The Delhi riots are proof that a section of young Indians has fallen off the edge of a crumbling nation and a feeble economy

Today’s national newspaper front pages have found a variety of ways to headline the riots across the Capital. Without exception, all featured unforgettable and frightening images of burning buildings and vehicles, billowing dark smoke, streets littered with stones and brick pieces, families crying over the loss of their loved ones and so on. Delhi’s rioters, I believe, are the products of a nation with a crumbling economy and an indifferent political class that has turned its back on them. No one seemed surprised at the headlines. Not the youngsters and teenagers fleeing home at dusk. Not Julfikar and Hari, who used to live in Chand Bagh and had returned to stand vigil over the stone-pelting and police vehicles littering an urban war zone. Julfikar claimed to have seen the whole thing coming. “This was always going to happen,” he says in a nonchalant manner and shrugs his slim shoulders.

The police shot a thin guy under very suspicious circumstances. A sturdy teenager shouted while brandishing a gun in his hands and pointing it at a policeman. Another young man got a bullet in his neck from the back, ending his life even before he could reach the nearest hospital. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Hari’s mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse.

In the aftermath of the violence that spread through Delhi, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over the last few days, physical attacks and verbal abuses, calling one another goons became a contagion in the capital of the world’s largest democratic nation, reverting the city to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.

This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern, too. Its participants, marshalled by YouTube videos and Twitter posts, are protagonists in a sinister flip side to the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The Delhi Winter featured young people as young as teenagers in an assault on the established order of a benign democracy.

For many, one naïve question still hangs over Delhi’s battle-torn streets. How could this ever happen? Among several obvious answers, one, is a major failure of policing. The evidence so far points to more ignominy for the rudderless policemen, as doubts emerge over whether the youngsters who died on the spot sparked the initial riots? Whether they pelted stones at the policemen or some other miscreant lurking about the place did?

The apparent loathing, demonising and then appalling indifference of the powers that be, towards the protesters, leaving them at their state without any communication for months at a stretch, precipitated the crisis. The absence of officers or any intelligent intervention to reassure the protesters at Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Millia Islamia led to a breakdown of order as seen in these lawless badlands of a State failing in its administrative skills/performance.

Apparently, the second answer to the naïve question (why did it happen?) is the number of inciting hate speeches and myriad videos floating on various social media paltforms. Recall in particular the scathing utterances of a BJP party worker of questionable motive/IQ, threatening the young protesters already seething with the exclusionary implications of the Citizenship Amendment Act. In uneasy gatherings/societies, power to people or political party workers — whether offered or stolen — can be toxic, precipitating a crisis of this kind. We need more matured minds and party workers to deal with a situation like the present one.

Someone has said, these are not communal riots in the streets of Chand Bagh, Jafrabad, Bhagalpur, Gopalpur and Maujpur, where the Marwari grocery, the Mughlai biryani shop and the Sikkimese hairdresser’s salon sit side by side. The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence that Delhi has seen in many decades has taken  place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for a freefall.

Mob violence is always despicable; inexcusable, must always be condemned. But those terrorising and trashing Delhi are also a symptom of a wider malaise. These riots are proof that a section of young Indians — the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes — have fallen off the edge of a crumbling nation. A country with a crumbling economy.

With unprecedented financial stress in the country’s households, the loss of jobs (6.2 million in 2011-12 to 15.5 million in 2017-18), the mammoth problem of joblessness (the unemployment rate rose to 8.8 per cent in 2017/18 from 3.3 per cent in 2011/12), the reality is grimmer that what appears on the surface. And it has direct repercussions on the youth that constitutes 70 per cent of the Indian demographic make-up. The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human (most importantly young people) blight.

 (The writer is an author and a doctor by profession)