When police fire pellet guns and AK 47s at unarmed protesters on the streets of cities, that’s when you know for sure that India is an integral part of Kashmir and the North Eastern states.

Also the other way round. One big happy parivar.

But of course now we are no longer talking about the devastated landscape of education in India, nor about the police violence unleashed on young unarmed  people protesting exam leaks and perversions of the education system. No, finally – finally – we have come to the real debate as a nation.

Abusive, sexually explicit language against men in power by the protesters, in posters and social media reels and memes.

Correction – by [young female, middle class] protesters. They were not the only ones using their creativity to do this, but they are the ones in the glare of the nation’s spotlight.

There appears to be a misconception among some commentators that the mass of the protesters eventually – the most radical, the least disciplined by traditional forms of political protest – were “the feral underclass” (Saroj Giri) or the “crude proletariat” (Ashis Nandy) – who dominated the areas outside the assumed to be sanitized space of designated protest at Jantar Mantar. The implication is that unruliness and violence from the protesters was driven by this feral underclass which the old style Left student movement was unable to control. But this assumption is purely theoretical.

On the basis of going to the protests several times including on July 20th, I can say with confidence that there was in fact no such centre-periphery type of division. Of course there were working class protesters in massive numbers, as well as middle class and upper class folk in equally large numbers (remember there were thousands of people around at any given time, and at least a lakh on the 20th of July, in and around Jantar Mantar) – but everyone was everywhere. 

First of all, the working class protesters were not the “feral underclass” – a disparaging term used by a Tory Minister for rioters during  the 2011 Tottenham riots, meaning they were like wild animals. Unless workers take this descriptor back for themselves, as Cockroaches did, I don’t think we should be using this phrase for them. But it is also factually incorrect, because any violence from protesters came from planted agents provocateurs, about whom CJP had warned much earlier. The truck with stones parked outside the protest space the day before the march to Parliament, a truck that was found to have been impounded by the police in another case a few days prior. Masked men in the gathering, recordings of men planning violence at the march to Parliament and so on.

The workers and working class people present like everyone else, were there because of their aspirations to education, to a decent livelihood for their children if not for themselves. Remember, it was not only about the leak of NEET, the centralised exam for medical education. Leaks from 2014 to 2026 have included leaks of exams for tubewell operators, forest guards, lower division clerks, panchayat development officers. These are jobs the children of workers can aspire to. This was not an angry rampaging underclass getting its revenge. (This is not a value judgement. Had the latter been the case, I would have empathised, to be honest, but that is not what happened here.)

But the other claim is equally wrong – there was no centre/periphery differentiation. To repeat – everyone was everywhere. Inside the designated protest space there was recitation of revolutionary poetry and speeches and the hunger striking satyagrahis; but also young people dancing – young women on stage uninhibitedly dancing too – to Hindi film songs like sandeshe aate hain with no political content that I could discern; and content creators doing their thing with phones and selfie sticks and tripods.

And similarly, outside there were people in Spiderman costume and youngsters doing masti with crazy kinds of music  but also organized Ambedkarite and Left groups with Jai Bhim and Inquilab Zindabad.

(And everywhere there were chroniclers of the protest. Somewhere the story needs to be told about the heroic work done by citizen journalists with their mobile phones – mojo, I learnt it is called, mobile journalism – who undercut Godi Media reportage at every moment.)

The sexualised mockery of the men in power through memes and reels was carried out by all of the sections of protesters who were  not part of organised, more traditional kinds of student politics. Some of this was in the familiar misogynist mode (choodiyan pehenna; Modi, Shah and Pradhan in lipstick and saree etc) which has been pointed out and criticized by young feminists on social media and online platforms. But such spaces of protest are also  where growth happens, people talk to one another, learn and unlearn from one another. I assume the people holding such posters would have been argued with, made to rethink. I saw a reel of a young boy sitting with students of a Left group. He says he came to them to find out if they were anti-god and speak against god, as such students are said to do. But he found that they speak about many other things, and he found that interesting, so he stayed there. A sit-in of this kind is one that generates self transformation too.

The large proportion of sexualised posters and memes however were just boisterous, funny and punching up, not down. My colleague Ajay Gudavarty called this “disengaged mockery” – where you don’t feed the demagogue by addressing him directly, but look to an audience, your fellow protesters, and mock him, talk about him.  These posters and reels were held and made by young people of all genders, of all classes, in English and in Hindi.

This is how they are in their circles on social media, of which we, the older generations, had no idea. It’s like suddenly we were allowed to join them as they hung out with their friends. And we were enthralled, shocked, unprepared for the profanity, enchanted by the humour.

As  Anand Teltumbde  puts it in his brilliant essay:

…vulgarity, deployed with intent against sacred power, has a much older and much more successful political career than most respectable commentary is willing to admit.

But the mockery was directed at more than the men commanding the police. It was a celebration of defiance, of talking back. One young woman laughingly says to a reporter in Hindi, surrounded by other young people, “I am here, but I am tired. I’m having my periods. Par kya karein, desh ke liye khoon bahana toh padta hai”. What to do, one has to shed blood for the nation. Her friends cheer.

In one throwaway line she punctured the hollowness of toxic masculinist nationalism, inserting the woman’s body and its fecundity at the centre. Not blood signifying death, but blood signifying the possibility of new life. Proud, unashamed, amused.

(And yes, as I chuckled in delight, I did remember Gloria Steinem’s satirical essay If Men Could Menstruate).

The comments on that reel? Calling her the name that these people think will shame us and silence us forever – Slut. Randi. Again and again. One after the other, only able to repeat this one word. Which feminists in fact, reclaim with pride.

