Jantar Mantar Protests: A Generation Demands to Be Heard

A Generation Without a Filter

The Jantar Mantar protests were supposed to fade after the first day. On July 20, when the batons came out and the tear gas rolled across Parliament Street, the familiar arc looked set to repeat itself — a dramatic morning, a subdued evening, a slow return to the ordinary business of forgetting. Instead, the Jantar Mantar protests grew — across Delhi, then across the country to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Jammu and Ahmedabad, and outward still, into solidarity gatherings and vigils among Indian communities abroad.

What is most striking about the Jantar Mantar protests is not the anger but the composition of the crowd. The children of Lutyens' Delhi stand beside students who took a night bus in from Bihar. Every faith is represented without a single communal placard in sight. Women, men and openly non-binary and LGBTQIA participants organise side by side, unbothered by the categories that usually divide Indian public life. Class, caste, religion, gender — at Jantar Mantar, for these remarkable weeks, none of it has mattered as much as it should have.

There is something else unfamiliar here. Since 2014, most journalists and most ordinary citizens have measured their words carefully before criticising Mr. Modi or Mr. Shah by name. That caution has defined public discourse for over a decade. Gen Z has discarded it entirely. Protesters hurl language at the Prime Minister and the Home Minister that would once have invited a knock on the door. Posters at the site depict the Prime Minister in women's clothing and lipstick. One poster — put up, pointedly, between the lights of a traffic signal pole — shows Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani kissing the Prime Minister on both cheeks. In twenty-five years of reporting, this scale of open anger has not been directed at a Prime Minister who, for most of his tenure, was treated by public discourse as someone beyond reproach — criticism of whom carried real and understood consequences.

A Generation Led by Feeling, Not Fear

Call them what you like — entitled, directionless, addicted to their phones, a generation with no patience and less discipline. There is a kernel of truth in some of it. But Gen Z does not care what you call them. This is a generation that has largely opted out of the religious fault lines that have organised Indian politics for decades — you cannot brainwash them with religion, because they were simply not raised to think in those terms. They do not organise by class hierarchy either. What moves them is simpler and, in some ways, harder for any establishment to manage: they act on what they 'feel' is right, and they cannot be influenced against their own instincts. That makes it essential, not optional, to make them feel they have been heard fairly.

During the course of the Jantar Mantar protests, small clusters of young people can be seen quietly negotiating logistics that have nothing to do with ideology — who needs to go home because their parents are calling anxiously, who can stay another night, who simply needs to show their face at the site before slipping away to reassure a worried household. It is a small, unglamorous detail, but it says something large: this is a generation navigating protest and domestic obligation simultaneously, in a way mine never quite had to. This generation is so unlike mine, or my father's. We were comparatively easy to influence. We responded to authority, to institutional pressure, to the fear of consequence. This generation does not carry that fear in the same way.

A Movement No One Controls Anymore

There is some authority to speak to this, having been present at two of the defining protests of a quarter-century in this profession. I was among the few journalists present in the earliest, thinly attended days of the Anna Hazare andolan — the anti-corruption movement that began as a handful of people and grew, in front of my own eyes, into one of the largest civil movements independent India has seen. I was also among the few journalists who followed the Nirbhaya case all the way to Singapore, reporting from outside Mount Elizabeth Hospital as the country waited for news of her condition after she was flown there for treatment following the gangrape that had left her fighting for her life on a moving bus in Delhi. When the protests broke out back home and swelled into the kind of mass movement every newsroom in the country was covering, I was on the ground for those too — where, amid the chaos, middle-aged men in the crowd molested women protesters, myself included, more than once.

A protest can curdle into chaos. A protest can curdle into cynicism. What is unfolding at Jantar Mantar is neither. Instead, young men pour water into the eyes of women blinded by tear gas. Boys form human chains around girls being pushed back by police lines. A young man, badly beaten, is lifted and half-carried away by a group of young women who did not know him an hour earlier. A young man in tears is quietly steadied by a young woman beside him. There are accounts, too, of plainclothes personnel slapping and molesting women in the crowd — one woman recounted being struck by an officer with such force and in such a manner that she was left in visible pain, while the Gen Z crowd came to her rescue. Another girl confronted an officer she accused of molesting her as he tried to slip away in an auto-rickshaw, refusing to let him leave until a crowd had gathered around them both. What followed each of these moments was not political theatre — it was the same instinctive fury you would expect if it had happened to a sister. This is a generation that is rebellious yet real, radical yet raw — one that argues with the state by day and holds a stranger together by night.

That instinct did not stay passive for long. On July 21 and 22, after the videos of Monday's crackdown had circulated overnight, the crowd's anger was returned in kind — protesters took the law into their own hands and beat back at the police who had beaten them a day earlier. They did not leave the site. The message was unambiguous: mess with this generation, and it will not simply absorb the blow. This is not the crowd that could be worn down the way Anna Hazare's or Nirbhaya's eventually were, and the Jantar Mantar protests have, by now, plainly outgrown the control of the Cockroach Janta Party leadership that lit the original spark. Abhijeet Dipke can call for calm; whether the crowd listens to him at all any longer is another matter entirely.

The Cost of Being Ignored

Many at the Jantar Mantar protests will say, almost dismissively, that they do not care about CJP, or about Abhijeet Dipke, or about any of the branding built around this movement. They did not come for a satirical political party. They came for something older and simpler — for the youth of this country, for an education system they no longer trust, to be seen and to be heard by a government that ignored them for a month before it finally noticed the size of the crowd it had created.

