A disparaging comment, describing the unemployed youth of the country as cockroaches and parasites, made by the chief justice of India (CJI), Surya Kant, created history. It gave rise to a much-needed street-based movement in India. The protest placards, the snappy bytes of the protestors, and the witty slogans will remain inerasable evidences of a temporal shift which the future historians will use to write the history of popular protests and Indian democracy.
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We need to wait to see how this movement will make its journey from movement to being a vehicle of political transformation, but there is no doubt that the government has lost this round to India’s youth.
This victory carries wider implications for our political culture and for existing notions of social and moral authority. The dominant political culture of the Modi era is based on cult loyalty, (misplaced) hyper-patriotism, and majoritarianism. Modi has quite successfully tried to fuse political, social, and moral authority by positioning himself as the nation’s moral guardian. Questioning him abrasively therefore was an act of questioning the wider world of authority.
That field also includes the home. The movement was, of course, about fixing governmental accountability. It successfully extracted the resignation of a cabinet minister, something no protest movement has managed to achieve in the last twelve years. Yet, the movement’s greatest potential may lie in raising questions on the production of obedience at home.
Can the politicization of the street lead to/accompany the democratization of the family?
From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, the home has commonly been imagined as a secluded space of intimacy and privacy, distinct from the world outside. This conception tends to conceal authority that can be excessive, and power that can be coercive. Feminist politics and struggles over domestic labour have questioned the premise of this modern division between the public and the private.
Can the politics of eradicating hatred become another milestone in recognizing that the home and the world are inseparably connected? Demanding public accountability and challenging the hatred reproduced in the private should be considered parts of the same political work.
Confronting hatred at home
This movement was led by a new generation. It revealed an inter-generational breach in understandings of authority. A significant section of the parents and grandparents of the Gen Z have cheerfully contributed to the making of the Modi cult. They popularized the slogan har har modi, ghar ghar modi (hail Modi, Modi in every home) modelled on a popular Hindu devotional chant.
In doing so, they have allowed the home to be policed by the Hindutva forces. They have allowed decisions and choices related to life and lifestyles to be judged by an external ideological force.
For the Hindutva regime, home is as significant a site of conquest as are the institutions of government. In this scenario, asking for governmental institutional accountability is only one aspect of the desired political change. The energy generated by this movement must find a way to dislodge the cult of Modi from the ghar. That will be the deeper and tougher political task.
Over the last decade, the polarized position over politics has become a permanent fixture of any home. Friendships have been severed, and family relations have grown cold. Political bhakti to the leader and to the ideology he represents has come to define the political culture of many homes.
If Modi, riding the wave of polarized politics, has been allowed to reign the political culture of the home, then it is only through his ouster from that space that a wider political change and normalcy of relationships can be achieved.
The politics of hate unfolds both at home and on the streets. Negative, violent views about Muslims and lowered-castes people are brazenly, without filter, expressed in middle-class Hindu households. By contrast, dissent against such opinions is still voiced within the limits of respectability. Strategic avoidance or silence often becomes the best ploy to deal with such views backed by the authority of age, relation, and ideas of decorum.
Will this movement strengthen such voices that challenge the culture of lehaaz, compliance, and submission at home? Which language will Gen Z use to question the authority of Hindutva politics within the family?
Humour slayed political legitimacy
The most important tools of resistance used in this movement were satire and humour. The contrast between the police baton and the satirical reel dented the moral and political legitimacy of this regime. The fear is gone. The air is still polluted, but it feels less suffocating.
Similarly, the aura of the leader has been shattered. Former reverence has been replaced by outlandish, funny, and abusive taunts. The divinity to which Modi aspired, for instance by claiming to be non-biological, has been debunked through the power of ridicule. Even if this posturing is partially retrieved in the future, the movement must have instilled a fear that the hollowed-out aura can be smashed again. For the first time, the regime felt the fear of the people.
Until now, the BJP worked hard to establish Nehru as the most reviled leader. Ironically, Modi who wishes to bypass Nehru in every footstep, does seem to have become the most abused leader on the streets of independent India. He received abuses and taunts from young people who chanted slogans and made reels without covering their faces. This was not an act of resistance; it was plain defiance.
If Modi is the mascot of Hindutva, then mocking him can be seen as a partial, though muted, contribution to reimagining a new social order without biases and prejudices. Slogans such as jab jab Modi darta hai, Hindu-Muslim karta hai (whenever Modi is scared, he resorts to divisive politics of Hindi-Muslim) promise to challenge the normalization of hatred that has been steered in the society and at homes through nexus of government, media, and Hindutva family members.
