The young people I have been seeing on Delhi’s streets since June are angry and anxious, ready to defy police orders and leap over hundreds of yellow barricades. They call it “season one” of their protests, borrowing from Netflix as digital natives often do. Most are inexperienced marchers; fresh graduates carrying backpacks and exam certificates, hallmarks of an education system whose unfairness they are out to contest.
India is the latest country in south Asia to witness gen Z-led demonstrations, with the generation projected to account for 28 per cent of eligible voters by 2029. Narendra Modi’s government is no stranger to protests: Muslims opposing changes to citizenship law, farmers angry about a corporate push into agriculture, Olympic wrestlers and health workers are among those to have challenged it since 2014. Those protests failed to metastasise into a national challenge. The state was quick to dismiss them as issue-based mobilisations of a single group or community.
But these young protesters present a radically different challenge. Uniting under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, an Instagram meme-turned-pressure group, their anger over the examination system has morphed into protests over the integrity of elections. Their fury has struck a chord across regions, castes and classes. The government’s response has been brutal: police assaults, pellet guns and thousands of detentions. Videos of the crackdown, despite attempts to ban them, have carried the confrontation far beyond protest sites.
Indians are counting themselves again after an unprecedented gap of 16 years. A census worker knocks on my door armed with a register and a ballpoint pen, promising to return again in winter with a digital device for “more detailed questions”. India has recorded a census roughly every 10 years since the first was introduced by the British in 1872. Indians have been counted through wars, partition and famines. But the chain snapped in 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic was used to postpone it. BJP election rallies and mass gatherings of Hindu pilgrims went ahead; the census did not.
This time, the government is insisting on collecting new types of private data—mobile numbers, national identity numbers, the religion of your parents. At least 10 Indian states have criminalised interfaith marriages and I worry such sensitive data could be weaponised. In recent years, India’s record on data security has been abysmal. Before the government demands more information, most Indians would like to know how securely it holds what it already has.
Born to a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, I have always prided myself on being an emblem of confluence, which I believe is foundational to the idea of India. My kitchen is a mishmash and would never satisfy a purist. Last week, I thought nothing of teaming up Hyderabadi biryani with some Punjabi-style potatoes and red chilli pickle from the state of Uttar Pradesh. India’s world-famous food, music, dance, cinema and textiles reflect the warp and weft of its many identities. Its constitution has never linked Indian nationalism to a particular religion, ethnicity, language or race. For centuries, India has welcomed multiple ways of life.
Watching Sonia Gandhi, former president of the Indian National Congress party, speak about her upcoming memoir, Belonging, on social media, made me think about who is counted as an Indian. Born in Italy, she made India her home six decades ago after marrying Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Years later, when their two children were adults, Rajiv was assassinated, as his mother had been before him. Sonia has been ridiculed by some in our Hindu nationalist government for being “foreign born”. But I find her commitment to living in India and embracing it as her own deeply inspiring, especially as I struggle with the loss of my own husband, who was also a political leader. When does a woman’s journey cease to be a part of another’s and become her own?
I watched Silhouettes, a play in English and Hindi, at the Kamani Auditorium in central Delhi, the perfect bookend to a politically charged few weeks. Written and directed by Sandhya Gokhale, the show explores the lives of extraordinary women whose achievements have been overshadowed by their better-known male partners. Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer and painter (more often associated with Picasso’s Weeping Woman portrait); Camille Claudel, the French sculptor (whose work was long eclipsed by her relationship with the artist Auguste Rodin). Who gets to be heard, who gets counted and who gets to belong? In India, these questions have begun to run into one another.
The play’s name stays with me after the curtains close. Silhouettes, encapsulating shadows and reflections, as a metaphor of the times we are living through. Both darkness and light. It is within these silhouettes that India’s democratic impulse must continue to shine.
Seema Chishti is editor of the India-based news website the Wire and author of “Sumitra and Anees: Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family” (HarperCollins)