Meanwhile, in my imagination she will forever laugh out loud with her friends, in that space in which all taboos were breakable, in which all people of all genders and classes and ages felt comfortable and safe, jostling up against each other in the humid heat of Delhi’s June and July. So many many reels of women saying how safe they felt in that crush. In Delhi, one of the most unsafe cities in India.

The regime has been rattled not only by this avalanche of mockery and the use of abusive language, but by the fact that so much of it is by young middle-class appearing women. This is the demographic BJP assumes to be its own, the category of people who must bear good Hindu sons for the RSS Bharat Mata, and it is on  them that the government has cracked down hard, with regard to abusive content. FIRs have been lodged against some young women, the Hindutva troll brigade is on the rampage, doxxing and threatening these women, some have entered homes and forced women to apologize on camera (with complete impunity – it seems Delhi Police is a shakha of the RSS). I am not adding a link to that video because it exposes two women as well as gives the Hindutva thug the publicity he craves. The cherry on the icing – an Instagram video by the Prime Minister expressing his deep hurt but forgiving the daughters who have been misled by the wrong people.

As many have retorted, first of all, the Prime Minister himself as well as his supporters, have made a fine art of misogynist and violent abuse in public discourse, it is they who have normalised such an atmosphere of hatred and disrespect towards women. Modi in fact, himself follows all such violent misogynist characters on X (Twitter). Here is MP Sanjay Singh in master rhetorician mode bringing Modi down in measured tones.

And as others have pointed out, where the people demand accountability and an apology from the Prime Minister, he focuses on his own sense of hurt and betrayal; he magnanimously forgives them.

The fact is that the universe of the Jantar Mantar protest became a sort of utopian queer feminist space of mutual caring and feeding and companionship that went beyond class and caste – revolutionary and unimaginable in a society of graded inequality, to use Ambedkar’s pointed term. People donated hand-fans and the protesters used them to fan one another. Food was brought by Muslim  and Sikh sympathisers, and everybody ate together. Young boys went around offering sanitary napkins to women.  The shoes and slippers lost in the stampede of the lathi charge were carefully collected, organised in pairs to the extent possible and set up at the protest site under a sign that said “Free footwear”.

And the fact that the exciting call – “What if all cockroaches came together?” – was given by a young Dalit man, is not an incidental part of this story. This is the first time in independent India that such a massive and diverse movement has coagulated around a charismatic figure, whose caste identity was known from the very beginning. Abhijeet Dipke’s identity both mattered (in that it produced an inclusive space that felt safe for marginalised groups), and did not matter – the massive crowds in the protest space reached out to him as he passed, to touch his hand, to caress his head; mothers brought small dabbas of food to feed him a mouthful with their hands; a young man came all the way from Sikkim to give him a jersey marked INDIA – he shouted out “Bhai”, Dipke turned, he tossed him the jersey, Dipke caught it with one hand, immediately put it on. The aura of the man!

CJP was able to coagulate around itself multiple issues, the participation of Left and Ambedkarite groups was crucial, and like most mass mobilisations of the 21st century globally, it represents a form of coalition that emerges around one shared point of concern.  In the first piece I wrote after my first visit 16 days into the protest, I have dwelt a little on this form of political campaign:

The CJP is by no means a homogeneous platform, it is a coalition that has come together over one issue – education. There are internal differences on other issues, but those need not be raised here, at this time, and they are not. This is the form of successful non-party mobilisation we saw in the late 1990s to early 21st century – citizens coming together over Hindu right-wing violence or workers’ rights, or in  opposition to nuclear energy and the nuclear bomb – broad platforms of individuals and organizations that did not agree on everything, but worked on that one issue and marched together for a while.

(Cockroach Janta Party – A turning point for a dying democracy?)

In this hiatus after the first phase of the CJP campaign, we await the next development, especially in the face of continued state repression.

But in the meanwhile, the Jantar Mantar moment was meaningful in itself. It has shaken the patriarchy. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS uber patriarch, has declared in the wake of the protest that the women’s liberation movement has damaged two generations.

This is progress indeed. If the RSS recognizes feminism as the enemy, then it is being forced to see that the challenge to Hindutva is not the Outsider, the Muslim, but that, like in a horror film –  she is right inside the “Hindu” home.

This anxiety is what has propelled the Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand, which gives the state the right to interfere in consensual adult relationships, including criminal provisions. Live-in relationships will be closely policed by the state. This is to be replicated in all BJP ruled states.

The fact is that the family has failed in its patriarchal functions – young women are speaking up, asserting their agency; young people are insisting on choosing when and whom to marry or whether to marry at all; they are straying from strict binary gender identities; from heterosexual norms. It is ghor kalyug, the darkest era.

(Seriously, among the predictions the shastras make about this era of darkness in which we currently are, include – miscegenation of castes leading to everyone belonging to one varna; women will not follow the rule of their husbands; mutual liking between the boy and girl, and not family pedigree or social status, will be the criterion for selecting a spouse.

I think it is possible that we do live in kalyug).

So now the Hindu Rashtra state has to step in to perform the function that the family has spectacularly failed to do. As Modi perfidiously “forgives” his daughters, while forcing an apology video from a 15 year old girl, the goons emerge in his shadow to discipline them in their own ways, and the state (tries to) lock them up in the institution of endogamous, heterosexual marriage. There to produce proper Hindu sons.

But young people have no effs left to give, as they might say. They are finding their true home. That home is a space of self chosen relationships, political community and mutual care. The JNUSU President Aditi asked me during a conversation, why do you think people came back to Jantar Mantar on July 20th, after that day of extreme terror and violence wreaked on them? It was a stunning question. Why indeed, did they come back? With their casts and bandages and bruises, back to that space – again? Limping, singing, laughing, carrying wounded friends – always, always making more reels – they all came back, to a place that perhaps…felt like home?

Yes this is but a hiatus.

Abhi toh party shuru hui hai.