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INDIA’S GEN Z PROTESTS ARE BREAKING THE GRIP OF FEAR  
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Ashok Kumbamu
September 6, 2026
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The protest movement by young people in India has challenged the
culture of fear that protects Narendra Modi’s Hindutva government.
They are carving out the space for a future without Modi and his
divisive authoritarian agenda. _

Young Indians who have grown up under Narendra Modi are refusing to
treat power as sacred. By not only questioning it but ridiculing it,
they are puncturing the aura of invincibility that Hindutva forces
have constructed over the years. , (Sumit Sanyal / Anadolu via Getty
Images)

 

"I swear, I can die in peace now. I can die smiling.” Coming from
the renowned writer and activist Arundhati Roy
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startling.

For more than three decades, Roy has stood alongside people fighting
to protect their land, their homes, and their rights from destructive
development projects, state repression, and policies imposed in the
name of national growth. She has seen movements rise and victories
won, but she has also seen resistance criminalized, promises broken,
dreams crushed, and hopes worn down.

And yet watching India’s Gen Z take to the streets, Roy seemed to
glimpse something she had almost stopped expecting: hope.

Challenging Power

The immediate trigger for the protests appears to have been the paper
leak involving the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), the
entrance examination for undergraduate medical education programs. But
the anger went well beyond that. When the paper was leaked, students
lost not only their faith in the system’s capacity to conduct a fair
examination but also their faith in its promise that education and
hard work would be fairly rewarded.

Around the same time, another controversy gave this anger a new
political expression. On May 15, 2026, during a Supreme Court hearing,
Chief Justice Surya Kant made a deeply prejudiced remark, describing
unemployed young Indians as “lazy” and calling them “cockroaches
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Young people began reclaiming the insult: first through mockery, then
with pride. They called themselves “cockroaches” and created the
Cockroach Janata Party
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on Instagram. What began online did not remain there. The anger moved
from memes and Instagram posts to protests on the streets of New
Delhi.

The movement didn’t stop at the paper leak. It brought other major
issues to the surface: unemployment, corruption, inequality, and
systemic oppression. None of these grievances is new. So what makes
this moment different? After decades of watching movements rise and
fall, what does Roy see in this generation that gives her hope?

Narendra Modi is still the prime minister. The Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) remains the country’s dominant political force. The Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP, and its
vast organizational networks have not disappeared.

Institutions that were strangled by Hindutva forces have not started
breathing again. Caste remains deeply rooted in most social
interactions. Inequality is staggering. And yet something appears to
have shifted: not necessarily in the structure of power but in the way
power is perceived and confronted.

Young Indians who have grown up under Modi are doing something
unusually simple: refusing to treat power as sacred. They not only
question it but also ridicule it. In doing so, they are puncturing the
aura of invincibility that Hindutva forces have strategically
constructed over the years.

This really matters because, in a culture of fear and compliance,
people begin policing themselves. Journalists reconsider what they
write; students hesitate before speaking up or joining a protest;
activists weigh what a slogan, photograph, or social media post might
cost them. When power goes unchallenged, over time, fear becomes
routine, and routine produces compliance. In this way, power creates
people who are conditioned to move aside.

Learning to Fear

Iknew this kind of power long before. Growing up in a remote village
in Telangana in the 1980s, I learned that power had a face. We called
him _dora_ — the dominant-caste landlord who ruled our village as
though ruling it were his birthright. No constitution gave him
authority; no government appointed him. He inherited it by being born
into a landowning Reddy family, one of the dominant castes in the
region.

Yet hardly anyone questioned how he had acquired his land or his
authority or why he should possess either. His power had been
reproduced for so long that it no longer appeared as power. It
appeared natural, even functional.

As children, no one told us to fear him. We learned it by watching the
people around us. Adults stood when he passed in the street. Older
children stopped playing; conversations suddenly stopped; voices grew
quieter; people moved aside. No one had to tell us to keep our
distance from him, let alone question him.

By the time I knew him, he was already in his early seventies. He
struggled to complete a sentence and rarely engaged anyone in
conversation. He did not converse with others; he simply gave orders.

Looking back, what strikes me most is how little his authority had to
do with who he was as a person. He was neither physically imposing nor
intellectually remarkable. He was a dora because he was born into the
caste, class, and family that had historically produced doras.

He did not have to earn or prove his authority. He inherited it, and
people recognized and reinforced it through the everyday routines of
village life. Over time, it became difficult even to imagine the
village organized in any other way.

Common Sense

Years later, reading Antonio Gramsci gave me a language for
understanding what I had witnessed. Domination is most durable when it
becomes part of common sense — when hierarchies created by history
begin to seem natural, inevitable, or even necessary. Coercion remains
available to those in power, but it need not be used constantly once
people have learned the boundaries within which they are expected to
behave.

