On the afternoon of 25 July, as news of Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation as Union education minister broke on the internet, a profusion of reels and memes celebrating the “victory” of India’s biggest “Gen Z protest”, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), began to flood social media platforms. Hours later, video clips showing key members of the CJP celebrating with their supporters also started circulating online.
A week later, the optics continue to be scrutinized, defended, and criticized. But the fact remains that the CJP had never claimed to follow any rulebook of political protests (even though two of their leaders, Abhijeet Dipke and Saurav Das, have worked with the Aam Aadmi Party in the past). Their non-violent agitation was sparked by a spontaneous and collective frustration with a corrupt education system and exacerbated by a throwaway remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant about the country’s youth being “cockroaches.”
At Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, confronted by the phone cameras of the Gen Z—recording every outbreak of violence, making reels to mock the leaders who have failed them, or endearingly engaging with those who lathi charged and tear gassed—the custodians of law and order looked confused and sheepish at times. “It is a rare quality to be able to hold anger and humour together,” says Kavita Krishnan, Marxist-feminist activist and writer. Having served as an All India Students’ Association (AISA) leader when she studied at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in the 1990s, she is a veteran of students’ agitation. After fellow AISA member Chandrasehkhar “Chandu” Prasad was killed in 1997 while addressing a meeting in Siwan in Bihar, Krishnan immersed herself in activism.
“The protests of those days were rooted in the aesthetic, language and tradition of Left politics,” she says. After the Nirbhaya tragedy of 2012, she led a campaign for women’s freedom and safety, supported by a large number of young people. The force and energy of this movement forged solidarities among people from different walks of life.
“It feels like this generation (Gen Z) is miles ahead of us, though,” Krishnan says. “They connected with the people with so much heart, their language is fresh and unschooled, and the lightness of their humour broke through the miasma of fear that had surrounded the generations older to them.”
Change is the air
“What unites all resistance is a common objective: the desire to change power,” says sociologist Abhijit Kundu. “The difference lies in how you change it.” The grand theories that shaped the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries are not going to work in the 21st century. “If you are fixated on doctrines, you will not be able to address the needs of the times,” he adds. “Nothing is a textbook template, fixed once and for all.”
India has a long tradition of students’ protests, in pre- and post-colonial times, which have profoundly impacted its body politic. In the 1950s, student agitations for linguistic states in Odisha set the course for the eventual creation of Andhra Pradesh and much later, Telangana. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Naxalite movement was led overwhelming by the youth, while another students’ movement, Navnirman Andolan in Gujarat in 1974—opposing the increase in hostel fees—gave steam to Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement against the Emergency imposed by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. An iconic photograph from 1977 shows a young Sitaram Yechury, then a student leader at JNU, confronting Mrs Gandhi, chancellor of the university—a moment of bravado that is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.
In the 1990s, a spate of violence erupted after the youth-led struggle to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission Report on affirmative action and reservation in education and employment. This was also the decade of rising communal tensions, its apogee being the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi riots in 1992.
Photographer and curator Ram Rahman remembers the political and social pulse of those times, 30 years ago, as “very different” from now. After communist playwright and director Safdar Hashmi was murdered, allegedly by Indian National Congress workers in 1989, Rahman went on to found the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat), along with friends and comrades. In the pre-Internet era, it was not easy to mobilise a mass movement but the prevailing social and political conditions favoured their outreach.
“Our movement was based in the community of creative artists, writers, academics, and student groups in different universities across India,” he says. “At the time, Indian media outlets were more open than now. A lot of our activities (theatre, writing, poetry, and music) were disseminated by the print media and on television.”
After Hashmi’s death, Sahmat designated the former’s birthday (2 January) as National Street Theatre Day. Groups from all over India would perform on the day, but it wasn’t possible to experience the magic of the moment simultaneously the way Gen Z protesters are able to see their peers in action in distant corners of the country.
Despite such hurdles, Sahmat found creative means of connecting with the wider public. “After the Ayodhya mosque demolition, we did an exhibition called Hum Sab Ayodhya,” Rahman says. “The idea was to look at the city of Ayodhya through various layers of history. We collected a lot of visual material and reproduced the exhibition in offset prints cheaply. The text was done on laser printers.” Effectively, this strategy helped create a kit. “You had the images, and you had the text, which you could then translate locally,” Rahman adds. “That’s how we turned it into one physical exhibition that opened in 17 cities.”
Mind the gap
In an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, published in 1977, social scientist Ghanshyam Shah pointed out that “the Sarvodaya leaders (referring to Jayaprakash Narayan and his allies) accept the theory of the generation gap and believe that students need not approve of the values, customs and institutions of their parents.”
The idea has resurfaced in the past, especially since in the 1960s, when violent students’ movements took Europe and the US by storm. In Long March, Short Spring (1969), their book on the fallout of the Prague Spring of 1968, writers and activists Barbara and John Ehrenreich pointed out, “Liberal journalists theorized about a ‘generation gap,’ but couldn’t explain why youth should have gone to the left.” The couple went on to identify “anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist” impulses as being the driving forces behind the protests. Like the youth in 1960s Germany who lashed out at the establishment due to their distrust of “anyone over forty”, a section of the youth in India are acting contrary to their elders’ ideas.
“In 2014, we saw the ascendance of a corrosive and toxic politics,” says Krishnan. “People who had known other political systems either noted the difference in alarm or said that the country needed a change.” Twelve years later, Gen Z seems to be saying something similar.