This is a guest post by VIRAJ  KAFLE

For years, a particular grammar was offered to the young.

It taught them to recognise an internal enemy — Muslims, left activists, social justice advocates, critics of the regime — and to treat their presence as contamination by measuring them against a narrow standard of productivity and usefulness. This grammar operated by sorting populations according to their perceived contribution to a narrowly defined productive order. It marked as contaminants those bodies and capacities that appeared to drain resources, require adjustments, or fail to generate efficient returns.

What was once directed primarily at designated communities has now begun to expand. When the highest judicial office described unemployed and critical youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites,” it applied the same measure of worth that has long determined who can claim unconditional belonging. The coordinated attacks that followed did not require new categories. They simply extended the existing test of productivity and non-burden to a wider section of the population. Youth who had been positioned as future contributors now found themselves recast as drains on the system. This reversal follows the internal logic of a grammar that has always treated human variation in capacity as a problem of management rather than a fact requiring social reorganisation.

The encampment at Jantar Mantar in early June 2026 made this expansion visible on the ground. Sections of the middle class that had accepted majoritarian consolidation as the background condition of their security began to see their children placed under the same scrutiny previously reserved for those whose labour or presence could not be easily extracted. The NEET paper leak scandal and the linked suicides revealed a system that first compels intense investment in competitive performance and then discards those it renders surplus. The label of vermin now attaches to the overproduced and under-placed products of the very order that once promised them security through aspiration and credential accumulation. The reversal remains uneven. Large sections of the middle class continue to believe that continued performance of productivity will protect them. Yet the grammar has already demonstrated its capacity to withdraw that protection from those who can no longer meet its shifting thresholds of usefulness.

Teachers’ and students’ organisations under the banner of JFME (Joint Forum for Movement on Education) participated from the very first day of the gathering. Their early presence opened up the possibility of a more organised political character to the encampment from the outset, even as its initial articulation remained largely focused on immediate institutional betrayal and the reclamation of a slur. Sonam Wangchuk’s decision to begin an indefinite hunger strike at the site on 28 June marks a further stage in this movement. Wangchuk had once been accommodated within the regime’s developmental and integrationist narratives around Ladakh after the abrogation of Article 370. When he subsequently raised concerns that fell outside that frame, particularly around environmental protections, his interventions were marginalised and he faced legal proceedings. His alignment now with the protesting youth at Jantar Mantar does not represent a sudden break but the continuation of a process in which even those who were earlier granted provisional space within the order find themselves pushed toward the category of the contaminant once they refuse to remain within the allotted limits. The grammar does not operate through abrupt expulsion alone; it works through successive narrowing of what counts as acceptable speech and acceptable dissent.

Into this space stepped students from the All India Students’ Association, who joined the hunger strike on 28 June. Their entry marked a further departure from the movement’s earlier post-ideological character. It introduced a more explicit political grammar and began to pace the encampment toward a longer confrontation with the systems that produced the original grammar. This development does not erase the reversal; it gives it greater organisational density and connects it, however unevenly, to histories of student and youth resistance that the post-ideological framing had kept at a distance.

The Ram Mandir donation scandal that broke in late June operates through the same inward movement. For years the temple functioned as the central staging ground for the grammar of purity and threat: the reclamation of sacred space from the Muslim other, the promise that majoritarian consolidation would restore honour and order. When allegations of systematic embezzlement of devotee donations and valuables surfaced, accompanied by police investigations and the cancellation of a planned press conference by sections of the trust, the contamination could no longer be projected outward. It appeared inside the most heavily invested symbol of the project. The sense of betrayal voiced by sections of the devout and the aspirational is not only about lost funds. It registers that the grammar which taught them to police external and internal enemies had also authorised forms of extraction that now touch their own devotional economy.

This precarity of belonging is not a completed episode. The clarification issued by the Ministry of External Affairs on 25 June that an Indian passport is not conclusive proof of citizenship arrived amid ongoing processes of voter list deletions and bureaucratic adjudication that continue to render documentary recognition unstable for large numbers of people. For disabled people, the demand to repeatedly prove one’s existence through documents has long been a site of structural violence. Aadhaar biometric failures, inaccessible government portals, and the constant requirement for medical certification have functioned as everyday mechanisms that render belonging conditional. The grammar that once presented citizenship and recognition as threatened primarily by external or designated internal enemies now generates a generalised condition in which even formally secure markers can be withdrawn or placed under review. What was once treated as an exceptional administrative burden placed on marked bodies is becoming a wider condition of provisional inclusion.

Youth formations more explicitly aligned with opposition parties have faced a markedly different order of state response. Protests led by Congress youth wings, for instance, have routinely encountered swift police action, preventive detentions, and the invocation of stringent public order provisions, even when raising demands similar to those currently being voiced at Jantar Mantar. Earlier, the women-led Shaheen Bagh protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act was met with prolonged siege, barricading, and eventual violent clearance, because it combined Muslim leadership with a direct challenge to the regime’s core legislative project. The continued incarceration of Umar Khalid, without trial for over five years, stands as a stark example of how individuals associated with left and minority politics are kept in prolonged judicial custody on the basis of vague and expansive charges. In Noida and other industrial areas, workers’ protests have been met not only with immediate police force, but also with sustained witch-hunts involving raids, arrests, and the branding of organisers as anti-national or extremist. These instances reveal a consistent pattern: the state does not respond uniformly to dissent. It calibrates the intensity of repression according to how legible and containable a formation appears within its existing grids of threat. Formations that can be framed as post-ideological, concerned primarily with immediate institutional failures, or lacking an organised political lineage that directly challenges the regime’s foundational narratives are often permitted a degree of mediated visibility. In contrast, those whose political identity is already coded as fundamentally antagonistic — whether because of party affiliation, community leadership, ideological positioning, or class character — encounter swifter and more severe measures. This differential response does not indicate tolerance for the present reversal. It demonstrates the grammar’s flexibility in deciding which expressions of discontent can be managed within existing frameworks and which must be more aggressively contained or neutralised.

The question of whether this inward expansion can proceed without large-scale societal destruction returns us to the problem of war. In the European fascist projects of the interwar period, the grammar that sorted populations according to their contribution to the national body was first applied systematically to those deemed least productive or most burdensome. The external war did not create this grammar, but it created the conditions for its most radical and systematic realisation on a continental scale. By the time significant sections of the population began to recognise that the logic was turning inward and consuming even those who had once been positioned as its beneficiaries, the war had already devastated Europe and culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The military defeat of fascism came only after this immense destruction. In India the same grammar has so far operated through a managed economy of violence while preserving enough macroeconomic and media stability to keep significant sections invested in selective security.

The present reversal raises the possibility that a wider recognition of the grammar’s inward movement can develop without a comparable domestic catastrophe. Yet the global context makes this prospect uncertain. Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestinian territories and its ongoing war on Gaza, along with the recent direct military escalation involving Iran, demonstrate that eliminationist and authoritarian logics continue to expand with significant international backing rather than facing containment. Combined with the renewed strength of Trumpist formations in the United States, these developments indicate that the international environment is currently favourable to the further consolidation of such grammars rather than their reversal. Whether the reversal visible at Jantar Mantar can generate a political response sufficient to arrest the grammar’s further expansion in India before it reaches a point of no return therefore remains an open and urgent question. The grammar does not remain stable. Once set in motion, it expands the zone of those who must prove they are not contaminants until even those who once imagined themselves exempt discover that the category of vermin has become portable.

VIRAJ KAFLE teaches at Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi.