A new India has taken to the streets. And more are coming to take on the establishment. The older generation is worried—and more so because Gen Alpha has caught on and is following the lead of Gen Z. Raised with a smartphone in one hand and a world of information in the other, Gen Z has little patience for what they perceive are obsolete rituals of deference to elders who don’t get them. Titles, hierarchies, and institutional gravitas no longer automatically command respect. If something seems absurd, they say so. If it feels hypocritical, they call it out. And when authority tries to shut them down, there is always a screenshot, a meme, a ditty, a parody account, or a mocking video that makes the original reprimand a joke. The government may take online insults down; but by then, they have already been downloaded, reposted and re-reposted. Starting at Jantar Mantar in July, fear appeared to have lost its grip. Fear of FIRs, arrest, and parental censure evaporated. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests offered a glimpse of this new defiance. “My father is a crook, and a BJP leader, “ said the boy who had come to Jantar Mantar from Uttar Pradesh. “He told me if some students committed suicide over the NEET exam paper leak, it doesn’t affect me. But it does.”
Him, and many youngsters who are taking on the establishment have no patience for rhetoric. Television channels, derisively called “Godi media”, became targets of ridicule and, in some cases, physical confrontation. This fury is more than a generation gap. It is a moral gap. When Gen Z is told something is forbidden, its instinct now is to ask: why? Yet this “fearless generation” does have fears. It worries about jobs, money, climate change, relationships, social pressure, and an uncertain future. What has changed is its unwillingness to be obedient simply because authority demands it. The old bargain—respect authority, follow the rules, keep your head down—has lost its power. When after weeks of silence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a midnight video asking the youth to stop protesting, “Frainds” memes sprang up mocking him. It is not that leaders are not trying to reach out; it is that they simply do not get it. This generation celebrates solidarity and speaks its own visual language. Spiderman and Superman mingle with Pride activists dressed in bright colours at protest sites, turning dissent into something that is as much about community and expression as it is about politics.
Born to Question
Every generation grows up with its own catalogue of what it is taught to fear. The policeman represented the law, the bureaucrat the state, the parent the final word. Even disagreement had etiquette. The previous instinct was to avoid trouble; now Gen Z is asking why the rule even exists.
Take 17-year-old Rhea Mehta of Delhi’s Mayur Vihar. After a teacher allegedly humiliated her classmate, she challenged the school. Her mother, Neha, panicked: “What if the principal makes an issue of it?” Her father, Amit, warned: “There are consequences to everything.” Rhea shot back: “There are consequences to staying quiet too.” When the school threatened her with disciplinary action, she asked her parents to show her exactly which rule she had broken. “If I had broken one, I’ll take the punishment. If I didn’t, why should I be scared?” The school eventually settled for a strict warning and counselled the teacher to be “gentle in class”.
Not all parents oppose such courage. Many of them admire it but worry about the price to be paid. “I raised him to be honest. I just don’t know if the world will reward him for it,” says one Delhi mother of her 19-year-old son. A father whose daughter routinely challenges college administrators tells her: “Fight if you’re right. But have a Plan B.”
Their anxiety is not irrational. According to the India Employment Report 2024, 82 per cent of youth were unemployed population in 2022. Unemployment among graduates was 29.1 per cent. Meanwhile, India ranked 91 out of 182 countries on the Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index.
Delhi-based Shubhrat Roy, 22, puts it bluntly: “Fear? We’ve already sacrificed everything; what do we have left to lose?” His father had appeared for railway recruitment exams decades ago and still tells him about of examinations cancelled, sometimes repeatedly. Roy grew up believing such chaos was a relic of the past. The reality check came when he began preparing for government job exams himself. Adjustment was a survival mechanism for older Indians. Institutions were imperfect, but the assumption was that individuals had to navigate them.
Gen Z has inherited the consequences of that bargain, and watched it fail. “We, as Gen Z, witnessed the protests firsthand and saw exactly how the state manages its youth—pellet guns, tear gas, lathis, online trolling and more. What’s left to threaten us with?” says Roy. This is a generation that has fundamentally changed its relationship with authority. Their demand is authority must explain itself.
