What has changed in India? The BJP, bolstered by Narendra Modi’s image and with a bit of help from EC boss Gyanesh Kumar, seems to have missed it. The Indian villager always knew the government has rules. He must deal with the patwari, tehsildar, police station, block office, a ration shop or a panchayat by following procedures. What has changed now is that these rules are being explained to him. Gen Z has demystified governance: the hitherto of a minster, MP, chief minister or bureaucrat has come crashing down. Citizens understand the powerful are fallible and biologically like them: maybe not with money and limousines, but fallible nevertheless. Only Tamil Nadu chief minister Vijay gets it; he cancelled a previous RTI rule that the police don’t come under its purview. The people have already seen the movie. They know what his role is.
The CJP could fail, last or not: it may fail, because has-beens like Kejriwal and never-beens like Yogendra Yadav and Modi-baiter Mahua Moitra have joined the students, damn the age gap. Reuters Institute’s 2024 India Digital News Report found 54 per cent of respondents used YouTube and 48 per cent WhatsApp for news each week. A 2024 YouGov-Mint-Centre for Policy Research survey of the 10,314 people across 200 Indian cities and towns found 47 per cent followed politics on social media; court cases become mass digital stories and trial by vox populi. A Supreme Court judgment concerning free speech, privacy, same-sex relationships, citizenship, reservations, religious practices, internet shutdowns, bail, or government powers can be clipped into Instagram reels, YouTube explainers, X posts and WhatsApp forwards within minutes. A young lawyer in Lucknow explains an Election Commission procedure on his phone. A Patna student takes apart a government notification in Hindi. A civil service aspirant compares a minister’s statement with the relevant government document online. These are not necessarily English-speaking metropolitan liberals addressing an audience they regard as less educated. Increasingly, the people doing the explaining come from the same linguistic and social worlds as those watching them, speaking in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and other Indian languages. Someone is explaining in a language shorn of officialdom, what the government can be empowered to do, what the citizen had hitherto believed, and what procedure any institution must follow. The Indian who once watched politics and governance as spectacle is beginning to watch it as machinery. And he wants to know how the machine works. Why does a name disappear from a voter list? Why is an examination cancelled? Why is a school teacher-less. The extraordinary part is rural India’s political education has an updated syllabus increasingly being taught by young urban antagonists. Words such as Article 14, Article 19, Article 21, fundamental rights, due process, bail, habeas corpus, judicial review, sedition, UAPA, and contempt of court circulate far beyond law schools. But the paradox is they may know the names of constitutional provisions and court cases better, but could simultaneously get misinformation about what those provisions actually mean.
Survey evidence shows youth protest participation is not a marginal phenomenon. A large Lokniti-CSDS youth found that about 15 per cent of Indian youth participated in a protest, while 26 per cent had in activities of student organisations. The fascinating development is the fall of awe: the judiciary has entered political conversation. Young routinely discuss whether a law is “constitutional”, a court has stayed an order youth think is unfair, whether police action violates fundamental rights, whether a government has followed procedure, and whether Parliament has exceeded its powers. Despite memes and ditties, the agitations are necessarily anti-Modi: it is the diffusion of protest methods and expectations, and a united anti-government movement sweeping cities and rural India. An angry Gen Alpha gets voting rights in 2040: school protests are moving into rural India. Administrations are boxed-in: perform or lathi charge. The andhbhakts who refuse to open their eyes and label youth as dimagi Naxals talk about development not potholes, progress and sheets hiding slums from foreign dignitaries.
The underlying question is the same: “This is a public service we are entitled to; why isn’t the state delivering it?” Schoolchildren demanding a teacher or villagers demanding a road aren’t protesting ideologically against the Prime Minister. Rural political dissatisfaction once had very direct vocabulary: Our road isn’t built yet. Give us water. Give us electricity. Give us a school. The newer vocabulary is: Why isn’t the government fulfilling its obligation? Who is accountable? What does the law guarantee? Why has money been allocated if the facility doesn’t exist? But the question comes in the same form: Why? Under what rule? Who decided? And what can I do about it? Now, that is a very different citizen from the one the Indian state was accustomed to dealing with.
