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. Image source: here 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, a...
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