Unbowed & Unbothered
That shift in attitude is visible in humour. The “Bal Narendra” songs around Prime Minister Narendra Modi turn a powerful political figure into a pop-culture character, collapsing the distance between the leader and the joke. Humour is not an accessory to Gen Z politics; it is part of its operating system. That belief changes the meaning of shame. The Chief Justice of India calling young people cockroaches, “who don’t get any employment and RTI activists,” started the CJP backlash. It is notable that a once-hallowed guardian of justice is not an idol. PM Modi’s quip about “Dimagi Naxals” caused a Dimagi Naxal Party to pop up online and already has almost 60k followers on Instagram. The insult becomes a caricatured screenshot, a joke, a meme or a mocking slogan.
A company’s promises can be compared with employee reviews. A university’s reputation can be investigated by student groups on social media. Institutions no longer have complete control over their own narratives. Status, therefore, does not automatically translate into credibility. “My parents, like many people of their generation, are conditioned by society to believe we have to bow down to certain people,” says Sakshi Tiwari, 28, a freelance photographer from Kolkata. “They are not taught about their rights with the same emphasis. Today, young people want to know of their rights. They simply don’t want to succumb without fighting back.”
The same confidence spills into careers, too. A 19-year-old girl in Bengaluru can tell her parents she wants a game designer’s career; a student in Jaipur can build a jewellery business on Instagram; someone in Kochi can work remotely for a Singapore company. When former Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan described Gen Z as “our children” and blamed “outside forces” for misleading students during nationwide protests, they responded with memes rejecting his idea of puppet-masters. His claim that he stepped down so that students could refocus on their studies and careers was mocked too. The political response is visible now. Parties are reshuffling leadership and foregrounding younger faces, but the problem is deeper than age. Youth does not necessarily recognise itself in leaders simply because they are young, but not ‘that young’. As one Gen Z youth puts it: “We don’t need leaders who speak like us. We need leaders who understand what our lives actually look like.” When Dharmendra Pradhan finally resigned, CJP leaders were seen partying and dancing at a five-star hotel, only to be called out by the older generation for not being serious enough. In effect, they just don’t get it. That may be the real generational rupture. Their slang reflects this shift: “be so for real”, “it’s giving”, “delulu”, “touch grass”. Beneath the vocabulary is a deeper preference—not to sound authoritative, but authentic. They are less intimidated by the physical symbols of state power. Lathis and water cannons can become footage for parody: when the cops were leaving, a young bystander asked them to bring guns because the lathis were not enough. An intimidating confrontation is transformed into a reel shared by millions. What was once meant to frighten becomes online content.
The backlash to power is now personal. Tiwari recalls an encounter with a SHO who frightened her parents over a SIM card registered in her mother’s name. The family of three was illegally summoned to the police station, where the officer was disrespectful towards her mother. She intervened. “Just because he is wearing a uniform, it doesn’t mean he can take away our basic human rights,” she says.
Gen Z has grown up watching parents and neighbours continue to support Modi and the BJP despite rising prices and often mocked online as “andhbhakts”. A meme showing a half-naked man with a placard saying “even if petrol reaches `5,000 I will still vote for Modi” captures the growing generational disbelief and contempt of a loyalty that overcomes disappointment. The generation has grown up watching the consequences of political decisions up close. There are adults who support them at their own cost. A police constable who was ordered to use batons on the Jantar Mantar rebels quit his job rather than carry out his orders: he joined the youth. The power of YouTube and other platforms was visible, and bypassed official internet bans. It showed that authority is not monolithic and that individuals can successfully work around it. Technology has shifted beyond watching random clips on the cell phone to become a powerful weapon against the old order.
No Permission Needed
Governments may announce online learning, digital classrooms, and AI-based education, but a student who has grown up navigating technology is quick to ask the obvious questions: What about villages with poor connectivity? What happens when the technology being taught is already being disrupted by the next one? Memes are being made using AI even as government technicians are figuring out how to teach students AI. Digital exposure has made young people impatient with solutions that feel outdated before they are even implemented.
The same crisis impacts the indifference of bureaucracy. A young person applying for a passport in Jaipur, dealing with a telecom company in Bengaluru, or seeking a university certificate in Guwahati, is more likely to search online to know how to, find someone who has done it before and, maybe post about the experience. The institution may have the power to delay the request, but no longer has a monopoly over information.
