Sitting still is not an option! New
A brief history of youth movements for social change

By Raghu Karnad

Mussolini loved young people. So did Hitler. Hitler believed so deeply in the power and the promise of youth, albeit a limited racial category of them, that the only unit of the Nazi party to bear his name was the Hitler-Jugend, the Hitler Youth, an enormous following of loyal and organized young people. In the history of youth mobilization, the Hitler Jugend deserves a special seat of dishonour. Led by the fiery 21-year old lawyer Kurt Gruber, the HJ encouraged young Germans to “participate actively in the formation of our national life,” but more importantly, to resist the destructive influence of the Jewry, genetic pollution with foreign races, and generally to become future Aryan supermen and/or elite SS paramilitaries. Even before membership became mandatory, the HJ had over five million members.

But one of those five million was Hans Scholl, a student at Munich University. He was clear-headed enough to react to HJ doctrine with the same shock and revulsion with which we react to those words today. Hans, his sister Sophie and three other students, secretly composed six leaflets appealing to the German people to abandon the Nazi party and support the underground resistance. They called themselves die Weiße Rose , the White Rose, and they howled with outrage at the fact that “t he Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have tried to drug us, to revolutionize us, to regiment us in the most promising young years of our lives.” The young men of the White Rose had been at Stalingrad, and the leaflets pleaded with Germans to pay heed to what would happen when the war inevitably rolled back across their own fields and streets, as it surely would. They cyclostyled and secretly distributed thousands of copies of each leaflet, causing an uproar that pretty soon got them on the Gestapo's priority list of traitors.

They evaded detection for a year, until one afternoon when the Scholls, in the kind of moment of mad passion that is the undoing of every prophet, climbed to the top floor of their university building and flung handfuls of leaflets into the central atrium. Caught, the White Rose were charged with treason, and every one of them was executed by guillotine.

Sometimes, when you stick your neck out, it gets cut off. Still, those leaflets would be read everywhere, they would be smuggled out of Germany to other European countries, and to England, and when Allied planes began flying easily over German airspace, millions of copies would be dropped upon the German fields and streets along with fire and ghastly retribution.

Looking back on the era of fascism in Europe, and the now incomprehensible compliance and enthusiasm of European societies with its cruelty and arrogance, we run into a global stirring of young people who refused to go quietly. The idealism and internationalism of the anti-fascist movement was highlighted in the mid-1930s, when tens of thousands of anarchists and liberals and socialists, including George Orwell, and black men as well as white, volunteered to fight General Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War. It was not strictly a youth movement, but the majority of the volunteers were in their twenties, the youngest casualty just sixteen years old. They shipped off from across Europe and the United States, trickled in from Iraq and Mexico and South America and China. The Six Février Battalion included Indians, North African Arabs, Belgians, Japanese and Palestinian Jews, most of them unable to understand each others' speech, but trusting each other on the basis of a broad ideological solidarity and a shared understanding that fascism was the greatest threat to their generation. Volunteers famously defended Madrid from Franco's opening campaign, with the slogan " ¡No Pasarán! " – You Shall Not Pass – that still resounds in the collective heart of the country. But they lost the war, of course, in part because for each volunteer in the International Brigades, two “volunteers” were dispatched on the orders of Mussolini to fight for the other side.

Speaking of youth movements, in India or at large, for every young person that history has judged to be a hero, there is one has been judged to be a monster. Although we want to remember youth as a constantly regenerating source of clear-eyed challenges and unmuddied idealism that has always and will always be around to hustle the conservative septugenarians who run the world into new experiments with justice and brotherhood, it is a transparent myth. And on the other side of that myth we see the horrible parade of youth movements that have earned and deserved altogether different labels: racist, traitor, nutcase, collaborator, suicide, genocide, murderer, fool. There is one fact in this history: youth will not shut up forever. There is one hope: that when it has spoken with passion as well as control, with outrage as well as forgiveness, and with principles instead of partisanry, that it will never fail to be heard and obeyed.