That underlying grievance deserves to be stated without embellishment, because it is legitimate. The protests trace back to the 2026 NEET-UG paper leak and the chaos of a cancelled and rescheduled exam that roughly 2.2 million aspiring doctors had prepared years for. In the weeks between the cancellation and the re-test, at least twenty one — by some accounts even more — young people reportedly took their own lives. Sonam Wangchuk — now on the twenty-sixth day of a hunger strike he has refused to end even from a hospital bed, declining intravenous fluids against his doctors' advice — and the demand for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation, sit on top of that grief. Whatever one makes of the theatre around the protests, the demand for accountability from the minister responsible for an examination system that has now cost students their lives is not an unreasonable one. Nor is the demand for fair compensation to the families who have lost their young ones. 

The state's answer to that grief was force. Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force lathi-charged marchers on July 20, some using canes studded with what protesters described as nails. Tear gas was fired directly into the crowd, some of it — by multiple accounts on the ground — expired stock. There is now ample documentation, corroborated by media of pellet-gun wounds among protesters, including one young man who underwent surgery — allegations Delhi Police have denied outright.

A viral video showing Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba slapping a woman protester who was not resisting led to Lamba being withdrawn from duty at the site within a day, and police privately conceded he had "lost his cool." All of this is wrong, and it should be named as wrong plainly and without qualification. Yes, police personnel were injured too. But a generation that has just watched its own being slapped, molested and filmed cannot reasonably be expected to turn the other cheek, and it did not.

The Cowardice Behind the Camera

Then there was what protesters call 'Godi media' — a term now used widely for television channels seen as functioning less as independent press than as an extension of government messaging. Reporters were heckled, jostled and in multiple documented cases physically assaulted at the site. One reporter had his clothes torn and his phone taken; other reporters were escorted to safety by police as crowds turned on them. This is public anger finding an outlet it should not, and it is not something I will defend. But it is happening, and it is real. One editor-in-chief of a prominent news channel, so wary of that anger that he chose not to send his own reporters to the site at all, instead sat safely in his studio and spewed venom at the young protesters — calling them China-sponsored, Pakistan-sponsored, CIA-sponsored, Khalistan-sponsored, anything but what they actually are. These editors genuinely believe there are buyers for this kind of journalism. The truth is simpler: they no longer dare step out of their own studios, because the crowd outside has made it clear exactly how it would receive them.

That is precisely the point the profession needs to reckon with. Reporters on the ground did not decide how their channels would frame this story. The young journalists being shouted down at Jantar Mantar are, in the main, doing a job under instruction, with bills to pay and few genuinely independent newsrooms left to move to. I know some of these reporters personally. They are not bad people. Most mainstream channels in this country are, today, compromised in one direction or another, and not everyone has the freedom, or the appetite for risk, to build something independent before an election cycle, as I once chose to do — and I say that without any wish to hold myself up as an example, only to acknowledge that the choice is not equally available to everyone. It is the editors and editors-in-chief who deserve scrutiny for the line they set — not the foot soldiers sent out to absorb its consequences. If that editorial line does not change, the risk is not hypothetical, and I say this as a professional observation rather than as any kind of threat: a public this angry, watching its own being beaten while certain channels call it foreign-sponsored, will not indefinitely distinguish between a channel's editorial leadership and the building that houses it.

Listen Now, or Lose Later

The same caution applies with even greater force to government. India's neighbourhood offers two recent and sobering precedents. In Bangladesh in 2024, a student movement that began over civil service quotas ended with the prime minister fleeing the country as protesters entered the seat of government itself. In Sri Lanka in 2022, economic protest drove crowds into the president's official residence. Neither country's leadership believed, until very late, that matters could go that far. I make no call for anything of the sort here, and nothing in what I have witnessed suggests the protesters intend it. But governments that keep clamping down on a generation this determined risk discovering, too late rather than too early, that the distance between a protest site and the Prime Minister's own residence is not as vast as it currently feels.

The remedy is neither complicated nor expensive. Hear them. Feel them. They want to be heard, and they want accountability. No minister's tenure is worth the risk this government is currently running. What begins as a demand for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation today can, if mishandled, become a demand addressed to the Prime Minister's own office tomorrow — and no one should want to find out how quickly that escalation can happen. Saying sorry should not be difficult. Saying "we were wrong" earns a government more than it costs — it earns it, in fact, a great deal.

Saying 'come, let us talk, we are here because of you' would make this government larger, not smaller — and that is true even if one sets aside every moral argument and looks at this purely as political strategy. Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls soon, and no party wins an election by alienating the first generation of Indian voters who have shown they can build a mass movement without any party's help at all. A government that treats its most energetic, most online, most persuadable demographic as an enemy to be tear-gassed is not protecting its flank — it is manufacturing an opposition it did not previously have. Can the ruling party really afford to let the anger of this generation spread like wildfire over something as small, in the end, as one minister's chair? Something is deeply wrong when a government finds it easier to deploy tear gas than to say two words, and something is politically foolish about it too — anger this raw does not stay contained to a protest site; it follows voters into a polling booth. The Jantar Mantar protests have already made that clear. It remains to be seen whether anyone in power, reading this as anything more than a law and order problem, is listening.