In the Indian context, B. R. Ambedkar saw inherited social
hierarchies, particularly those of caste and class, as sources of
power, and he showed how they created deep contradictions within
Indian society and democracy. For him, political democracy and
constitutional morality have little meaning when everyday life remains
deeply entrenched in these social hierarchies.

Yet decades after the Constitution came into force, constitutional
morality had barely entered the social relations of my village. The
dora effectively presided over a feudal constitution of his own. The
village itself functioned as a school of subordination and
self-subjection.

It had its own hidden curriculum, grounded in feudal and Brahmanic
domination, that taught each generation to see hierarchy as natural
and reinforced it through everyday customs, rituals, symbols, and
social practices. Its syllabus was simple: know whom to fear, whom to
obey, and whom never to question.

It was into this world that the Naxalites — the communist
revolutionaries — entered our village. In Telangana and Andhra
Pradesh, they were popularly known as _annalu_ (“brothers”), a
term they would later disown for its patriarchal and paternalistic
overtones.

They quickly understood where power lay. But they also understood that
eliminating the individual who embodied that power would not
necessarily transform the social relations that sustained it. They
figured out that something else had to be confronted first: the fear
of the dora.

Post-Fear

One morning, the annalu mobilized a small group from the Dalit _wada_,
the segregated settlement on the outskirts of the village where Dalit
(the so-called untouchable) families lived. Together they walked to
the dora’s house, brought him outside with minimal force, tied a
towel around his neck, and marched him through the streets. As they
walked, people came out of their homes and joined the procession.

The annalu addressed the crowd. They explained that the problem was
not just the dora as an individual but the feudal system he
represented. Then they turned to him and said that he could continue
to live in the village, but he could not exercise his authority as the
dora. That was how we witnessed the fall of the last dora in our
village.

But the fact is that nothing materially changed that day. Land was
still unequally distributed. Caste did not disappear, bonded labor
continued, and the power structure that had sustained the dora was
still in place. Yet something had changed all the same.

People had seen the dora brought out of his house. They had watched
him walk through the same streets where they had once moved aside for
him. An authority that had appeared natural had been publicly
challenged. After that, fear could no longer reproduce itself in quite
the same way.

I call this moment the post-fear phenomenon. Post-fear does not mean
that fear disappears or that coercive power has collapsed. It
describes a political condition in which fear remains but begins to
lose its capacity to organize everyday behavior — to produce
silence, self-policing, obedience, and deference. People may still be
afraid, but they begin to act despite their fear.

Post-fear, then, is neither liberation nor revolution. It is a
transitory and uncertain political condition. But it makes one thing
possible: tomorrow may not look like yesterday.

False Narrative

Forty years later, I found myself thinking again about the moment when
the dora’s authority began to collapse in my village. Young Indians
are questioning, ridiculing, and confronting a government that has
spent more than a decade cultivating an image of strength and
invincibility. Things that once appeared beyond challenge are being
challenged, and political possibilities that seemed closed are opening
up again. It feels as though India, too, may be entering a post-fear
phase.

But post-fear explains only why people may become more willing to
confront power. It does not explain the anger that brings them into
the streets. The BJP came to power promising to curb corruption,
expand welfare, create jobs, accelerate economic growth, and make
India “shine” brighter in the global economy. Eventually, however,
the narrative of growth and prosperity encounters a simple test: Can
people recognize the experience of their own lives in it?

They hear that India is rising, but secure employment remains
difficult to find. They hear that rapid growth is creating enormous
wealth, and they begin to wonder who owns it. They were told to study
hard and compete on merit, but they repeatedly encounter examination
leaks and recruitment failures. And while the ruling class and much of
the media celebrate India’s economic success, around 800 million
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people continue to receive free food grains from the government.

According to the International Labour Organization–Institute for
Human Development India Employment Report 2024
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young people aged fifteen to twenty-nine accounted for nearly 83
percent of India’s unemployed population in 2022. Among unemployed
youth, the percentage who had completed secondary education or higher
increased from 54.2 percent in 2000 to 65.7 percent in 2022. This
systemic crisis has intensified as the public sector has shrunk and
the privatization of production and services has grown.

Altogether employment opportunities for educated young people have
been declining. India’s problem now is not that we have too many
young people without education but rather that too many qualified
young people are unable to find appropriate employment.

Government statistics show that India is getting richer every year,
but they do not tell us the whole story. Much of this wealth is
created at the expense of the impoverished and is distributed in
highly unequal ways.

According to the World Inequality Lab
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in 2022–23, the richest 1 percent captured 23.3 percent of national
income and controlled 40.1 percent of national wealth. By contrast,
the bottom 50 percent received only 15 percent of national income and
owned only 6.4 percent of national wealth. The researchers describe
this concentration at the top as the rise of a “Billionaire Raj.”