At the same time that the White Rose was blowing on the embers of resistance in Munich, the most important student movement in India was ablaze. Youth mobilization reached its critical mass in the independence movement during the Quit India movement of 1942. But the story of youth struggle against British rule should be begun a little earlier.

For the pervious two decades, students had been fitfully organizing and protesting the policies of the British Indian government. There had been a notable flare-up at the announcement in 1927 about the Simon Commission, a committee with no Indian members, that was to look into the success of the system of partial self-governance. Students took to the streets shouting “Go back Simon!” and in Lahore, where the protests were most strident and the police beat Lala Lajpat Rai until he died from his injuries, students reportedly filled the sky with kites and balloons printed with those words.

One of the students in Lahore, eyewitness to the beating, was from the National College. A born firebrand, he had participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement when he was 13 but had grown jaded with Gandhi's plodding non-violence. Now 21, he was ready for swifter revenge. Bhagat Singh would become one of the few memorable figures of an otherwise forgotten anti-colonial terrorist movement that attracted many younger activists who lacked the patience for satyagraha . Singh was a leader of the Hindustan Socialists Republican Army, along with the 22-year old graduate Chandrashekar Azad. A few days later, they assassinated the Deputy Superintendent of Police. The whole outfit went underground.

In their next audacious action, Bhagat Singh and a partner infiltrated the Legislative Assembly and dropped a home-made bomb in the Chamber. They didn't intend to injure or kill any legislators, but rather to “make the deaf hear,” and through the resulting chaos, Singh and his accomplice hung back in the visitors gallery scattering leaflets, crying out “ Inquilab Zindabad!” and making no effort to escape. He allowed himself to be sent to jail, where he went on hunger strike for inmates' rights. When he and two of his comrades were implicated in the case of the assassinated police officer, they were re-sentenced and hanged by the neck until dead.

The anti-colonial terrorist movement in India did not outlive them by much. Gandhi eulogized them as being no less brave, although much less wise, than his non-violent activists. Still, Gandhi also knew that this brief, angry rash of violence had secured him a lasting position of favour with the British: as a lesser evil than the young people with writings so explosive and bombs so poetic.

Later, as the non-violent movement itself became more daring and more openly challenging to the idea of British rule, Indian youth gathered around it like never before. The Second World War had begun and had been joined by Britain without any Indian say, and Indian troops had once more been mobilized to fight and die in Europe. The Quit India movement was launched by a 1942 resolution of the Indian National Congress that demanded complete independence. To many veteran Congressmen, the demand was scandalously hasty, but to tens of thousands of students Gandhi had finally delivered a convincing call to action. The struggling All India Students Federation, which Nehru had helped to establish in 1936 as a unified front for Communists, socialists and Gandhians had split up again as early as 1940; but the summons of the Quit India movement were irresistible.

The morning after the resolution was announced, students found themselves gathering in campus quads around the country, trembling with anticipation. “The principal shouted at us from the bridge – ‘No slogans! No slogans!'" recalls Sivasankara Menon, a student at Maharaja College in Ernakulam who was later arrested for organizing a hunger strike, “But I plucked up courage and said Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! "

And so it began, across the country, Indian youth's greatest days. Students turned out to protest in the tens of thousands, boycotting classes and being expelled from their universities. As the adult leaders of the Congress party were rounded up, students took up the party's leadership, and were arrested in turn. Illegal newspapers poured out of university basements, and in Bombay University, 22-year old Usha Mehta operated a clandestine radio station.

The non-violent protest was accompanied by no-longer-subterranean acts of sabotage and organized reprisals against police and administrators. Students from the Benares Hindu University raided the city armory and burned down the police station; the military occupied their library and canteen for a week until they quietened down. Trains were hijacked, there were public lynchings. Underground outfits for young men and women, called the Mukti Bahini and the Bhagini Sena, trained militia in lathi- and knife-fighting. Eleven days into the agitations, the first young person to be executed was 14-year old Veer Sharma in Nagpur. Next was 16-year old Hemu Kalani in Sindh who, legend has it, climbed to the gallows shouting Inquilab Zindabad . On more than one occasion, the entire mechanism of control threatened to yield to mob rule. In the end, though, the unanimity of the young voices behind Quit India couldn't be misunderstood.

