While taking up this task, two critical points from the earlier two articles on the subject could become the base for moulding this new emprise. One is the first article, where it summarise to indicating the role that small communities can critically play as the resistance movement. The second is the understanding of the emergence of groups who lead a life that is isolated from the class realities, which intensified with the emergence of the “millennials”.

Shrinking of the Left

In the Indian context, we need to look at few more factors to understand the political and social times that we live in. One of the factors, which could be evaluated as the critical factor is the shortcomings of the liberal thinking leadership as a group involved in purely intellectual conversation of the issues, bereft of any direct engagement with the human beings who they pose to represent. We can call them class conscious, but they fail to maintain an umbilical connection with the socially underprivileged, or people who live in the periphery of the society.

It will be worthwhile to critically examine whether these ideas have become more of a fashionable statement to make, rather than having a genuine interest and effort to understand these realities and redefine these ideas to suit the changing times. Thus a major section of the liberal left therefore lack credibility. This coupled with the right-wing onslaught, they themselves got marginalized. They no longer hold a space called liberal and secular, though they continue to espouse it as an idea.

There comes the second point that one need look at in the Indian context, hijacking of the liberal space by Islamic fundamentalist world view. Without understanding this element properly, and disengaging from this element, the true space of a liberal cannot be reinvented and recreated. We will be doing more of the same thing with no different results if we are pursuing the path without comprehending this element completely.

Decades back, there was a genuine humanitarian crisis for Islam as a community across the globe. They were in the peripherals and they were underprivileged. But in the late seventies and early eighties, with Mujahedins being trained in Afghanistan to counter the soviet influence, Islamic fundamentalists developed a new equation or a strategy to expand their world view by using the position of being in their peripherals and being underprivileged, to their advantage. That is very different in nature to the genuineness of being in the peripherals and being in the position of underprivileged. The fundamentalists do not represent the common man of the Islamic society. Liberals, failing to differentiate this, started responding in a fashionable manner, thus gave legitimacy to the Islamic fundamentalist world view. This helped them act as the agency of the whole diaspora and they started using this position to expanding their geographical limits. That took demonstrable expressions in all liberal and secular societies like many European countries and to a great extend in India too. Victim mentality and planned migration developed as two key strategies for the expansionist agenda of this worldview and liberal space was exploited by them over a period of time.

Right-wing Rhetoric

Liberal space, which was otherwise occupied by genuine human approach with no other agenda started being perceived as one, whose liberalism is limited to when it comes to identifying with one group of people and the right-wing wolves across the world took advantage of this and succeeded in rallying the majority communities, thus saw the emergence of governments with quasi autocratic qualities.

It is critical to use the word ‘credible’. Credibility comes from being absolutely objective about the way the space is defined, the thought process and the manner it is put into action. That needs a redefinition of a community based approach for defining the people living in peripherals, irrespective of whether they belong to minority or majority community. For example, the absolute silence of liberals regarding the ethnic attack of people belonging to one specific community in Jammu area may have made them to be perceived as lopsided in their approach. Such lack of response would have given rise to an insecurity among the majority community, which came into a perception that the liberals no longer represent the neutral position and therefore they have to stitch together a counter platform to address such issues. This thought process was cleverly exploited by the right-wing, branding the liberals and centrists as ‘pseudo-seculars’ and this resulted in the emergence of majoritarian regimes across the globe.

Coupled with these changes, media which played the role of a vehicle for causing changes in the society slowly abandoned all such positions and moved to just a profit making proposition. It thus got redefined as media of entertainment and lost its social significance. This needs to be understood thoroughly well for us to be realistic in our expectation from mainstream media. At the same time, huge opportunities came up through social media space, whose potential to create the new momentum has not been truly exploited yet. The protest against citizenship bill probably is the first such attempt where a mass movement on ground is being used by social and online media to further and strengthen a collaborative way of resistance.