A Tale of Two Walks
One Generation. Two Sankalpas. What Do They Create?
Over the last few weeks, we have seen two very different groups of young Indians walking with a sankalpa.
Thousands walked from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament. Around the same time, lakhs of Kanwariyas were walking towards Shiva, and some were even running the Dak Kanwar, carrying Gangā jal for Jalabhishek. Around this season, we also see the Wari, where lakhs of Warkaris walk towards Pandharpur chanting the name of Vitthal.
All these journeys inconvenience the body. They affect traffic and disrupt normal life around them. More importantly, all of them show us the enormous power of young people coming together around a shared purpose.
The real difference is not that one group walked in protest while another walked in devotion. The real difference is what their collective energy was ultimately being used to create.
The march towards Parliament began with a genuine issue. Students wanted justice over examination irregularities, and they had every right to demand answers and accountability. Protest is not wrong. In fact, standing up for someone else’s right to a fair examination can itself come from responsibility towards the people around you.
The problem was what the movement eventually became.
Somewhere along the way, the students for whom this supposedly began seemed to get lost. Other political and ideological forces joined the mobilisation. We saw abusive language, attacks on Hindu Gods, attacks on Bharat, anger and aggression becoming increasingly central to the movement. What began as a demand for justice increasingly looked like an attempt to create unrest and force a democratically elected government into surrender.
This becomes even more difficult to understand because the Education Minister had already acknowledged the problems and several corrective measures had been initiated much before the march to Parliament. Yet the demand for his resignation became non-negotiable.
If the sankalpa was really justice for students, then students suffering because of examination and recruitment failures elsewhere, including Jharkhand, should have generated the same sustained mobilisation. Justice cannot become important only when a particular government can be targeted through it.
This is where the comparison with the Kanwariya becomes interesting.
He too has a sankalpa. He too leaves home and puts his body through discomfort. He walks for kilometres, sometimes barefoot, and in the Dak Kanwar he may even run while his group carries the Gangā jal continuously towards its destination.
But he is not walking to make someone else surrender. He is walking to learn to surrender himself.
You do not merely say that something is sacred to you. You undertake something with your body for it.
The Gangā jal that finally reaches the Shiva linga has cost the pilgrim time, comfort, effort and discipline. That cost is precisely what turns the water into his or her offering.
This is the deeper purpose of pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is not meant to be a conquest. You do not undertake it to prove that you are greater than someone else. You deliberately accept difficulty so that something within you can become smaller. Your comfort becomes less important. Your compulsions become less important. For a little while, something that you consider sacred becomes more important than you.
That is why the contrast between the two sankalpas is worth thinking about.
One kind of collective energy can become increasingly focused on making somebody else surrender. The other is consciously directed towards surrendering something within oneself.
One can fill public discourse with anger, abuse and Vāk-viṣa. The other attempts to bring some sweetness of devotion into one’s life.
The consequences of both extend far beyond the walk itself because what we repeatedly think, speak and do eventually shapes the kind of human beings we become.
The Wari gives us another beautiful example of the same possibility. Lakhs of people walk towards Pandharpur together. They eat together, sleep together, sing together and serve one another while chanting Vitthal Vitthal. People who may never otherwise have met become part of one community because they share something they consider sacred.
This is where both these very different movements teach us something important about the power of community.
CJP understood community extremely well. An emotion that began online became a physical community on the ground. Young people found others who shared their concerns. They developed a common language, common symbols and a sense of belonging. An individual sitting alone with his anger suddenly discovered thousands of others saying, “I feel this too.”
We should learn from that.
Sanatana Dharma has been creating communities at an extraordinary scale for centuries. The Kanwar Yatra brings together enormous numbers of people, many of them young. The Wari brings lakhs together year after year. These are not communities created around a political leader or a common enemy. At their best, they are communities created around devotion, discipline, seva and something larger than the individual.
Yet we are remarkably poor at amplifying them.
A protest involving thousands can dominate social media for weeks. An abusive slogan becomes a reel. A confrontation becomes breaking news. Anger travels extraordinarily fast online.
Meanwhile, lakhs and sometimes crores of people can voluntarily undertake a pilgrimage, and we rarely stop to ask what makes a young person put his body through this.
Why is the young person shouting angrily at a barricade more visible than the young person running with Gangā jal?
Both are young. Both have energy. Both are willing to endure discomfort. Both understand the power of community. The question is what we encourage that energy to become.
This is why protecting Sanatana Dharma cannot only mean responding when someone abuses our Gods or attacks our traditions on social media. We also have to become much better at building, strengthening and amplifying communities around Dharma itself.
What if the community created during the Kanwar Yatra did not simply disappear after Jalabhishek? What if the relationships created during the Wari did not end at Pandharpur? What if young people who discover this sweetness of devotion remained connected through seva, learning, responsibility and spiritual seeking throughout the year?
That would not mean creating another angry counter-mob. The objective should be exactly the opposite. It should be to create a mass movement for inner transformation.
That inner transformation does not mean withdrawing from the world or becoming indifferent to injustice. Devotion towards knowledge can make you fight for a student’s right to a fair examination. Devotion towards your country can make you take responsibility for its institutions. Devotion towards people around you can make their suffering your concern. A community rooted in Dharma can absolutely organise for justice.
The difference is in what drives the action.
Justice need not require hatred. Responsibility need not require abuse. Courage need not require Vāk-viṣa. A person can stand firmly against injustice without allowing someone else’s political or ideological agenda to use his genuine grievance to create anarchy.
That is perhaps the most important lesson from these two walks.
Young India clearly has no shortage of energy, commitment or sankalpa. It is capable of building enormous communities both online and on the ground.
The question is what we organise that energy around.
We should learn from CJP’s ability to turn online emotion into an active physical community, while refusing to imitate the anger, abuse and ideological piggybacking that eventually overshadowed the original students’ cause.
At the same time, we should stop treating the Kanwar Yatra and the Wari merely as annual religious events. These are already enormous living communities. They need to become more visible, more connected and more active. Their devotion can express itself through seva, responsibility, protection of Dharma, concern for society and, when necessary, standing together for justice.
Young India should not allow genuine issues to become vehicles through which someone else’s vile agenda creates anger and unrest.
We can organise around something far more powerful.
We can organise around the possibility that Sanatana Dharma has always placed before us: transform the human being, build strong communities around that transformation, and allow those transformed human beings to transform the world around them.
Perhaps that is the sankalpa worth amplifying.