The fervour had evaporated by 1946: once the national leadership was released, an odor of necessary compromise returned the negotiations for independence, and the students' interest waned. It was this same year, however, that another student movement emerged that would be among the most consequential in Indian history.

The Constituent Assembly elections of 1946 were something of a rehearsal for the fight between pro- and anti-Pakistan political forces. In an unprecedented electoral drive, some 600 students of the Aligarh Muslim University visited hundreds of villages from Assam to the North-Western Frontier Provinces, tweaking familiar communal anxieties and canvassing the vote for a separate state. Their presence in the village square tilted the balance for many communities who were detached from the fray, and it transformed the Muslim League from “a condescending and aristocratic cabal into the chosen shepherds of a nation in the making,” with Jinnah as sole spokesperson for Muslim India.

One of the author's earliest memories is of the arrival in our ancestral village in Northern India of three young men carrying the Muslim League flag – the Islamic crescent and star on a deep green background. The three were students from Aligarh University. They planted the flag in the village square and a crowd of little boys gathered around them … within an hour our village had been turned into a ‘Pakistan village' … A few months later they all walked in their bare feet, and some carried their aged and sick parents on their backs, to the polling both four miles away, to vote for the Muslim League and Pakistan. This was repeated all over India. Seldom in History have so few inspired so many with so little effort.

-Kalim Siddiqui, Conflict, Crisis and War in Pakistan

The Muslim constituencies were swept by the League, leaving Congress candidates behind in the dust. “I have been following the wonderful work that the Aligarh boys have done,” remarked Jinnah, “You have proved what I said, that Aligarh is the arsenal of Muslim India.” It only took six hundred rounds from that arsenal to open the breach that tore one country into two.

These pre-independence youth movements would set two major precedents, one positive and one negative. The bad news first: Indian youth politics would never fully regain its autonomy from political parties and their increasingly communal agendas. There would be lasting damage to the Indian youth movement's ability to raise questions that political parties didn't want to ask, and only once would an Indian youth movement ever try to re-imagine the political system itself.

On the other hand, the dialogue between violent and non-violent action in the Indian independence movement had a higher volume and higher stakes because of the participation, or leadership, of young people. Other oppressed groups around the world were listening and learning. Soon afterwards, the same dialogue would be reprised in the second generation of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, featuring similar teenage truculents and student satyagrahis rushing up against – and eventually over – the white establishment.

Take a look at Wes Mumia Cook. In 1967, he was an African American teenager growing up in the housing projects of Philadelphia, a city that still carries the reputation and the scars of being a racial flashpoint in America. At 15, he was appointed the Minister of Information in the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense and he wrote for their national magazine, documenting police racist abuses. Mumia tried to stay in school and was even elected President of the student body, but ended up getting himself expelled for campaigning to get the high school renamed after Malcolm X. He changed his own name to Mumia Abu-Jamal. His journalism, in the Black Panther and later over radio, breathed a fire and a fury that really spoke to the accumulated frustrations of African-Americans living in a unofficially segregated and racist city, but with words that were a guaranteed ticket into jail whenever he next stood trial for an offense, which would be soon.

One night in 1972, Mumia came upon a policeman beating up his brother, Billy Cook. By the end of the night, Mumia had been shot and the policeman had been killed. In all likelihood, Mumia did it, but the reason nobody is sure is that the incident was followed by Mumia's conviction – to be executed – in what is now a watershed example of racist mistrials in the US. At one point the judge refused to let him interview his jurors, because, he ruled, Mumia's dreadlocks would intimidate the jury. Mumia spent twenty years on Death Row, the poster child of the campaign against capital punishment, until his death sentence was overturned – he's still spending life in jail. “But you know what I mean,” he told his biographer, Terry Bisson, “Don't make me out to be some saint or martyr. Being a revolutionary is hard, but it's fun. I was having fun. Hell, can you believe it, I'm still having fun.”