Weapons of the Weak

For young people, it is increasingly difficult to see these
contradictions as unrelated problems. The question is no longer simply
whether India is growing but who is growing with it and at whose
expense.

The current movement did not emerge from a sociopolitical vacuum. This
generation grew up watching — and, in many cases, experiencing —
how the state responds to organized movements and challenges to its
ideological domination. They saw students and farmers beaten and
arrested. They watched struggles over forests, mining, and
displacement unfold in the name of national development.

They also witnessed the intensification of counterrevolutionary
operations in Adivasi (indigenous) regions, most recently through
Operation Kagaar. The BJP government carried out this operation with a
declared goal and a deadline: to eliminate the Maoist movement by
March 31, 2026.

They saw activists, writers, poets, academics, and artists subjected
to surveillance, arrest, and criminal prosecution, including on
allegations of conspiracy or links to banned organizations. This
history of struggle and repression formed part of the political world
in which this movement emerged.

More important, young people have turned to humor
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ridicule, memes, videos, and other everyday forms of defiance. James
C. Scott’s ideas of the hidden transcript and the weapons of the
weak, developed through his study of peasant resistance in Southeast
Asia, are useful here.

For Scott, the silence of the weak should not be mistaken for consent.
People may appear compliant in the presence of power but express
anger, criticism, and resentment in its absence. Scott calls this the
“hidden transcript.” In such a situation, people observe,
remember, talk among themselves, make jokes, and ridicule those in
power, even when they are unwilling or unable to confront them openly.

Intellectual Naxals

However, there is an important difference between Scott’s peasants
and Indian youth today. For young Indians, the hidden transcript is no
longer entirely hidden. Their “weapons of the weak” — jokes,
memes, ridicule, and mockery — now circulate openly on social
media.

Moreover, the protests were not confined to Scott’s “weapons of
the weak.” At Jantar Mantar, young people also showed remarkable
steadfastness, collective resistance, and militancy in confronting the
state directly. Their struggle eventually forced Education Minister
Dharmendra Pradhan to resign
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On August 15, 2026, speaking from the Red Fort, Modi declared that the
government had succeeded in eliminating armed Naxalites but warned
that the country still faced another threat: dimagi Naxals
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literally, “intellectual Naxals” — a term he used to describe
those he accused of ideologically supporting or encouraging unrest. He
said they needed to be “identified and isolated.”

This new term joins earlier forms of name-calling, such as “urban
Naxal” and “anti-national,” that Modi and his allies have used
to intimidate activists, intellectuals, lawyers, academics, and others
critical of the government. Yet in what I describe as a post-fear
phase, people responded within twenty-four hours by mockingly forming
an informal political party on Instagram
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called the Dimagi Naxal Janata Party. This response shows how the
post-fear phenomenon operates: by appropriating labels intended to
intimidate and turning them into a form of discursive resistance.

Here a historical irony is difficult to miss. Former Union Home
Minister P. Chidambaram responded by declaring that he was “proud
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to be a dimagi Naxal.” As union home minister from 2008 to 2012,
Chidambaram presided over a major escalation of the state’s
counter-Maoist campaign. The offensive became widely known as
Operation Green Hunt.

Unorganized Unity

The rising movement does not fit neatly into classical Marxist
categories of class struggle or conventional forms of political
organization. The people involved do not necessarily share the same
ideology, party, leadership, or program. They come from different
classes, castes, genders, regions, and political traditions.

I describe this possibility as an unorganized united front. I use this
paradoxical term deliberately because they are united in struggles,
but they are not yet organized. The history of antifascist movements
tells us that such a political formation is fragile. Shared anger does
not automatically become a coherent and sustainable political
movement.

Post-fear opens political possibilities, but it does not determine
what follows. To give these possibilities political direction,
however, the movement must eventually confront harder questions that
resistance alone cannot answer: What is it fighting for? Whose
interests will it represent? What kind of society does it seek to
build?

The Gen Z movement also poses a challenge to the Left and Ambedkarite
political parties and organizations, many of which have been targets
of Hindutva politics. Gen Z has opened a political space that the
organized Left, despite years of resistance and sacrifices, has
struggled to create over the past twelve years.

The question now is whether these political traditions can move beyond
their polemical and ideological divisions and engage with this
emerging movement. Academics and other public intellectuals, too, can
borrow the freedom that younger generations have created and use that
space to defend broader freedoms.

Perhaps this is where Roy draws her hope from the movement. Her hope
need not rest on the belief that the movement has already defeated the
forces it confronts or even that it knows where it is going. Perhaps,
then, her hope lies somewhere more modest but no less consequential: a
generation that dares to look power in the eye and say, “Enough is
enough. This time, you move aside.”

_Ashok Kumbamu is a sociologist whose research examines globalization,
agroecological change, social movements, medical sociology, medical
education, and bioethics._

* India
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* Gen Z protests
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* Narendra Modi
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