Wokeism is very recently coined terminology. The term ‘Wokism’ has become more popular as social media platforms have grown in popularity. Even the so-called woke culture has also grown parallel to the development of Internet facilities around the world. What, then, is Woke? The past tense of the verb to wake up is ‘woke.’ Positively speaking, the person who is awake and not sleeping is woke. It's as simple as that. On social media, it refers to someone who is aware of certain social concerns, refuses to give in to established conventions, thinks outside the box, breaks the typical, standard patterns, and frees themselves as well as those who are oppressed by the society. What a rosy picture of woke culture! isn't it? By now, society in general is quite familiar with concepts like Left, Marxism, Naxalism, liberals etc. Now, these people have moved on and are using more sophisticated yet very dangerous patterns. We are aware that Nationalist organisations, agencies, governments etc. are improving on their working styles, making appropriate changes in their organisational structures etc.

 

Likewise, the left or as far as India concerns ‘treasonous forces’ are also changing their stance. Now we will try to segregate the people who refuse to follow standard norms of Indian society on social, political, religious grounds. We are only considering Indian scenarios for now. so that we understand the basic idea of the concept of Wokism. Let's make three important groups of these organisations according to their working style and the type of social strata they engage as their weapon. The Neo-Left: They are players on the political grounds. eg. Shaheen Bagh, Farm laws protests, Anti-CAA protests etc. Cultural Marxism: Cultural warfare. Hindu bashing every way possible is a key element in their activism. They are seen everywhere from trolling Hindu festivals, Jallikattu, Sabarimala racus to support Burqa and Church propaganda. Wokism: Its psychological warfare. Famous anti-woke activist James Lindsay in his book Marxification of Education (Theft of Education) very rightly talks about radicalised youth power. He quotes, “Their energies are not being used but been radically misused”. Wokism basically started In the year 1925 in Germany. In 1933, influenced activists got an opportunity to take it to the Frankfurt school of Columbia USA. They started promoting the idea of ‘the great refusal of basic identities’.

 

According to them, any identity is ‘given’ to a person. So they refuse to accept the identity a person receives by birth. They expect to replace it with a person’s ‘choice of identity’. For example, according to one of the famous Wokes, Judith Butler, “Gender is a social construct, not biological.” That means someone is not born as male or female. people around that person make her or him believe so. No matter how absurd we think it is, they wholeheartedly believe such things to be right and true. Intersectionality of different feminisms and LGBTQ+ are the best examples of this. Famous woke writer Stuart Hall says it aptly, “Our aim is not to study cultures. Period. Our aim is to make one. Period.”Young people are rebellions in nature. They are curious.Younger generations always want to experiment on different things of the world. They wish to experience more and more different things. They want to use their energies to make their own mark, create their own identity in the world. attention seeking can also be one of the important traits of younger age. All such things are used to attract young students to this ideology. Cancel Culture: It is the culture they believe in. Cancel culture means shunning out the people who have some different opinion than yours. They outrightly reject the people having some other viewpoint. Eg. students refuse to sit in the class of the college professors they have decided to ‘cancel’. Remember, shame and victimhood are the weapons of Wokeism. Now the question arises why do they do it all?

 

The first and foremost obvious answer that comes to mind is money, power, lifestyle, career. There are organisations like Bill Gates Foundation, Open Society etc that are pumping money in different levels in many ways. Some of them actually believe in what they are doing, some of them dream to live a life of a Woke, some are dragged by their peers, some have lost the strength to get out of that vicious circle which looked very lucrative initially. There must be many other reasons also. Such radicalised Woke are great resources. They operate on diagnostic mechanisms. That means they want some project to be given so that they can show their prowess. They want their presence to be felt. Using this trait, nowadays, efforts are being made in order to identify such Woke from different institutions and align them to some positive, social cause. This has proved to be helping them to look at the world from a different perspective and revise their own thinking.Iknow some professors who are working on these lines. If you come across any such Woke, it's an opportunity for you to ‘convert’awoke into an activist that works for society’s interest, not against it. Isn't it?