The Black Panthers would become an iconic youth movement, a proudly militant – and apparently fun - alternative to the non-violent movement for civil rights. One of the founders was a 24-year old African-American named Huey Newton, who was also convicted of murdering a policeman in what was later admitted to be a mistrial. The group was largely responsible for popularizing the Black Power movement, short-hand for a new African-American nationalism, so affirmative and macho that the whole world took notice of it, particularly at the 1968 Olympic games. There, the gold- and bronze-winners for the 200m sprint gave the salute – a closed fist held up in the air – as they stood on the podium and the Star Spangled Banner played. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were 24 and 23. The silver medalist, a white athlete from Australia, wore in support the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a campaign to protest apartheid in South Africa.

Newton and Carlos gave silent expression to the sentiment voiced by Muhammad Ali, age 24, when he refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam: “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Every young black man and woman could rally around the idea that they should not be sent as representatives of the United States – to sprint for it, or to kill and die for it – only to return and be treated as second-class citizens.

Criticizing their action, former American IOC member Avery Brundage said, "...one of the basic principles of the Olympic Games is that politics play no part whatsoever in them." But in 1936, Brundage had been instrumental in awarding the Games to Berlin, although the Committee was aware that German Jews would be forbidden from participating by the Nazi government. The Nazis had wanted the 1936 games to showcase the superior talent and vigour of Aryan youth. When a 23-year old black man named Jesse Owens took four gold medals for track and field, consistently beating out his German competitor, Adolf Hitler refused to hand Owens his medals in person. So Smith and Carlos knew that politics plays a part in everything, and they made their point.

The Panthers would fail, however, undermined by internal factionalism, not to mention an official FBI programme of espionage and sabotage called COINTELPRO. This extra-constitutional programme targeted several flamboyant youth movements of the 70s, like the Weathermen, a group of white students whose long-term goal was the revolutionary overthrow of the United States government but whose short-term missions were more like attempting the jailbreak of the acid-guru Timothy Leary. They were part of a phenomenon of young middle-class urban terrorists across Western nations, inspired at least as much by boredom as by ideology. Their romantic counterparts in Germany were the Baader-Meinhof gang, who only drove BMWs and insisted on co-ed topless sunbathing while barracked for arms training with Palestinian militants in Syria. It goes without saying that none of them eluded State intelligence programmes like COINTELPRO for very long.

“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”

Less forgivably, in the 1950s COINTELPRO had targeted Martin Luther King's movements for desegregation and civil rights. King was 27 when he became a pastor in Montogomery, Alabama, and found himself leading the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott in protest of segregated seating for blacks and whites. While King's movement became principally church-based, his philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience – famously borrowed from Gandhi – inspired the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC), which in turn became a major target of COINTELPRO in the 1960s. SNCC volunteers organized “Sit-Ins” in segregated cafeterias and “Freedom Rides” on segregated bus lines, defying local segregation laws in the Southern states and forcing the Kennedy administration to provide federal protection against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. The SNCC became a model for youth activism in the United States. As it had in India, that ceaseless peaceful push against oppression would win new ground that violent force had never been able to seize.

Across the Atlantic, an even more racist state began to be challenged by nonviolent youth movements in the 1960s. In 1968, a 22-year old medical student named Stephen Bantu Biko organized the South African Students' Organization as a united front for black, white and Indian youth opposing apartheid. The SASO contributed to the political foment that built up to the terrible Soweto Riots in 1976, where thousands of black schoolchildren and supporters protested against the government's maintenance of Afrikaans as the compulsory medium of education. What began as a peaceful protest slipped out of control when police tried to disperse it with tear gas; when the children picked up stones, soldiers responded they only way they had been trained to. Five hundred protestors, possibly more, died that day. Two days later, Biko was arrested at a road block and beaten to his death in custody – but the non-violent movement against apartheid would not die with him, and once again, it would prevail where the violent movement failed.

