Alternation Between Precarity and Unemployment: Satire as Form of Resistance

What happens when an entire generation begins to recognise itself more easily in satire than in the promises of the political establishment? That question lies at the heart of the sudden and astonishing rise of the youth resistance phenomenon of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). A digital political phenomenon that began as a satire on contemporary Indian neofascism has rapidly transformed into a political threat to the neofascist dispensation calling for various types of repression.

The proximate trigger that led to the emergence of the CJP was a controversial remark associated with Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant during proceedings involving social media discourse and aggrieved youth. Given that constitutional propriety enjoins a certain democratic felicity in public discourse, especially from those in the highest echelons of constitutionally sanctioned positions, the statement about Indian youth was galling, notwithstanding the belated clarification.

The outrage was not merely about one undemocratic remark; it reflected a growing perception among young Indians that institutions have become increasingly apathetic toward their anxieties, insecurities and lived realities since the neofascist dispensation has taken over India. This episode struck a nerve because hundreds of millions already feel unseen within a system that repeatedly celebrates (mostly fabricated) national success while invisibilising the exploitation and oppression of the working people by intensifying the differentiation of their unfreedom. This revolved around an unviable choice between precarity and unemployment with the only payoff being persistent spectacles of schadenfreude orchestrated by the denizens of the neofascist dispensation through its otherisation process.

Instead of outright rejecting the language of their marginalisation, Indian youth appropriated it by comprehensively reworking its political substance. The “cockroach” became a symbol not only of resilience in the hostile ecosystem of neofascism but also of open and collective resistance.

Within days, the CJP’s online presence reportedly crossed the digital support numbers associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party, often described as the world’s largest political party. Those beholden to the neofascist dispensation dismissed this as an internet spectacle. But such dismissals miss the deeper political economy significance of the moment. The rise of the CJP is not fundamentally about memes. It is about the accumulated anger of a generation that is no longer willing to be depoliticised by the self-defeating cocktail of ‘otherisation’ and schadenfreude overlaid by orchestrated delusions of national grandeur.

For years, young Indians were told that they were the beneficiaries of a purportedly inexorable rise of India as a great power. They were promised opportunity through (halting) digitisation, (exaggerated) start-up culture and (statistically orchestrated) economic growth. Unsurprisingly, the lived experience of hundreds of millions tells a very different story.

Employment is not rising and what is available is lifelong alternation between precarity and unemployment as the neofascist dispensation is driving an unprecedented wave of contractualisation and informalisation. Public sector recruitment of the permanent variety has shrunk into insignificance even in the armed forces. Competitive examinations, which were unacademically centralised at the behest of the profiteering segment of private education, have repeatedly been hit by paper leaks, cancellations and allegations of irregularities. Degrees no longer guarantee even a modicum of mobility.

The macroeconomics underlying this persistent alternation between precarity and unemployment is based on the unviability of export-led growth when the US government is trying to re-establish the colonial setup in all but name. The situation for the Indian economy is worsened by the fact that the enduring links between Indian elites and international finance centred in the US not only discourage investment but also act as a decisive hurdle to authentic strategic diversification towards the Global South. Besides, the technology that underlies whatever growth does happen is at best jobless or more often of the job-loss variety. This tendency towards unemployment and precarity has been fortified by the transition from the de facto attenuation of the employment guarantee process to its de jure repudiation along with the coming into force of the anti-worker Labour Codes.

The crisis confronting Indian youth is not merely about the lack of jobs. It is about the collapse of the most elementary certainties that underlie any meaningful social contract. During the dirigiste phase and the early period of transition to neoliberalism, education carried at least the possibility of social mobility. Today, many young people spend years preparing for examinations whose results are delayed, cancelled or legally contested. Many families deploy their relatively limited savings or take on debt for educational pathways that often lead to the aforementioned alternation between precarity and unemployment. Behind every statistic of unemployment and precarity lies a household negotiating despair, debt and deprivation.

At the same time, social media (largely beholden to the neofascist dispensation) continuously manufactures and celebrates (mostly imaginary or fleeting) success while systematically seeking to invisibilise systemic failure. Young Indians today inhabit digital spaces flooded with crafted neoliberal stories of achievement, luxury, entrepreneurial triumph and upward mobility, but the disproportionately large contrarian trend that decisively dominates neoliberal reality, which is differentiated by structural exclusion, is sought to be brushed under the carpet by the neofascist dispensation. But this undeniable contrast between promise and reality is now so marked that it is beginning to pierce through the veil of fog created by the orchestrated but disempowering duo of otherisation and schadenfreude.

Youth resistance is also beginning to be cognisant of the increasing concentration of power and shrinking democratic spaces as the neofascist dispensation seeks to consolidate itself. Media’s relative independence prior to 2014 has weakened under the neofascist-driven process of corporate concentration and exercise of political pressure that is inconsistent with the spirit and letter of the constitution. Universities have become sites of surveillance and saffronisation which is undermining whatever was achieved after 1947. Journalists, students, academics, activists and the democratic movement as a whole which is critical of the government have often been conveniently labelled before being repressed with varying degrees of success.

The first cumulative effects of this ideological atmosphere engendered by the neofascist dispensation involve not only intimidation but also alienation. A generation that grew up believing democracy would expand opportunity increasingly feels that institutions, under the neofascist dispensation, neither represent them nor respond to them. Formal political language has therefore begun to lose credibility since it is more often than not a thinly disguised apology for the neofascist dispensation.

Satire has emerged as a form of resistance, along with other struggles, to this crisis of credibility of the neofascist dispensation. Political economy and political entomology are converging to create the opportunity of a future beyond Indian neofascism that can resist the ongoing depravity of political re-engineering. The INDIA Bloc in concert with the democratic movement must not squander this political opportunity created by this convergence.

Shirin Akhter is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. C. Saratchand is Professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.