A generational revolt in the Modi Parivar

Among the many striking images in Gen Z’s Jantar Mantar protests, there were a fair few of young protesters wearing masks. They weren’t hiding from the police but their own families. It was particularly noticeable after the march on 20 July when they were attacked with nailed lathis, shock batons, tear gas and pellet guns by the police and private militia unleashed upon them by the government.

One 21-year-old student from Bihar said he had not informed his parents he was joining the protest because they were hardcore BJP supporters, but he had to join because the protesters, his peers, were fighting for his own cause. Another wore a mask because he “feared being recognised on television or social media”. A third said bluntly it was his parents’ political leanings that had brought him to the streets.

There were plenty such examples. For many young protesters, the first confrontation was not with the State but with their parents.

In a recent interview, Neha Bora, national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), told Barkha Dutt of MoJo Story that her politics stood in sharp contrast with her parents’ — she is on the left, her parents on the right. For her too, the first political clashes of note were at home.

Echoes of the same rebellious sentiment have been heard elsewhere in the country. Several reports, such as this one, record support for the protests from unexpected quarters. Daughters of BJP leaders or the party’s allies in Assam embarrassed their parents to openly back the Gen Z movement demanding the removal of (now deposed) Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. They made public declarations of their departure from their parents’ politics in media interviews.

Umang Gupta, a former BJP student leader, said hers too was a family of devoted Modi supporters and she had joined the protests against her parents’ wishes. Like her, she said, many young people had stood up to their parents to be at the protests. “They are getting beaten up. They are being called terrorists,” she said in a PBS interview.

For nearly a fortnight, much of the commentary around the Gen Z protests has focused on the streets, the slogans, the memes and on the political damage they may or may not have caused the Modi government. Perhaps a more interesting story is unfolding inside homes, at dinner tables, in family WhatsApp groups and the wider social universe of the right-wing ecosystem that has sustained the BJP’s political rise over the past decade and its grip over public messaging.

The first signs of an inter-generational fracture are now manifest inside the BJP’s social coalition — families, neighbourhoods, RSS shakhas, WhatsApp groups, temples, business networks, alumni circles… For years, political socialisation flowed from parents to children, but the Gen Z protests suggest the expiry of that assumption.

These acts of rebellion, individually or even as an incipient trend, if this is one, should not be overestimated as the beginning of the end of the BJP or even an indication — yet — that its political fortunes will go downhill from here. Parties have been known to weather crises and moments of internal dissonance. But the carapace of social cohesion has cracked — as discerning young voices start taking their cues not from their family elders but a digital ecosystem that perhaps feels like home, their internet family, if you will.

Inside the BJP too, there are murmurs. While some MPs have even been bold enough to publicly acknowledge that “the fiasco could have been avoided”, as quoted in this report, they say more off the record. Some concede that the delay in responding to the students hurt the government’s image, but they still affect unconcern about lasting or long-term or electoral consequences.

Both inside and outside Parliament, senior party leaders like Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari maintained a studied silence, not landing openly in support of home minister Amit Shah, who has been in the crosshairs of the Opposition for presiding over the barbaric police action.

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The generational story is not necessarily one of disconnect. In Mumbai, for instance, many parents marched alongside their children in solidarity with the movement. Different families have responded differently to the same political moment; so, it’s probably unwise to extrapolate too much. Political parties do not unravel because a handful of young adults argue with their parents or because a few sympathisers express discomfort. Nor do scattered anecdotes constitute evidence of a broad ideological shift.

Yet these vignettes deserve attention because they emerge from places that political reporting often misses and our mainstream media today will certainly suppress. Elections tell us how people vote and protests tell us who mobilises. But families tell us how political beliefs are transmitted, defended, challenged and sometimes renegotiated across generations.

For much of the last decade, the BJP has enjoyed extraordinary social support that extended beyond party membership. Its grip on society, especially in ‘the cow belt’, has been sustained through RWAs, neighbourhood groups, Hindu religious networks, professional associations and the family unit.

Narrative building through a pliant media, beholden to the government for support, has played no small part in projecting its invulnerability. Even after they have been called out and lampooned and shooed away from protest sites, big media is unwavering in its focus on critics of the government. Celebrity anchors are still busy trying to trip up the likes of Abhijeet Dipke and Saurav Das rather than asking who ordered the use of pellet guns against the protesters.

What’s heartening, though, is the political voice of a post-mobile generation, seemingly cutting across caste, class, religious and old political lines, of a young networked citizenry that social theorists have begun to call ‘digital publics’.

This platform-native, anxious generation is finding common ground in real-life concerns of education, employment and identities that seem more meaningful to them. Unlike their parents or grandparents who seem to have given this government a free pass because it has given them an imagined enemy to hate.

It’s hard to predict at this moment how this first real social challenge to the BJP in its happy hunting grounds will progress, whether the young protesters and their backers in the Opposition are able to build larger solidarities with other aggrieved parties — disaffected farmers, industrial workers, displaced tribals etc.

Can the opposition on the streets make common cause with the Opposition in Parliament? We don’t know. But political change, if it comes, rarely announces itself dramatically. It often begins quietly — with hesitation replacing certainty, with questions challenging stock answers, with families discovering that the political consensus they once took for granted no longer holds.

Jaideep Hardikar is a senior Nagpur-based journalist and author of Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis. More by him here