Those hinge years between the 1960s and the 1970s were a time when young people really grabbed society by the balls and demanded change, immense and immediate. A convergence of sociopolitical and cultural events – their nations' cynical behaviour in the Cold War, the resurgence of Communist sympathies in Western and post-colonial nations, and the new discourses of technology and human rights – alienated young people from their parents, the establishment and the values of the wartime generation. Liberal governments were starting look monstrously conservative, democracies showed new symptoms of fascism, the West was sprouting imperialist tumours around the world. An old cynicism mixed with a new idealism blasted youth to the front and centre of the global activist stage. It also put in motion a counterculture that was - in its various aspects - as idealistic, as inflammatory, as drugged addled and sexually liberated and gifted with the guitar as any we've ever seen. The year 1968 handed youth an international mandate to brim with hope and burn with discontent.

Like in Mexico City: we know about Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos at the ‘68 Olympic Games. The games had been preceded by months of protests in the Tlatelolco neighbourhood, where Mexican students tried to draw attention to the authoritarianism of the Diáz Ordáz regime. The protests peaked on October 2 nd , when 15,000 unarmed students were marching through the streets carrying red carnations. Towards nightfall, noticing a military build-up, many of them left. After dark, the military closed its formation and began to fire live rounds to disperse the group. The number of students killed is probably close to three hundred. It was followed by a dense government smoke-screen that left all questions of responsibility unanswered.

Like in Paris: a general strike, set in motion by students, made the number “1968“ a cultural signifier all by itself. Towards the beginning of the year, high school and college students were dissatisfied with the conservatism of their curricula and their educational institutions, and began demanding a kind of education that engaged new ideas. Students en masse were sick of capitalism: how it edged towards fascism, how it encouraged the pursuit of wealth to discourage the pursuit of consciousness, how it talked about rights in order to avoid talking about true freedom. Capitalism was a halfway house towards good citizenship where society was prone to get stuck. Democracy was a spectacle of freedom. Students said: “ Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui. We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.”

After clashes at the University of Paris, in May of '68 the University was closed down. The national student union began to protest, followed by the union of university teachers, and a sympathetic one-day strike was arranged by leftist unions. Radical student groups occupied offices in their universities, turfing out the senior administrators and proclaiming the colleges “peoples universities.” Workers followed suit in factories, to the extent that in the third week of May, two-thirds of the French workforce was on strike. The problem was that no one was entirely sure what they wanted: workers and students pounded their fists raw demanding the resignation of the government, visions of anarchist utopia wobbling in the far distance. It was left to union leaders to negotiate a less precipitate course, specifically, a hike in the minimum wage and other mere occupational benefits. This would be a lame conclusion, except that 1968 made the French state reconsider its relations to society and capital in a way that has, until very recently, buttressed the state against conservative resurgences. Not bad for kids who began agitating because they had too little to complain about.

In the United States, though, young people had plenty of good reasons to complain: for one, the continued disenfranchisement of women and minorities. These were the years of the feminist Second Wave in the West, which brought attention to new questions like women's equality in the workplace, their right to reproductive choice, their right to attend the best universities along with men. A generation of young women questioned their role in society and the limitations that had historically been placed on their bodies and their sexual needs. On the civil rights front, in 1968 the SNCC organized a protest at a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg – it got a little out of control, and the police shot and killed three young men – all of them black, so the media didn't make a big fuss.

Besides, the media was occupied with the second good reason for youth to be protesting in 1968 - the war in Vietnam. In the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong hammered through all the way into Saigon, and Americans were treated to the sight of VCs rattling their guns at GIs inside the compound of the US Embassy. Not a sight that reassured anyone about a war in which their classmates were fighting and which nobody understood in the first place. The Vietnam War protests are old news now, they're a bedtime story for pacifists and anti-imperialists and a lasting, disfiguring dent in the overconfident American psyche.

