It had begun to drizzle, but the students refused to leave. They were angry, and yet they were elated, for here they were, displaying their might in front of the portals of the infamous Manorma Talkies which, because of the continuing success of Deedar in attracting customers at the full price, and also because of its hardheaded manager, who cared less for law than profits, had been discriminating against them for months. Refreshed by their vacation, excited by the recent student elections, and indignant at the attack on their pride and their pockets, the students shouted that they would show the management what stuff they were made of, that the cinema-hall must ‘either learn or burn’, and that sticks would teach the employees what passes couldn’t. The sorrowful and subdued patrons of the first show began to come out. They were astonished to be faced by a belligerent crowd which condemned their acquiescence in the earlier violence. ‘Shame! Shame!’ shouted the students. The audience, among them old people and even children, looked perplexedly at them with tear-stained faces.
The scene began to grow ugly. There was no violence, but some of the patrons were not allowed to enter their cars, and hurried away, fearing that if they stayed, their own safety would be threatened. Finally the District Magistrate, the Deputy Superintendent of Police, and the Proctor of the university all arrived on the scene. They tried to ascertain the nature of the problem. All of them felt that the management was to blame but that the students should have taken their complaint through the proper channels. The Proctor even tried to make the point that the students had no right to demonstrate before the second show, but it was clear that when facing four hundred angry students on a rainy night, he could not immediately exercise his normally awesome authority. His voice was drowned out by the shouting. When he perceived that the students would not be pacified or persuaded about the adequacy of the proper channels except by office-bearers of their own union , he tried to seek them out. Two of them, though not Rasheed, happened to be in the crowd. But they made it clear that they would not act unless the Treasurer appeared on their behalf as a representative of the Executive Council in order to show that the Council in general acted to protect, not merely to impose its will on the student body. This was a way of demanding L.N. Agarwal’s presence.
The manager, who had gone home just after the students had been thrashed and before the crowd had collected, came hurriedly to the scene when he heard that the police would protect his person from injury but that only he could protect Manorma Talkies. He was abject. He called the students ‘my dear dear friends’. He wept when he saw the bruises on the arms and back of one of the students. He talked about his own student days. He offered them all a special showing of Deedar. It would not do. ‘Our university Treasurer will represent us,’ insisted the students’ union . ‘Only he knows how to restrain us.’ As a matter of fact, they themselves were keen that the incident should not turn violent, because it would affect the next day’s victory-cum-protest march, and they did not want it to be perceived by the public at large that students demonstrated only for their own trivial privi- leges and not for the good of society.
L.N. Agarwal, who had told the DSP that he should handle the matter on his own and that he should not ring up the Home Minister for every petty disturbance, was finally persuaded by a phone call from his colleague the Proctor to come to the scene. Most unwillingly, he did so. He found himself utterly out of sympathy with the unruly mob. Students did not realize how privileged they were in comparison to the rest of their countrymen. They chose deliberately to be ignorant of how little they themselves paid for their education, how two-thirds of it was subsidized by the government. They were a cosseted bunch, and he deplored the concessions that they received for what was, after all, mere entertainment. But since the concessions existed, he was forced to tell the manager that he would have to accede to the students’ demands. ’
As a result, the offending employees were dismissed; the manager submitted a letter of apology to the Proctor expressing his regret over the incident and assuring the students of his ‘best service at all times’; two hundred rupees was paid to each of the injured students; and the manager agreed to screen a slide of his letter of apology at all the cinema-halls of Brahmpur.
The students’ union calmed the crowd down. The students melted away. The police retired. And L.N. Agarwal returned to his two rooms in the MLAs’ hostel, furious at having had to act on behalf of the rowdy mob. Even when he had emerged from the manager’s office, some of the students had jeered him. One went so far as to rhyme his surname with the Hindi word for pimp. For puerility, selfishness and ingratitude, thought the Home Minister, they were hard to beat. And tomorrow again, no doubt, their propensity for violence would come to the fore. Well, the police would be ready if they overstepped the line between propensity and action.