Is it the love for Tamil culture that has brought tens of thousands of youngsters to the streets in Tamil Nadu in the name of jallikattu, virtually holding the state government hostage and putting the Union government in a fix? Yes and no.

For the protester and the sympathiser, it is a fight for one’s cultural heritage being trampled upon by biased, insensitive, even ignorant, decision makers. Look beyond the placard-holding student who boycotted classes to be a sentinel of Tamil culture on the Marina beach and you see a deeper reason: angst of a second generation muffled through systemic de-politicisation of campuses.

What makes this reading difficult for even the discerning is that the protestor himself is not conscious that he represents a generation denied the right to stand up and be heard. With the last of powerful leaders gone with Jayalalithaa’s death, what we see today could be an eruption of that pent-up anger, say observers. Jallikattu came as the right spark, with all the ingredients of hurt pride and unrecognised valour.

The prime culprit here, says political commentator Gnani Sankaran, is M Karunanidhi who quelled two protests in the 1970s, one in Trichy Clive’s college hostel and the other in Annamalai University. Ironically, his party had ridden the student wave during the anti-Hindi agitations to attain power. Not much of the Trichy history remains in public domain, but old-timers remember the hostel residents’ attempt to protest being met with police lathis, leaving pools of blood in the corridors.

In 1972, when Annamalai University decided to confer a doctorate on Karunanidhi, who was then chief minister, the Students Federation of India (SFI) organised a protest. The police beat up student activists. Soon, a body was found in a water tank on the campus. Students said it was Udayakumar, a second year maths student, but the government wouldn’t agree. After a state-wide protest by the SFI, the government set up an inquiry commission headed by Justice NS Ramasami which found the dead man was Udayakumar.

“There was fear,” says retired judge K Chandru, who led the 1972 agitation as an SFI leader. “But an organisation like the SFI had enough members to sacrifice. There are not many now.”

MGR, who became the chief minister in 1977, had a heart of gold, but when it came to dealing with student unrest, he wasn’t much different. “MGR crushed several protests at MC Raja hostel in Chennai,” says C Lakshmanan, associate professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies. Jayalalithaa continued with the legacy, ensuring that student union elections were not fought on political lines.

Adds Lakshmanan: “Students unions, which are supposed to assist colleges in academic and other activities, are either non-existent or handpicked without political banners. This de-politicisation is at the core of the jingoism that we see.”

But a ‘jallikattu jingoism’ may be better than the violence students of some Chennai colleges unleash in the name of ‘bus day.’ “Vandalism shown by some students of Pachaiyappa’s College and Presidency College is also the result of depoliticisation,” says Gnani. Karunanidhi got a taste of this in 1974 from a men’s arts college near Spencer’s, and shifted it to Nandanam. Quaid-E-Millath College for Women today stands where the men’s college was.

Chandru says the DMK not just depoliticised campuses, it also diverted youngsters’ attention from greater social issues to Tamil causes. “The net result is that today’s students interact less with each other over ideas, and social media has occupied the space. This leads to interested parties playing puppetry,” says the former judge who sees “the jallikattu movement” as a mix of spontaneous crowds and some pulled in by such parties. “But the sad thing is that most of our students have no political orientation,” says Chandru.

Without such an orientation, Gnani agrees with Chandru, the jallikattu movement may not sustain itself. Culture is a nice concept; battle, a tough reality.