Their success was not cheaply won: in 1970, at the Kent State University in Ohio, protests became so heated that the National Guard decided to open fire on upper-middle class white kids, killing four of them (like they had done in Orangeburg, and like they would do ten days later to black students in Jackson State University, but at Kent State everyone was surprised ). The Vietnam protests in '68 were so strident that President Johnson refused to run for a second term and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had a nervous breakdown and was reduced to weeping behind his curtains before he resigned. Most importantly, for the first time, and perhaps the last, it seemed like an American war might be curtailed because the American people said so.

The third good reason to protest: 1968 was the creative peak of a generation of protest rock so powerful and articulate that it still revives the spirit of the ‘60s when little else does. The bands Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds broke up that year, but David Crosby and Stephen Stills decided to starting jamming a little with Graham Nash and loner Neil Young, giving rise to one of the finest distillations of talent and anger in the history of rock. The stunned disillusionment of young people after the Kent State killings would be perfectly captured in the lyrics and the wailing guitar on Young's song, Ohio.

During the dramatic `68 Democratic Convention to nominate the Democratic candidate in the Presidential race, Simon & Garfunkel, the Credence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin performed in New York, fanning the young supporters for anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy into hysteria. Chicago became a war zone between student demonstrators and police. Naturally, McCarthy lost to the more hawkish Hubert Humphrey, who would be demolished by Richard Nixon.

Not all the music was angry – some just encouraged young people to turn on, tune in and drop out, and not to take the problems of their societies any more seriously than they could from the hash tents at Woodstock. Either way, music was the tingling spine of the counterculture, and it helped carry a shared revolutionary energy to young people around the world.

Like to Czechoslovakia: that year, student demonstrations against the Stalinist President resulted in his replacement by Alexander Dubcek, a reformer with a genuine interest in merging Communism with personal and intellectual freedom – “Communism with a human face”. It was the first uprising in a Soviet satellite state behind which students were the main force, as opposed to the working class, and the Prague Spring of 1969 was the most successful period of reform until 1989. Dubcek's government permitted new freedom for the press and even began discussing multiparty elections, and oversaw a period of brief but optimistic chaos before seven thousand Soviet tanks made their presence and their message known on the streets of Prague. Czech students stormed the tanks and engaged the young Russian tank drivers, who had hesitated to fire on unarmed crowds, in furious ideological debate. Still, the defeat of the Prague Spring cost 72 lives and it buried political freedom in Czechoslovakia for another two decades.

Further east, two youth movements in South Korea and China created a popular undertow that would drag their entrenched national leadership out to sea. South Korea was a capitalist autocracy that pretended to be a democracy – in reality the systematic oppression of workers was part of the national plan for economic growth. Hundreds of radical students quietly left colleges to take up factory work – the only way to infiltrate the prison-like industrial compounds and attempt to organize labour. In 1960, after a routine electoral fraud was revealed, a student uprising in Seoul rushed the palace of President Syngman Rhee. As workers and supporters joined the students, the armed forces refused to continue firing into the crowd, and Rhee resigned. Youth struck the first blow and, through the ‘60s, it was the groundswell of organized labour that would continue to force the Korean government forward, despite repeated coups and missteps, towards popular government.

In China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when Chairman Mao Tse Tung called on the “revolutionary successors” to shake loose the bureaucrats and bourgeoisie that had reappeared in the Communist Party. School and university students from urban backgrounds formed revolutionary squads called the Red Guards, and traveled around the country conducting their own purges of suspected counterrevolutionaries in the government and university faculties, savaging the hand that would have fed them very well.

The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigour and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning.

- Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung, or “The Little Red Book”

Teachers were the first victims – in front of enormous public meetings called “struggle sessions” they'd be beaten, foully humiliated and made to confess their ideological straying. The Red Guards spent three years terrorizing the Party and the government, holding the country in a state of bloody disarray, with each squad competing to demonstrate who was most loyal to Mao while Mao himself sat in Beijing in wide-eyed horror at the adolescent brutality he had unleashed. By the time the army had kicked the Red Guards back into class, tens of thousands Chinese had been killed and the dream of ‘permanent revolution' was vandalized beyond recognition. So began China's descent toward the apology for a revolutionary state that it is today.

