Regimes rarely choose their nemesis. Sometimes they arrive genetically coded for resilience and success. The Cockroach Janta Party did not choose its own name: the insult on a young people was pronounced from an altitude where words are meant to be weighed before being uttered. Abhijeet Dipke deployed the insult as identity leveraging an old truth: the creature survives everything designed to exterminate it.
The rash comment produced a rash of dissent founded in angst and anger that acquired barricades, tear gas and a hunger strike. The leaks of exam papers year after year are not aberrations but recurrences, and have claimed over a score of lives. The protestors’ demands are quaint for the cynical— accountability, the minister’s resignation, withdrawal of cases, compensation to families of students who died and a system where papers never leak.
No matter the political hue, parties in power harbour contempt for questions, are disdainful of dissent and revel in the complacency of arrogance. On the opening day of the monsoon session thousands marched on Parliament; over a hundred were injured. By Tuesday, the protesters had returned and rebuilt the camp the police had demolished. Mass outrage registered on the Richter scale. The cockroach, as advertised, survived. On Saturday, the arc of power bent before the wall of resistance.
The biographical irony is thick enough to cut. This NDA regime owes much to student politics—nearly a dozen ministers graduated from the ABVP and the JP movement, their careers beginning with the kind of protests they now police. The Prime Minister’s own political formation runs through the Nav Nirman agitation of 1974. The party’s résumé was minted in the anti-Emergency movement amid lathi charges. Confronting its own biopic, the regime chose to wield lathis on those carrying the baton forward, only to retreat.
The protests illustrated the erosion of the contract between society and the State. The epicentre Jantar Mantar, the 18th-century observatory built to read the heavens, measured the Republic’s mood. Barricades extended to the street named after Leo Tolstoy, who wrote that governments sustain themselves because people submit to systems they inwardly reject. This was not just another group. It represented the NEET middle, the hope of families who liquidated savings for a seat on the train to prosperity. Lending their voice were the jobless, professionals, activists and parents.
Gen Z protesters’ repertoire of innovations in the face of brutality inspired and riveted India. Students in Delhi sang the national anthem, freezing the police mid-lathi-charge; in Patna the use of water cannon was converted into a rain dance; in Mumbai a young woman stopped a police van—India’s own tank-woman frame. The geography of the protests illustrates the consensus of the youth from the proverbial Kashmir to Kanyakumari—the catchment includes the districts spanning coaching empires harvesting over $7 billion annually.
Governments underestimate students at their own peril. It was students who set themselves and the official languages script aflame in Madras in 1965, triggering the exit of Congress and the installation of DMK in Tamil Nadu. Indira Gandhi lost the plot with the 1974 agitation in the hostels of Ahmedabad. It was Bihar’s students who then asked Jayaprakash Narayan to lead them. The Assam agitation was led by students. Globally, students hastened de Gaulle’s exit in Paris, led the Velvet Revolution in Prague, defied Suharto in Indonesia and recently drove change in Dhaka, Colombo and Kathmandu. Students do not need to win elections to end governments. Each generation files its petition on the street when it is not heard.
Arithmetic explains power and political anxiety. Projections estimate the 15-29 cohort at around 371 million—a youth nation larger than the population of the US. It is the constituency of potential voters—some about to reach the ballot box, some in the job queue disappointed by it. It came of political age a decade back and knows only the promises and disappointments of one regime. Any government in an argument with a quarter of its population can only hope to change the narrative or submit.
Typically, the standard operating system of power is ignore, insult, injure, invite. The regime’s spin masters inducted the foreign hand to shift the narrative just like Indira Gandhi did before imposing the Emergency. The mechanics of discouragement follow the muscle. Ill-advised advisories from universities caution students against expressing affinity with political movements, in person and on social media. The opposition, meanwhile, did what oppositions do—arrive after the audience is seated.
Students are the isotopes of the body politic. Like the radioactive tracers doctors use, students perform the diagnostic function for society and regimes. The malignancy lights up. They have no baggage, no stake in the settled order, no incentive to lie about the condition of the State. Isotopes are also the variants that split and set off the chain reaction. Their grievances are leading indicators: the leaked paper today is the jobless quarter tomorrow. And they impose an impossible dilemma on power.
The cause of the anger is a crisis of systemic credibility. Count the instruments of the State that have let down the youth: exams that cannot certify merit, the paradox of unemployment and unfilled posts, courts with seemingly no time for grievances, programmes for internships and jobs that under-deliver, and fast-track courts with a slow-track record. A nation’s aspirations cannot flourish in a society where truth resides in the complicity of silence. The young at Jantar Mantar refused the terms of that settlement. In their victory the students taught the State and the adults a lesson about youth power and the genetic code of Gen Z.
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
Shankkar Aiyar
Author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12 Digit Revolution, and Accidental India
(shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com)