I confirmed in the morning with one of the organizers whose phone number was given in the email, and landed there at around a quarter to five.

I realised I was at the right place when I saw a news van.

The core group of ‘protestors’ or ‘protest organizers’ who were already there was pretty small: only ten or twelve people.

Out of the people in the photo above, one wasn’t a student, but a TV news reporter. She was telling the group where to stand, what they should talk about in front of the camera when she conducted her live report, and what they shouldn’t talk about- giving the impression that she was running the whole show. That’s her in the photo below:

NDTV wasn’t the only news channel or newspaper around. In fact, the number of people from the media outnumbered the number of protestors.

NDTV eventually conducted its live report at around 5:15 or 5:30 pm. Even at this time there would have been only twenty or thirty people around. The NDTV reporter made all of them cluster around her to make it look like a much larger crowd.

After the actual interviewing, they did an actual protest ‘march’, marching around Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium with the camera running ahead of them.

I’ve made it sound as if the entire thing was purely a media event. Actually, the number of ‘protestors’ did increase later on. If there were more media personnel than protestors to begin with, I think it demonstrates the proliferation of newspapers and news channels rather than the media giving an issue undue importance. The anguish over the reservations proposal is real and genuine, and the low number of people at the march is because United Students has no experience organising marches (as they themselves admitted)- and unlike political parties, can’t afford to bring people down in trucks.

Speaking of media, out there it seemed like the uniform for TV reporters was salwar kameez and sunglasses. With almost no exceptions anybody in a T-shirt was a student, and anybody in a salwar-kameez was a reporter. The one in the photo below was from CNN-IBN:

The exception that proved the rule:

Pretty much everyone over there looked as sulky as the people in the photo above. There were no smiling, joyous girls (or boys, for that matter). If the Babe Theory of Political Movements is correct, the battle is already lost.

Once the live shoot was done, United Students got down to what they had originally planned: collecting the contact details of people who were opposing reservation and who would be interested in getting involved with United Students, and inviting people up on stage to speak.

Although I gave my contact details, I haven’t heard from United Students since then.

I didn’t take any shots of the contact form collection- it just looked like any other crowd, but I took lots of photos of the speakers. The guy in the photo below is Gursimran Khamba, one of the main guys organizing the protest.

And some other speakers:

Most of the speakers were restrained and to the point, but some went a little over the top, talking about how Amit Goswami’s sacrifice would not go in vain. After those guys, Gursimran Khamba would come back on stage, politely remind everyone that United Students believed in free speech and that they wanted everyone to speak, but that as an organization, were only interested in coming up with constructive solutions and dialogue to take to the government. He said several times that they weren’t interested in going out on to the streets and causing a nuisance.

The guy in the photo above was one of the more over-the-top speakers. He ranted in a pronounced Bengali accent about how the government was spending more on ‘security’ and cutting down on education. He’s wrong- the Central Government expenditure on both defense and education have been increased. It’s a different matter that most government expenditure on education is wasted.

Junta out there brought pre-prepared placards as well as made them on the spot- but they didn’t come up with any new slogans for the ones they made there.

The people in the butterfly T-shirts are AIIMS students. Most of the crowd there were from one or the other of the Delhi medical colleges, with a smattering of people from IITD, NSIT, and DCE, plus a few people who’d passed out from school. I didn’t see a single DU person- though that’s not saying there weren’t any there.
The mandatory police presence looked bored- how violent is a bunch of doctors going to get anyway?

Towards the fag end of the march, a whole bunch of students from Lady Hardinge Medical College showed up, swelling the ranks to about a hundred and fifty people or so.

The protest wound down after two hours or so- by that time everyone who wanted to speak had spoken, and everyone who wanted to leave their contact details had left them. Since nobody was interested in burning cars or stoning the police, things ended there.

You can see all the photos I took here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Photography, Public Policy and Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.