Twenty years later, students would gather in Tiananmen Square to demand, instead, genuine democratization. The youth protests were joined by intellectuals and then by labourers, a provocative combination: it implied, correctly, that the only remaining supporters of the Party were in the countryside. The students demanded many things, but above all the demanded open dialogue with their leaders. There has never been a moment when youth spoke more honourably for their beliefs and their demands and their futures. But the tanks of the 27 th and 38 th Armies were not listening; they were not long deterred by the desperately improvised roadblocks arranged by the citizens of Beijing. They did what they were told and blasted a hole in the Chinese youth movement from which it would never recover.

The last of the sixties were also the peak years of the last epic youth movement in India. It didn't involve Acts of Parliament or SMS campaigns or upper-caste self preservation (and Mandal, I or II, right or wrong, are disqualified by association to the above). On the contrary, it involved a fundamental reimagination of society, a grand – some would say ridiculous – sacrifice of social privilege, and lots of gunpowder.

In August 1969, a handful of students in Calcutta responded to a most improbable call to action. “They must live with the poorest peasants, eat with them and help them in all their work,” explained Charu Mazumdar, the Chairman of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), “and thus gradually become one of them.” That much being accomplished, the students were to help villagers establish liberated areas in the countryside through armed struggle, replicating what Majumdar had achieved in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, and creating a zone for class struggle without the interference of the state. Urban universities were surprisingly ripe grounds for recruitment – students were infuriated at the monotony and mismanagement of their educations and they were jaded with parliamentary governance. They saw through the student unions and political parties, spaces for careerism and opportunism but by no means for revolutionary morality. Although most of them were anglophiles, economically privileged and – as students in posh universities like Presidency in Calcutta and St Stephens in Delhi – already had one foot up on the ladder to success, Majumdar's message about the decrepitude of the whole establishment hit them right on.

Most of the CPI-ML activists stayed in Calcutta, lamely pushing propaganda against Bengal's bourgeois intellectual heritage – by trashing statues of Gandhi - and organizing campaigns of petty urban terrorism against the police. But a few hundred extraordinary volunteers, like Ashim “Kaka” Chatterjee and some of his friends in Presidency College, actually gave up smoking joints in their dorm rooms to disperse into the villages. There are no records of exactly how many students went where, but within months certain areas, like Debra-Gopiballavpur in West Bengal, were shaken by guerilla activities. Over time their noble plans for land redistribution, popular organization fell to the wayside in favour of simple class enemy annihilation – a mistake, because the Indian state reared up and brought its full weight down on the Naxals. The CPI-ML-led wave was crushed by the mid-70s, but today more than ever, the Naxal movement has 'liberated' vast tracts of Indian Territory. It's an almost unreal situation – an enemy power embedded in the centre of the Indian state. Judging by the level of organization in the modern day Naxal movement, it appears that students continue to drop out of colleges – not the elite universities that fueled the first wave, but regional institutions now – to join the advance of the Indian peasant revolution.

There are a lot of unhappy endings in the history of youth movements. They do not matter. Today the young people of Iran are erupting from two decades of submission to a baffling theocracy to remind the ayatollahs that the country will be theirs and they will choose its leaders and its future. It may end badly, as it has so often before. That does not matter: an energy moves within youth that tells them not to be still, that refuses to go along silently. It's an energy commonly exploited by those who fear becoming its target: the state, the political party and the religious establishment.

In India, those three bodies have swallowed the youth movement whole. What we have left are perversities like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the very image of youth's energy hijacked by the establishment and made a tool of its atrocities. It doesn't matter. Sitting still is not an option. There are a thousand tiny youth movements that cannot stop moving: against the harassment of our bodies, against the contortion of our history, against the silencing of our speech. Seventy years ago there were young Indians ready to leave home to fight fascism in Spain. Eventually there will be a critical mass of young Indians ready to fight the fascism that is threatening to kick in our front doors.

We just need to remember what a critical mass of young people does: it stands its ground and anything will grind to a halt before it. It snaps its fingers and the world grooves. It stamps its foot on the ground, and the shape of the world is altered.