That rebellious syndrome is reshaping gender politics. When a parent threatened to tear his daughter’s clothes and file an FIR against protesters, the backlash was immediate and angry. The sight of large numbers of young women challenging old mores that Indian girls must remain “sanskaari” and obedient is rising. In Bengaluru, 19-year-old Ziya confronts the same assumptions at home. “I’m expected to ask permission for things my brother doesn’t even have to mention,” she says. Yet she refuses to see herself as isolated. “We’re exposed to a hundred different versions of the same. Every time I read about a woman standing up for herself somewhere else, it feels like she’s speaking for me too.” Gen Z’s contempt for parents’ hero worship has generated unique suggestions. In a viral video, a young man suggests locking news channels and get their folks to watch serials on Netflix and Amazon Prime. The remarkable shift in communicaion is of Gen Z weaponising visibility: the activist confronting power, the girl stopping a police vehicle, the young man quickly getting students out of a police van—all captured on cell phones, posted, reposted, and viewed millions of times—have become defining images of defiance. Threats, intimidation, and heavy-handed responses boomerang: what might once have remained a private encounter becomes public evidence within minutes. The establishment’s mistake is to dismiss this as just an urban phenomenon. History suggests otherwise. The Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement, the Arab Spring and youth-led protests in Bangladesh and Nepal, showed how digitally connected dissent can go beyond its original constituency and spread to rural youth.
Gen Z’s great advantage is its reference point is no longer local. A student in Patna can learn coding from California; a young entrepreneur in Surat can study how a Mumbai business solves a procedural problem; a college student in Ranchi can discover careers barely known about in her social circle. Perhaps connectivity is what makes Gen Z and now Gen Apha genuinely fearless: not that it has nothing to lose, but that it has become remarkably unwilling to be frightened into silence. Perhaps the largest generational divide lies in one deceptively simple question: “Why?” Why accept an unfair exam, a school without a functioning toilet, that unemployment is inevitable, a broken road because it has always been broken, or a hospital bill no one explains? And why should respect be automatic when official performance is absent?
The Root Cause
The establishment’s big worry is that Gen Alpha have taken the cue from the CJP. The government seems unsure of how to respond. Schoolkids are too young to be lathicharged or teargased. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke’s School Thik Karo campaign is going national. Some schools repaired roofs and Dipke’s own school—after a three-day tussle—in his village Hingoli, Maharashtra, finally secured chairs and benches for students. He says the PM CARES Fund could be tapped to upgrade rural school infrastructure and build over 1,000 high-tech schools. With its School Thik Karo campaign, the CJP has been auditing government schools across India for missing basic facilities. They are aware of intimidation by right wing activists, who are sometimes shamed online. In West Bengal’s Bankura district, CJP activist Sheikh Abdul Hafiz visited Karishunda Paschimpara Primary School to document its condition and question the lack of basic facilities such as drinking water and toilets. That evening, goons attacked him and his father, Sheikh Mohammad Mafik, snatched his phone and deleted the footage. Mafik, who reportedly tried to protect his son, died two days later from his injuries. Eight men, including a local BJP functionary, were arrested. The implication is chilling: how is asking whether a government school was functioning properly a political offence? Hafiz’s father’s death has only strengthened his resolve to demand better education. Around 1,500 students in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, staged a sit-in over water, electricity, toilets, fans, and furniture, prompting the administration to accept the demands. In Gaya, Bihar, students walked to a government office over dirty toilets, a defunct hand pump, poor midday meals, and inadequate infrastructure. In Hamirpur, young children marched five kilometres carrying the national flag to demand a proper road to their school. In Lucknow, around 250 girls walked out over teacher shortages and poor amenities. In Madhya Pradesh, schoolgirls protested higher bus fares, and authorities restored the earlier concessional rate. When a blind student was threatened with rustication, she asked the school principal to go ahead because there was no teaching going on in the school anyway. Gen A’s demands are strikingly basic: fans, clean water, toilets, teachers, desks, safe buildings, electricity, roads and functioning classrooms.