When young protestors declined to be further trained in the national syllabus of the “Hindu-Muslim divide”, they indirectly exposed the complicity of people belonging to preceding generations in normalizing the politics of hate. The movement not only questioned government and its institutions but also the family and the social through which political obedience is produced.
This was a movement in which political speeches from the pulpit of a manch did not become the main form of communication. Faiz’s poetry took a back seat. Memes, recordings, extremely articulated bytes full of frustration and desperation became the voices of expression and action. Gen Z developed a political language suited to its own world of communication.
The new language of dissent and its possibilities
The question is: what are the advantages and limits of this political language? Which elements could become hyper, excessive, and counter-productive in the long run and which are already present but need to be further strengthened?
Before pointing out the possibilities, it needs to be stressed that it would be a mistake to regard the “fun content” generated so generously by this movement as trivial and lightweight. Such content is all these things at once: it is information, interpretation, aspiration, and Gen Z’s own form of analysis.
Content was the register of protest rather than its outcome. Dance memes made with the police standing in the background were both entertaining and defying in nature. Protest became a site for the production of humour and humour, in turn, a mode of resistance.
Gen Z outsmarted one of the most tech-savvy political parties in the world. The BJP takes pride in its media game, but it was of no match for Gen Z’s creativity. The BJP uses an IT-cell that cuts, pastes, and reproduces messages on social media. By contrast, the movement protestors became their own IT-cell. They turned protest into a continuous production of political content. Through paper, protest, flags, slogans, reels, viral videos, and satire they demonstrated a new way of becoming citizens.
A movement created and principally led by Gen Z has expanded the established repertoire of what a political movement can look and sound like. A generation often stereotyped as lazy and apolitical hooked on “chilling”, “party” and “smartphones” has combined the world of the digital and that of the street. This journey reflects a new way of becoming citizens.
Becoming a citizen is an everyday process of questioning the government and holding it accountable to the people. This movement has, through demands to change India’s educational system, marked a beginning in that direction.
But there are limitations as well. One is at the level of language. Some elements of this content may appear obscene according to the established standards of political decorum and public messaging. They form part of Gen Z’s communicative idiom that includes slang, direct sexual referents, and expletives. This generation’s language of dissent has perhaps been influenced by a wider media culture shaped by OTT entertainment, stand-up comedy, reels, and online banter, in which slang and expletives are commonly used to generate laughter and defiance.
The question here is not of passing any moral judgement on the choice of words. A culture of abuse is, in fact, also part of the BJP’s online and offline political engagements. However, that does not justify anything. Also, it would be silly to believe that such generous use of expletives and abuses will redesign India’s political language. It may expand the permissible vocabulary of episodic protest, but it most likely will not become the language of articulating deep-seated social or political transformation.
The larger question is of understanding the limits of a particular communicative idiom in making it portable for a wider generalized template of dissent. Can the frontier of the political home be addressed in the same manner as that of the street? I doubt it. The very language that effectively breaks authority on the street may be less capable of doing so when that authority comes wrapped in age, affection, kinship, and everyday forms of engagement at home. It is obviously not necessary to have one cut for all fit. But it will be important to think through home as well and ask, what kind of political communication would fit there best.
Future political work will require consolidating many of the ideas already present in this movement: religious unity, class solidarity, caste harmony, and women’s and queer participation being the most important ones. It was remarkable to notice that the movement did not project itself in any of the established languages of social solidarity. It was as if solidarity across differences was already present. It did not require continual declaration. But it remains unclear whether this represented a new form of political commonality in which solidarity can be taken as pre-given or a temporary suspension of deeper differences because a common cause cemented the differences.
Nevertheless, there will be a need to devise a language of solidarity alongside the language of dissent. Gen Z is not an undifferentiated lot. There are divisions along the lines of urban and rural locations, big-city residents and small-town dwellers, English-speaking and vernacular-language participants, and not least, along lines of class, caste, and gender. Political and cultural divisions also exist. The same generation has also also taken the lead in organizing Bhajan clubbing in India and globally. There will, therefore, be a need to articulate and repeatedly affirm a vision of ideology and solidarity.
Movements of the past condensed their political visions into memorable slogans. Roti, kapda, aur makaan or the azadi chant are two such examples. This generation will produce its own vision, but it will be essential to link demands for governmental accountability and departmental efficiency with a social and political vision grounded in justice and non-discrimination. Accountability is not sufficient if the political project remains majoritarian and discriminatory. An efficient Hindutva regime, that promotes disharmony in the society, is not the desired goal here.
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