For the last twelve years, the RSS-BJP regime has repeatedly sought to impose the silence of a grave over the country. Yet India has repeatedly overcome fear, raised its voice, and resisted.The latest instance is the student-youth rebellion at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Alongside NEET aspirants who were cheated, a large numbers of unemployed youth from poor and lower-middle-class and marginalised communities – the ones most betrayed by the Modi government – also joined the movement. They are other side of NEET – those Not in Employment, Education or Training.The anger seething among young people is now visible in Ranchi, Jharkhand. But the Congress-supported Hemant Soren government, instead of learning from what happened in Delhi, is attempting to suppress the Ranchi movement in much the same way as the Bharatiya Janata Party did.This makes it clear that the issue cannot be reduced to one political party or the question of examination paper leaks. Nor can the underlying problem be explained only through the education policy discourse.The struggles in Delhi and Ranchi may have begun around paper leaks, but they quickly developed into wider protests against rising unemployment, corruption in government, nepotism and cronyism.Also read: Students Hold Sit-in Protest Outside Jharkhand Assembly, Congress Condemns Police ActionIn Delhi, particularly after July 20, the numbers and militancy of the movement grew when more discontented youth arrived. The movement that began with the paper leak issue rapidly spread across communities, social classes, states and issues, forcing the Modi government to respond publicly.Punjab’s powerful farmer organisation, Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ugrahan), extended support to students and called for a Delhi Chalo tractor march on July 27. This created additional pressure on the government. It was compelled to concede at least some of the movement’s demands. For the first time, under the pressure of a popular struggle, it was forced to secure the resignation of its minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.Naturally, this has generated renewed confidence, energy and hope among people who have been facing prolonged hardship.Repression and misrepresentationBut no ruling regime willingly accepts defeat and no authoritarian government permits a movement to expand freely – least of all the current authoritarian regime.From the very day Pradhan resigned, the government began using the media to spread disinformation and undermine the legitimacy that the movement had acquired among the public. At the same time, police repression intensified. It also tried to make Pradhan a martyr, giving him a hero’s welcome to parliament. This served to remind the public of how convicts from the Sangh Parivar are welcomed when they secure bail.Through RSS pracharaks, attempts are also being made to influence the class and generation that had previously assumed that the government would always stand by it.Police detain Patna University students during a march to Raj Bhavan in support of the UGC’s anti-discrimination regulations, in Patna, March 18, 2026. Photo: PTISangh Parivar outfits, including the BJP, are now expected to come together to formulate strategies of conciliation, inducement, division and punishment – either to win over Gen Z over, split them through divide-and-rule tactics or force them into submission.The ongoing “Reservation Hatao” (remove caste-based reservation) campaign is part of this strategy. All of these indicate that the youth movement has become sufficiently powerful to shake the complacency of the ruling regime.Modi’s India versus rebellious IndiaBut this is certainly not the first occasion when India has broken the grave silence that the present regime seeks to impose.For twelve years, students, youth, farmers, Adivasis, women and Dalits have continued to resist the government and its policies.2014-2015: Farmers resisted the farm ordinance and the proposed legislation through which the government sought to amend the Right to Fair Compensation Act.2015: Students at Pune’s FTII and the Bhagat Singh-Periyar Study Circle at IIT Madras openly challenged, ridiculed and exposed the government.2016: A nationwide student rebellion followed the institutional death of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula. There was also the historic JNU student protest against the victimisation and villainisation of critical voices on campus. In Bengaluru, garment workers, especially the women, launched a spontaneous mass protest against changes to Provident Fund rules, resulting in a three-day Bengaluru bandh.2017: After the BJP government fired on farmers in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, farmers across the country joined in struggle. There was a nationwide movement demanding legislation for Minimum Support Prices.2018: Around 40,000 Adivasis marched from Nashik to Mumbai in a major protest against the government’s anti-Adivasi and corporate-oriented policies.2018-19: Dalit resistance at Bhima Koregaon in Maharashtra, opposing its “Peshwai-style” politics, became a massive challenge to the Modi government.2019: In the aftermath of India’s freedom struggle, the country witnessed its largest nationwide civil resistance in many years against the government’s CAA-NRC-NPR policies.2020-2021: Farmers opposing the government’s anti-farmer, pro-corporate policies mounted an extraordinary 385-day siege around Delhi, an event remarkable not only in independent India but also in the contemporary world.2022-23: Unemployed youth across North India launched protests against the government over the Agniveer scheme and Railway Board recruitment.2023-24: Workers across the country, including workers in Manesar, participated in large-scale resistance.2026: The worker protests that spread like wildfire and continuing unabated across North India.There were also protests over incidents such as Unnao, Una, Hathras and Kathua, along with hundreds of other struggles that received far less national attention. They took place…and continue to take place. And they will continue to erupt.The excitement and energy witnessed at Jantar Mantar in July 2026, therefore, is not an isolated phenomenon. Similar moments of resistance have repeatedly emerged, organically and spontaneously.Different thorns; the same rootAt first sight, these struggles appear to be separate conflicts in which different sections of society are confronting the government over different grievances. Yet their underlying roots are common. They are different manifestations of the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and corporatisation that the government has pursued aggressively.They are also connected to the repressive measures adopted to contain popular resistance to that economic assault. These protests oppose the larger project aimed at polarising society, transforming India into a corporate-Manuvadi Hindu Rashtra, and pushing those considered