For Indian families, education is the ladder to upward mobility. The question is whether the state is prepared to handle children unwilling to accept institutional failure as normal. Mahesh Kumar, a school-uniform contractor in Uttar Pradesh, says, “We talk about AI, robots, and advanced technology, but children don’t have clean toilets or functioning ceiling fans.” Fifteen-year-old Riddhi Srivastava points out UP has “probably not moved even an inch” to fix its education and employment mess. Her brothers, she says, have degrees but had to leave for Delhi-NCR to find work. Inside her own school, she sees crumbling infrastructure and little room for discussion. “A ceiling fan fell in a class the other day. No one checks basic facilities until a tragedy happens,” she says.
Bihar offers another warning. Mudassir Nazar says higher education is plagued by the issue of hiring of school teachers in the region. Initially, there was a structured process: exams were conducted, followed by additional stages of evaluation before candidates were confirmed. Later, however, a large number of teachers were recruited based on marks alone, with the responsibility for hiring handed to designated heads. This process brought in candidates who, in some cases, could barely write properly despite having earned their credentials. Fresh BPSC recruitment drives have improved the calibre of hires, he says, but qualification does not always translate into commitment. Attempts at reform, including those associated with former education secretary KK Pathak, have also been disrupted by transfers and administrative churn. The children are not asking for ideological revolution. They want the minimum conditions necessary for the education they have been promised. That makes their dissent harder to dismiss.
Accountability is the New Ideology
A fascinating political realignment is underway. On one side is a generation which has found its political voice largely through digital culture. On the other are established organisations, particularly Left student groups, with decades of experience in campus mobilisation. And alongside them is an Opposition, led prominently by the Congress, trying to reconnect with a generation that conventional politics has struggled to reach. But Gen Z is not necessarily looking for a political home. It is seeking results. It can march alongside a Leftist student without becoming one; accept Congress support without becoming Congress; oppose the BJP without embracing its principal opponents. Its politics is increasingly transactional: show us what you can fix. “We’re not interested in reviving or building any political party,” says Nikhil Aggarwal, 22, a Delhi college student. “What we care about is accountability. If a school in Bihar used detergent instead of salt in midday meals, we want to know why it happened and what will be done. It’s the same with jobs. If there aren’t enough of them, what is the roadmap for young people?”
In that sense, Gen Z has converted hope into protest, not rallies. It is less interested in being recruited than in being heard. The point is that this generation increasingly seems determined to build its own political vocabulary.
This trope creates an unusually broad political constituency because infrastructure does not care about ideology. A broken road is a broken road. A missing teacher is a missing teacher. An unaffordable bus fare does not ask whether the student is Left, Right, or apolitical. “I often discuss politics with my peers and watch online how dissent unfolds in other countries,” says Arjun, a Delhi University graduate. “Have we become more intolerant? Yes. But given the way India is treating dissent and discourse today, it is critical that we act now. Otherwise, we will pay a heavy price later.”
The fearless generation is not fearless because it believes nothing bad can happen to it. It is fearless because it no longer believes bad things must stay invisible. It can be frightened and still protest; angry and still crack a joke; politically inexperienced and still ask a devastatingly simple question. India’s youth are discovering citizenship not as obedience, but as expectation. Democracy, they are learning, is not merely the right to vote every few years but the right to ask whether the institutions are doing what they were built to do. That politics may be messy, leaderless, and even ‘ideologically promiscuous’. When enough young people confront the same failures, share the same evidence, laugh at the same absurdity and then walk into the street together, those who once expected them to settle for less will have to start answering.
There is, however, danger ahead. A government that feels cornered has powerful instruments at its disposal, and a crackdown could test how far this new politics can withstand pressure. The Uttar Pradesh elections next year could become an important barometer of youth anger. But the bigger story may lie beyond elections: Today it is School Thik Karo; tomorrow it could be Hospital Thik Karo, Jobs Thik Karo, Exams Thik Karo.
The more coordinated these issue-based movements become, the harder they will be to dismiss as youthful noise. That confrontation—between a state accustomed to obedience and a generation demanding performance—could shape not just the future of Indian politics, but the future of India’s youth itself.