It is a little disorienting for long time observers of Indian politics to wake up to a world in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suddenly believes that profanity is unacceptable. While many of us have cautioned about the degradation of the public discourse in India over the last decade, most of it has fallen on deaf years. For a decade, the BJP’s online armies have used profanity to intimidate, silence and control public spaces. As an Indian woman online, it is next to impossible to escape being targeted by the BJP and their followers with gender linked slurs. Their preferred tactic of doxxing, accompanied by the unleashing of a horde of accounts spewing profanity, has successfully forced many young women (often Muslim) offline. Slurs like k*tu*, j*hadi and rice-b*g flood the replies of minorities who stand against them. A whole host of casteist slurs are used to target Dalits. Offline, right-wing groups have used DJs to blast profane songs outside Muslim places of worship on Hindu festivals. Kunal Purohit’s documentation of viral Hindutva pop anthems offers several examples of the use of profanity set to music to inspire violence and recruit fresh followers. The BJP has even gone so far as to use profanity to silence Muslims in the Indian parliament. It is safe therefore to conclude that the BJP’s sudden outrage about profanity in the public discourse is not driven by any moral concern for the quality of political discourse in India. It is simply the masters of using profanity to establish dominance over public spaces, fearing a loss of their monopoly over it. While the BJP’s about turn on profanity is explicable, many liberal watchers have been quick to criticise young protestors and draw an equivalence between the BJP’s use of profanity to harass and intimidate and the language used by India’s Gen Z in their protests last week. This misunderstands the role of profanity in protest. The role of profanity in protestScholars studying the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests noted that profanity, instead of being a distraction from the cause (the conventional wisdom at the time) did in fact serve a threefold practical function to protestors. First, it allowed then to escalate from generic assertions of demands to targeted aggression, without indulging in physical violence. Second, it helped in collective identity building, where the adoption of the profane slogan helped protestors identify the movement’s actual participants, and demarcate between themselves and the rest of society. Finally, as swear words themselves are emotive, they did not just express strong feeling, they also helped manufacture it. This helped them mobilise indifferent citizens to join the movement. The generous use of profanity in the protests last week by young protestors in India performed a mix of these functions, and some additional ones.Also read: Neem ka Patta Kadwa Hai…Offended by B*, C*, M* and F* Words?Collective identity building In a largely organic protest movement, where protestors are drawn from diverse caste, class, geographic and political locations, and are brought together by online mobilising, building a unique collective identity as protestors is essential to the survival of the movement. Without the luxury of time to organise, this collective identity must be built while protesting. Vocabulary plays a part in that. As multiple older observers of these protests have noted, the protests were “unlike any other” they had seen. A great deal of that unfamiliarity came from the fact that the vocabulary of the protests including the slogans used (both profane and otherwise) marked a departure from the more traditional protest slogans that have characterised protests in New Delhi for generations. While there were some classics, like Maulana Hasrat Mohani’s 1921 slogan, “Inqilab Zindabad” (Long live the revolution), much of the protest vocabulary was new. “Chappan inch ka chotta bandar” (the 56-inch little monkey), “jab jab Modi darta hai, police ko aage karta hai” (Modi hides behind the police whenever he gets scared) and of course the more profane hits were all the product of this generation’s interactions with each other in real life – invented perhaps at other small-scale protests and made viral online. Profanity for this generation is neither shocking nor even unusual enough to merit comment. The slogans therefore offer a way for the protestors to identify each other, build community, and also immediately weed out anyone who is merely a peripheral observer. The profane slogans especially, because of the risk they carry, immediately signal that someone wishes to be central to the protest community. Non-violent escalationProfanity offers a means of escalation without using violence. Modi’s 12 years in power have been marked by a communication channel that flows only in one direction. While the Prime Minister certainly speaks a lot – in election rallies, in his own show, Mann ki Baat, on X (formerly Twitter), or while addressing the diaspora abroad – he rarely listens. With no press conferences, townhalls, or non-scripted interviews, it is next to impossible for his electorate to communicate with him. With the government’s