Published Jul 24, 2026 | 3:09 PM ⚊ Updated Jul 24, 2026 | 5:50 PM
A poster that says it all from Jantar Mantar. (Photo | Likhitha Nair)
Synopsis: The Jantar Mantar protests have now gone far beyond the NEET issue it initially raised and the personalities who led it. Our young have shown that you can speak truth to power and bend the leaders to your will. This liberation is the biggest transformation the students have unleashed.
Thirty-year-old Shreiya, a lawyer, is nursing a regret. She has been thrice to Jantar Mantar, the venue of India’s biggest protest movement in years, and yet did not feel the pain of lathis on her body.
“This is the first time in many years that I have been able to attend a protest. Whenever I did in the past, policemen always outnumbered the protestors, be it on climate change or other issues. Sadly, I was 100 feet away from the spot where policemen were caning the participants,” says Shreiya.
Many like her see getting beaten up at Jantar Mantar as a badge of honour. “It is crazy if you are not there at the protest,” was the refrain among students and youth, as also their parents. And no, it was not just about the leakage of question papers.
The fiasco over the conduct of the common medical entrance test (NEET) only dialled the burner from low to high and let the whistle on the pressure cooker come off. But then to believe that the month-long protest at Jantar Mantar in India’s national capital was only about this one issue is to trivialise a movement that has no parallels in recent history.
If it was sensible, the Modi government should have learnt lessons from the way it just scraped through in 2024. It hasn’t.
The pent-up frustration over many things that have been going wrong since the government returned to power for a third term in June 2024 has culminated in what we are witnessing today. Slowing growth, growing unemployment, rising prices, the middle class being pushed further down and, above all, a regime that has steadfastly denied people an opportunity to voice their grievances have all contributed. People are now seeking accountability, a word that never found a place in the BJP’s dictionary.
Until July 20, the day police brutally caned those who represent the future of this country, the issue was about the resignation of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, climate activist Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike and Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke. The movement has now moved beyond them. No one really cares why Sonam has decided to call off his hunger strike or if Dipke softens in the days to come.
It is now about the emperor.
Much like the famed tale about a child calling the King who believed he was wearing celestial robes naked, Narendra Modi has now come to realise, or been made to realise, that he is, after all, human and he too could be called into question. Only the youth, who do not carry any baggage, could have done this.
It has also dawned on a good section of the “Bhakts”, if insiders are to be believed, that their King is no incarnation. This saffron grouping had all this while lived in an illusory world believing even in their subconscious mind that the “Government and Nation are the same”, “BJP is the sole representative of the country” and “We can rule by fear.” Not anymore.
At an internal meeting of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) held in Hyderabad a day ago, the unanimous view of the participants who came from across the country was that the government should have acted on the demand for Pradhan’s resignation without letting the movement escalate to this level. The meeting was conducted in preparation for the national convention of the ABVP to be held later this year.
The biggest shock that Jantar Mantar has delivered to those in power is destroying the climate of fear so assiduously built over a decade.
One must only look at the fearless innovation and the memes that were getting created.
Youth turning up at Jantar Mantar are keeping steel plates on their backsides to protect themselves from batons. They have neatly divided the work: some managing the crowd to ensure it is orderly, others receiving parcels of food being sent from across the country via online orders, and the rest cleaning the trash to keep the place tidy. To top it all, they have been taking selfies with the very policemen who beat them up.
Some of the memes from the protests are bound to hurt deeply. “What is the difference between the Old Bharat and Naya Bharat?” an anchor asks a protester in one of them. “In Old Bharat, we used to build temples and the Mughals used to loot them. Now, we are an Atma Nirbhar Bharat. We build the temples, and we only loot them.” The obvious reference was to what happened at the Ram temple in Ayodhya, another issue unlikely to die anytime soon with newer information about the scandal surfacing every now and then.
In Bihar, the wheel barricades put up by the police were used by the protestors to cycle away. When the police used water cannons, they began taking showers. When they tied ropes to prevent the youth from marching forward, they started playing the good old game of tug-of-war. Can you call them anti-national?
If the Bhakts have been woken up from the blind belief that their leader is an incarnation, the bigger damage to those who thought they could rule forever by instilling fear is the impact the current episode will have on institutions such as the bureaucracy and judiciary. Officials, who have thus far crawled when asked to bend in the belief that they are secure for another 10 years under this regime, will begin questioning that belief.
It may not be long before the likes of the Jantar Mantar crowd turn up outside the residences of Honourable Justices if courts continue to treat people as “Cockroaches.” Those manning the Election Commission will now think a 100 times before eliminating voters as they are asked to.
Dharmendra Pradhan is a non-entity in the entire issue. If a well-known Godi media anchor ran a story blaming him for the mess that the education system has come to be, it could not have been without approval from the PMO. Interestingly, celebrities otherwise known only to sing the praises of the government have begun voicing concern about the future of India’s students and how they are being handled. This too could be part of the playbook.
Pradhan might be dumped at some point, but the bigger worry for the establishment is the systemic changes that Jantar Mantar will bring about. That will be the defining outcome.
Also Read:
India’s students’ revolt has exposed BJP’s biggest political blind spot
To resign or not? Inside story of how Dharmendra Pradhan is holding on
Gen Z protest is not ‘unserious’, it is civil disobedience dismantling Modi’s crafted image
Why traditional media is at the receiving end at the Jantar Mantar protests
(Edited by R Rajesh Kumar.)
