India’s response to the Gen Z protest shows that democracy here still has “flexibility and receptivity”, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said as he spoke at length about how South Asia has been experiencing youth-led uprisings over the past decade and drew parallels with the response to the student protest in India.
He was referring to the recent student protests against the NEET-UG paper leak and the subsequent resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union education minister. Further expanding on how the countries’ responses differed, Tharoor gave examples of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where rulers were forced to relinquish power and leave. “In Pakistan, the military which had been playing behind the scenes came forward and established what is known as a puppet government.
Heaping praise on the government’s decision to accept the students’ demands for a big resignation, Tharoor said that the “system bent, but didn’t break”. “The difference amongst them (protests in different countries) is a reflection of the political system in these countries and the attitude with which governments attempted to face or refuse these situations,” Tharoor said at an NDTV event. Nepal also saw a change in government, but unlike the first two, “structures still remained intact” here, Tharoor said. Similarly, the military took control in Myanmar,” Tharoor said. Coming to India, Shashi Tharoor said that the mechanism here was “self-correcting” and the democratic system adapted itself to the new reality with “astonishing speed”.
“No one expected the BJP government, which has been impervious to public demands for resignations, to respond,” Tharoor said, recalling how demands for resignations of senior officials had been raised many a times by the Opposition but there was no response, but things changed this time. Earlier this month, Shashi Tharoor had reflected on how the Gen Z protest, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) played out and said that similar issues were part of the Congress’s student outreach ‘Chhatron ki Goonj’, which failed to resonate as much.