non-formal control over television media narratives, protests voiced in conventional terms in “permitted locations” blur into background noise. The protests that have succeeded in the last decade have all found their own ways to disrupt that barrier of indifference. The CAA protests had the Shaheen Bagh sit-in and constant street mobilisation; the farmer protests camped in the national capital for a whole year; and the students have weaponised profanity (made viral on the Internet) to escalate and disrupt. The answer given by many of the young protestors when asked about the profanity is that Modi had to be made to listen to them. It is important for us to acknowledge that perhaps in this, their profanity has succeeded where poetry would have failed. The centring of the privilegedA third aspect, which is perhaps more unique to this protest is that the chanting of profane slogans effectively put some of the most privileged participants (in terms of religion, caste and class location) at the front and center of the resistance. Privileged participants in earlier anti- Modi protest movements, much like Frantz Fanon’s nationalist bourgeoisie, have tended take upon themselves the role of being interlocutors between the protestors and the state. From expressing discomfort with overtly Muslim symbols and slogans during the CAA NRC protests, and with Sikh symbolism in the farmer protests, a prominent part of their contribution has been in deciding what tone, vocabulary and methods a protest should use to be most acceptable to the state. By standing on the margins and dictating civility, the privileged therefore insulate themselves from the brutality of any state repression that is used to dismantle the protest. Their marginality, and their positioning of themselves as the civil voices of reason in the protest also means the state can sidestep them in the violence it unleashes and lower the political cost to itself of deploying brutality. Also read: On the Gen Z Protests, From an ‘Anti-National’ MillennialThe use of profanity, especially from young, privileged groups, including young women, flips this order. Internet virality immediately makes them the most visible faces of the protest. It is also relevant that most of the abuse is in Hindi, not English. By refusing to set themselves apart from their peers using the usual markers of Indian middle-class respectability (tone, language and civility), they make it more difficult for the state to sidestep them and target only the marginalised. And the political cost of targeting the whole without differentiation, as was seen after the July 20 brutality in New Delhi, proved to be quite high for the Modi government. Turkish sociologist Zeynep Tufekci asks a fundamental question: what makes some protests successful and others not? The answer does not lie in numbers, because no matter how many protestors one mobilises, a state can always point to the overwhelming majority of the population that did not join the protests. The answer, Tufekci argues, lies in the ability of the protestors to signal three specific capacities to the government – narrative capacity (can they propagate their own narrative?), disruptive capacity (can they interrupt the regular operations of authority?), and electoral capacity (can they prevent politicians from being elected?). With independent media, the protest clearly had its own narrative capacity. Their disruptive capacity is more interesting. Much of Modi’s immunity from accountability, despite the widespread administrative failures of his government, stems from the divine pedestal on which his older supporters place him. The use of profanity that was spread through the protest demonstrated real capacity to disrupt that order. The government simply could not let the chanting of profanities against Modi continue on the streets indefinitely, and certainly not by the children of their own ministers and voter base. With respect to electoral outcomes, the BJP has always assumed that it enjoys wide support among Gen-Z Hindus. The unfiltered and escalating anger at Modi, demonstrated best by the wide adoption of profanity across geographic regions, would have dented some of that confidence bringing the government to the negotiating table earlier than most expected. While we are free to bemoan the vocabulary of the young (we would hardly be the first generation of middle-aged folks to do so), to divorce it from its context and equate it with the targeted harassment unleashed by the Indian right wing in the last decade is to do Gen-Z a great disservice. They are not using slurs to punch down, target the vulnerable, dehumanise or incite violence. In a David versus Goliath battle, where they stand alone against the government, the executive and even the judiciary, they are targeting their profanity at the most powerful man in South Asia. The message is that they, the protestors, will not be intimidated into silence. They’re signalling to the government, that irrespective of the overwhelming difference in power between them and the prime minister, they are unafraid to remind him of his duty, and for that they deserve to be congratulated, not censured. Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.