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.
“I swear, I can die in peace now. I can die smiling.” Coming from the renowned writer and activist Arundhati Roy, these words are 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.”
Young people began reclaiming the insult: first through mockery, then with pride. They called themselves “cockroaches” and created the Cockroach Janata Party 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
I knew 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 people continue to receive free food grains from the government.
According to the International Labour Organization–Institute for Human Development India Employment Report 2024, 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, 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, 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.
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 — 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 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 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.”