There is something profoundly moving, and deeply damning, about the sight unfolding at Jantar Mantar. To see the 16-or 17-year-old kids standing eye-to-eye with heavily armed riot police fills me with shame at what we have become as a country. As expected, there are no children of the politicians of any political party out there, braving the lathis and tear gas. The politicians know how broken our system is and have sent their kids abroad to countries that are not viswagurus to get a decent education. It is the children of the middle class and lower middle class who are out there in the open, with their frail shoulders bearing the weight of a broken promise. Meanwhile, the generation that came before them, their parents and grandparents, the comfortable middle-aged demographic that has crossed 40—indulges in blind, cringeworthy support of authority. No one is accountable for anything in this La La Land of WhatsApp uncles and aunts except the long-dead Nehru, Aurangazeb, Akbar, and Alauddin Khalji.
These much-derided Gen Z kids, the very same reel-obsessed, non-reading children, possess far more moral courage than the older generations who routinely lecture them. Their numbers on the street may appear modest for now, but the fire in their eyes should alarm anyone who understands history.
Instead of opening doors for honest engagement, the state has chosen its default response of police barricades, tear gas canisters, and lathi charges. When educator Sonam Wangchuk is forced into a fast unto death alongside student movements like the Cockroach Janta Party to protest back-to-back examination paper leaks, the response of a mature republic should be open dialogue. Peaceful protest is the essential safety valve of a constitutional democracy. When a government clamps down on that safety valve, it creates a volatile pressure cooker. Suppressing legitimate dissent does not eliminate anger; it drives it underground, creating a vacuum that fissiparous agencies and hostile foreign adversaries are always eager to exploit.
It remains utterly baffling why a government that has effectively decimated the formal political opposition feels the need to adopt such strongman tactics against teenagers. Why are rulers who command absolute power so terrified of a few students on the street? The answer lies in the classic, intoxicating disease of political hubris. Rulers forget that the seeds of a regime’s collapse are almost always sown at the precise moment it feels completely invincible.
History is ruthless toward such arrogance. The Mughal Empire reached its absolute geographical zenith under Aurangzeb, only to fracture into irrelevance almost immediately after his death. The Congress party won the largest parliamentary mandate in Indian history under Rajiv Gandhi in 1984, yet that colossal majority marked the beginning of its long, irreversible structural decline. World history tells the exact same tale. The Romanov dynasty in Russia celebrated three centuries of unchecked autocratic rule with breathtaking splendour in 1913, oblivious to the starved, angry populace that would tear down the empire just four years later. The Soviet Union appeared monolithic and unshakeable at the peak of its Cold War power, yet it dissolved overnight because its internal rot was ignored.
Perhaps the ruling elite believes this current storm will simply pass. The men running the state are well past their 60s and 70s and have smartly secured the future of their many generations. These geriatrics look at these protesting kids and see only the much-derided Gen Z. They view them as soft, privileged, screen-obsessed brats who cannot sustain a real fight and will run home at the first whiff of tear gas. They think that at the first sight of police, Gen Z would write abject apology letters and run home as many did during our freedom struggle. They forget that even when an imperial Britain ruled, for every one who wrote apology letters or colluded with the British, there were hundreds who braved the lathis and jails of a superpower that ruled half the world, and that is how we won our Independence. The DNA of these great-grandparents who fought the British could have skipped a generation or two, as it did for this writer’s generation, but it has to suffice somewhere.
Most of these kids who are protesting are not hardened political operatives or funded provocateurs. They are middle-class and lower-middle-class kids whose families pooled their life savings to pay for competitive exam coaching, only to watch question papers leak back-to-back while the state looks the other way. They are not asking much, other than to give them a fair system and show some accountability. When the police personnel, who also belong to the same social class as most of these kids, go home after beating the teenagers to pulp, how are they going to face their own kids? We can only hope that their training has made them sufficiently inhumane to be immune to the accusatory glances of their children. Let’s hope the police and RPF don’t lose sleep over such trivial things. They were just doing their duty, though the duty turned out to be beating up kids.
Mass movements are inherently unpredictable. Most likely, the establishment calculated correctly: the police force will wear the children down, the street protests will fizzle out, and our parliamentarians can comfortably return to their vital work. They can spend endless legislative hours debating whether to make the singing of Vande Mataram compulsory in every hall instead of debating education or the lack of the promised two crore jobs per year. That is, after all, the fastest route to becoming a vishwaguru.
Yet, in the remote chance that this spark catches fire, and the old men in power have severely underestimated the resilience of Gen Z, events could rapidly spiral out of control. We may either be witnessing the dawn of a new, uncompromising Indian political consciousness, or entering a deeply chaotic period of unrest. A smart government does not roll the dice on its own stability. A smart government would hold the paper-leak syndicates accountable, invite student representatives to the table, listen to Sonam Wangchuk, and dismantle the grievances driving the street protests.
An oversmart government, however, believes that a few lathi charges, a well-timed media blitz, and the old reliable playbook of religious polarisation and hyper-nationalism will suffice. Supported by a pliant media ecosystem, largely owned by the crony capitalists who bankroll political parties, this path seems effortless on paper. You simply label the protesting kids as foreign agents or anti-nationals, parade a few distractions on prime-time television, and carry on as usual. If these students are genuinely funded by foreign powers, the government commands the entire apparatus of the state—the CBI, the ED, and national intelligence—to arrest and prosecute them. Running whisper campaigns without judicial proof only proves that the administration has no answers for the exam paper leakages that ruined young lives. Since most of these kids or their parents don’t have the means or might to take on the powerful establishment or hold them accountable, this will likely fizzle out this time, as it often does.
This strategy of distraction and brute force may buy time. It may keep the illusion of invincibility alive for a few more news cycles. But as Abraham Lincoln famously warned, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. When an entire generation realises it is being fooled, no amount of tear gas can enforce their silence.