To Engage or Not to Engage: Experiences that Hit Home

By Aggam Walia (UG 2022)

With protests for and against CAA-NRC raging across the country, battles are being fought not only on the streets but also in more intimate settings. 

The occasional family dinner, for instance, where your grandparents go on and on about the supposed greatness of Modi and you ask yourself whether you really love them. Or that argument you have on Facebook with your once upon a time friend who speaks out against ‘violent protests by leftists’ and ‘destruction of public property’ but defends the demolishing of Babri masjid.

At first, when you see his name pop up on the notifications tab, you wonder why you both drifted apart, but later you become eternally grateful for it. It is a real challenge to accept and love those around you who shamelessly share bigoted memes and videos on family WhatsApp groups, those who dismiss your attempts to debate with facts as ‘intellectual’, and therefore unworthy. But is there a way to accommodate their bigotry and inevitable presence in our lives?

One fine day, when reports of two men who were shot and killed by the police in Mangalore started flooding the news, my family WhatsApp group erupted with messages. Till then, it had been strangely quiet and apolitical there. An uncle of mine urged everybody to send a missed call to a mobile number to show solidarity with the government’s decision to implement the CAA. Surprisingly, for a family which is generally quite right-wing, another uncle declared his decision to oppose the Act and the NRC. He claimed that his decision was a result of his daughter’s persistent efforts to inform him. She convinced him that the NRC is anti-poor and anti-Muslim (because of the CAA), thus it needed to be met with dissent. He declared that he is a ‘proud Hindu’ but not an extremist. At that moment, I realized that nothing’s more important than informing the opinions of those around you. Soon, my mother followed suit. I suppose by keeping her in the loop with the information I was fed with on a daily basis helped the case.

My excitement at seeing people who have always voted for BJP speak out against CAA-NRC was very short-lived. As soon as my grandmother read those messages, she went on an aggressive offensive. She flooded the group with videos and posters to defend the government. She even forwarded a poem which was loaded with Islamophobia. When I pointed out that a lot of what she was sharing was fake news, I was conveniently ignored. Instead, she shared a meme denouncing the ‘intellectual brigade’ which had apparently positioned itself against the Modi government. 

Her hostility towards ‘intellectuals’, that is, people who try to look at things a little more critically than she does, can also be seen in other members of the pro-CAA camp. For someone who likes to have a more nuanced opinion on such matters, these hostilities can be a severe letdown. But those who find themselves in such situations must never cease to complicate their opinions. In such divisive times, it is imperative that we be as nuanced as possible, irrespective of how our opinions may be received in certain circles.

When I went to see her a few days later, she asked me why so many students were protesting. Before I could reply, she went on a tirade against the Opposition and everyone who had uttered anything anti-Modi. In between, I did manage to ask her if she was aware of how several BJP leaders, at the time in their youth, led violent protests against Indira Gandhi months before the Emergency. My question softened her guard a little because she asked me the names of those leaders in a very innocent tone, as if this new piece of information had serious consequences on her stance. Later, of course, she forgot all about it, and resumed her rantings against the Congress. I realized that it was futile to engage with her. She was so stuck in her Modi-bubble that there was no way I could burst it. So, I let it go.

But I also realized something important about how to converse with strongly opinionated people. Instead of bombarding them with information, perhaps we could try asking them questions to ease tensions between us and them. The act of asking questions usually shows that the questioner is coming from a humble space, and that isn’t as threatening to the other person as throwing facts at them. I tried my newly formed hypothesis in a conversation on Facebook with a teacher from my old school. By gently asking him questions, I let his guard down. In the process, it was easier to bring out his irrationality and Islamophobia. While this may not work always, I celebrated that little victory.

If none of this works, if after trying our best to engage with people in a way that follows our logic, we don’t succeed, it is alright. We need not become lazy whenever some says something bigoted, so we must point it out, but if that’s all we can do, it’s okay. In the case of family and friends, it may help to see where they are coming from if their political views are very disturbing, but that is only if we require some temporary consolation. No amount of understanding or contextualization justifies bigotry. When dialogue is the only way to engage with family and friends, we should diligently pursue it. But we should also, perhaps, grudgingly accept to draw lines when dialogue becomes futile. If not for anything else, our own sanity.

Nevertheless, it dawned upon me that my grandmother’s generation, and my parent’s generation, is becoming less relevant than ours. Currently, 40% of India is under-20. If old people, who are still stuck in the communally divisive memories of Partition, do not show any inclination to deliberate on their political views, it is perhaps best if we sideline them. Their children would be more willing to converse, and in that case, maybe we could put in more effort to engage with them.

But the generation we should be seriously looking at to engage with is ours alone. In my family group, for instance, I share fact-checking articles only so that my cousins don’t get carried away by bigoted propaganda. On Facebook, I actively share posts so that all my friends and colleagues from my generation know that there is considerable opposition towards the current government and that bigotry isn’t the only way forward.