unwanted outside the boundaries of citizenship.Also read: An Open Letter: Dear Friends, We Should Expect and Prepare Well for the Repression that Comes Our WayThe periodic rebellions of different sections of people, which arise as attempts to remove the individual thorns that cause them pain, have not developed into revolutions capable of transforming the economic, social and political system that forms the taproot from which those thorns grow.Looking back at the major struggles of the past twelve years, one finds a recurring pattern: the Modi regime has managed to embed defeat to the very victories achieved by each movement.Defeats embedded in celebrated victories?It is true that in 2014-15, the Modi government withdrew its proposal to amend the Right to Fair Compensation Act after facing popular resistance. Yet BJP-ruled states went ahead and implemented similar amendments openly and without hesitation.Moreover, Opposition parties such as Congress, which are themselves committed to the neoliberal economic framework that treats foreign capital investment as the central engine of development, did not fundamentally oppose this direction.More importantly, in Karnataka, the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government in 2018-19 introduced amendments that effectively undermined the soul and substance of the Right to Fair Compensation Act that its own government had enacted. The Bidadi and Devanahalli projects are products of that change.Agitating farmers’ torched trucks on the Mhow-Neemuch Highway in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh in June 2017. Credit: PTIIn the case of the 2020 farmers’ movement, the central demand for legally guaranteed MSP has since lost momentum. Following the enormous farmers’ agitation of 2020-21, which astonished the world, the Modi government withdrew the three anti-farmer laws at the central level. Yet comparable measures continue to exist at the state level.At the central level too, there is now an effort to revive the substance of the earlier legislation through the National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing.In Karnataka, the anti-farmer measures introduced by the Bommai-led BJP government, as part of the policy framework laid out by the Union government, were not repealed even after the Congress government came to power in 2023.While the BJP is carrying out what amounts to the destruction of Adivasi communities in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in the name of combating Naxalism, with the objective of making Adivasi land available to corporate interests such as the Adani Group, the ideological acceptance of this approach continues to extend beyond the BJP.The anti-CAA-NRC-NPR movement was halted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the same process is now being pursued under the name of Special Intensive Revision (SIR), with the cooperation of the Congress and other opposition governments.Even after militant protests against schemes such as Agniveer, governments across states continue to adopt employment policies that institutionalise insecurity. The underlying logic is that capital will invest only when economic policies are made sufficiently friendly to it.Consequently, opposition-party governments too are competing with the Modi government in implementing employment and labour policies that favour corporations at the expense of workers.In Karnataka, the Congress government is withdrawing the minimum-wage rule it had introduced, reportedly under pressure from corporate interests.The Modi government’s New Education Policy – which the text identifies as the underlying source of paper leaks and related failures – is being implemented across states.In Karnataka, the Congress government had promised to introduce a State Education Policy as an alternative. Yet its term is nearing completion without even a public draft of that policy. Instead, the government is aggressively pursuing the Karnataka Public School scheme, which intends to close thousands of government schools and places the remaining institutions under corporate charity.If the National Testing Agency system that produced the paper-leak crisis and the anti-people NEP identified as its underlying cause remain untouched, then Pradhan’s resignation will amount to little more than a symbolic performance staged over the suffering of the students who were cheated.At the same time, the Supreme Court, which is expected to defend the constitution against systematic assaults by the Sangh, has during this period functioned increasingly like an extension of the Prime Minister’s Office.If the root remains, the thorns will regrowThe roots of these problems go much deeper.Removing the visible thorns may offer temporary relief or it may create the appearance of a resolution. But unless a comprehensive strategy is developed, a temporary victory can itself become the beginning of a longer-term defeat. This is the warning repeatedly conveyed by the history of struggles over the past twelve years.World history offers a similar lesson. Between 2010 and 2020, the world witnessed major rebellions in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Italy, Chile and elsewhere. In several countries, youth-led uprisings succeeded in bringing down governments.Vincent Bevins, who reported on and studied these movements, examined this phenomenon in his serious and influential book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. His argument explains why enormous popular uprisings, despite shaking countries with the force of a tsunami, did not ultimately develop into revolutions capable of producing fundamental structural change.India, still energised by the Jantar Mantar struggle, needs to reflect seriously on the lessons contained in this analysis.Critical inquiryThere is no doubt that the Jantar Mantar struggle has given India much-needed relief of excitement, confidence and hope. But even as we celebrate and draw strength from this moment, we must confront some difficult questions:How has the Modi government repeatedly managed to absorb, contain or neutralise these different forms of resistance?Why does anger against the present regime’s policies so often fail to develop into resistance against ‘Modism’ as a political and ideological project?What conditions and weaknesses prevent these movements from becoming revolutions capable of producing fundamental change?What must be done to ensure that the youth resistance of today does not become merely another temporary moment of excitement?We need to move beyond both the impulsiveness of unrestrained enthusiasm and the paralysis of excessive caution which masquerade as wisdom.The energy of youth and the accumulated wisdom of experience must come together. We must learn to see with both eyes. We must learn to move forward on both legs.The urgent task before us today is to transform rebellion into a revolution capable of bringing about fundamental change.Shivasundar is a columnist and activist in Karnataka.