The Prime Minister of India made two surprise midnight appearances on his personal Instagram account in recent days, one disheveled and haggard, and another a little more manicured and made up. He seemed to be addressing the very people his now-erstwhile colleague, the recently resigned education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, had referred to with disdain some weeks ago in a television interview, as ‘the B-team of terrorists’.Although one is not always sure who he thinks he is talking to when he does, the prime minister’s impromptu midnight ‘insta man ki baat’ did seem to be addressing this same ‘terrorists’ B-team’, this imagined assembly of young listeners at midnight, as his fantasy ‘frands’.The only glitch was that the most significant part of the prime minister’s intended night shift audience, that restless knot of young people in Jantar Mantar, would not have received his plea of friendship. They were under an Internet blackout, instituted by the prime minister’s own government. They would have had to walk a distance to download and upload their Instagram messages, and late into the night-shift at Jantar Mantar, no one really bothered.Or, as one friend told me, on her ‘night-shift’ duty at Jantar Mantar, ‘Network nahin aata aur neend bhi nahin aati’ (‘the network doesn’t reach here, and sleep doesn’t come’). So the prime minister’s plea of ‘frandship’ came and went, unheard, without landing where it was intended to land.As always, on those two nights as well, the insomniac prime minister was talking, mainly to himself, to his teleprompter (whose glow was visible in the reflection of his spectacles) and to millions of his minions. But minions can never be friends, and teleprompters have no feelings. The geriatric beast was alone, and sorely unloved, in his cage beside that cul-de-sac on Lok Kalyan Marg. And the young ones didn’t care anymore.Within two days of the first midnight missive, around 2:30 pm in the afternoon of Sunday, July 25, his colleague, the education minister, published his overdue resignation letter. Curiously, this letter too (at least the version that was made public), which ought to have been addressed (as is normally the case) to the prime minister or the president, turned out to have been addressed, again, to ‘my young friends’.The letter, coming as it did in the wake of extraordinary police violence unleashed on students on July 20 to safeguard the adhesion of the education minister’s posterior to his chair, demanded friendship but did not offer any apology. It conceded no wrongdoing on the part of the education ministry.For a resignation letter, it indulged in an extraordinary amount of self-congratulation for having conducted the normal exercise of a ‘re-test’. It said not a word abut the young people who had felt compelled to die by suicide, or those who had been beaten, tear-gassed, shot at with pellet guns, and made subject to illegal detention and harassment during and after the Cockroach Janta Party-led march to parliament.The only reason the minister offered for resigning was contained in the tenth paragraph of a 12-paragraph long letter. He wrote:“Considering the situation at Jantar Mantar and across the country—with the aim of preventing anti-national forces from exploiting it, preserving national unity, ensuring that not a single Indian student’s future gets entangled in legal complexities, and allowing our children to devote their time to studies and focus on building their careers—I have submitted my resignation to the Honorable Prime Minister.”I am not aware that the prevention of “anti-national forces” was part of the remit of the education ministry. I am also not aware as to how an education minister’s resignation can prevent said “anti-national forces” from doing anything they have in mind.The letter offered no explanation for a very sorry state of affairs, but still invoked ‘friendship’ with the very people who were at the receiving end of that sorry state of affairs. It was insulting, to say the least.It was as if suddenly, two creepy WhatsApp uncles, given to berating young people for what they do or do not do, how they dress, what they think etc, had decided to launch the ‘will you be friends with me’ missive-missile. The first two missive-missiles (from the Pradhan Mantri) were as welcome as expired tear-gas canisters, while the third (from Mantri, Pradhan) led to jubilation. There was ululation, there was dancing.But there always has been dancing.Tonight, on the intervening night between July 25 and 26, even as I am writing this, after the resignation, I saw a video posted by Neha Bora, president of the All India Students Association (AISA), the student front of the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (Liberation), one of the firmest and most intelligent figures to emerge from this entire month-long agitation at Jantar Mantar. She and her comrades were dancing, ecstatic in victory.That Neha and her friends have that kind of energy after 22 days of a hunger strike makes me trust them. They are here for the long haul. They have the stamina, the courage and the grace to lead a political struggle, and to dance. That is the kind of politics we need.On the night after the tremendous orgy of violence orchestrated by the Delhi police and the Central Reserve Police Force’s Rapid Action Force (RAF) during the aborted march on parliament on July 20, when traumatised protesters injured by tear gas, pellet guns, clubs with nails in them and the vicious thud of batons landing on fragile bodies were dealing with their injuries, the police and the RAF moved swiftly into protest site and dismantled the stage.I watched the video of assembled protesters, the remnants of the day’s march, clapping as they saw the blue uniformed RAF contingent march in. The rhythm of that sardonic applause was steady, unstoppable. I could recognise it from the thump-thump beat of the songs that the young people danced to, in the days preceding the 20th, and the nights that were to come after.That night, despite the heavy police presence, the stage was rebuilt, the precarious infrastructure of tables, chairs, mattresses and bodies, reassembled. The protest was unbowed. The night-shift at Jantar Mantar, continued.A young man I know, a physicist from Guwahati in Delhi to do his research, who spends time with his friends amongst the Students Federation of India (SFI) activists at the protest site, likes to take up a position astride a tall tree branch above the Jantar Mantar protest site at night.He tells me that it gives him the best view. He has seen the site come live, with lights flickering on phones like the glow of fireflies, from high above. Some of them are using the light from their phones to read. He tells me it is one of the most comforting and beautiful experiences to see people rest, and stir, and talk, and be silent, in knots of friends, in couples, in solitary repose – from far above his perch on the tree.I imagine his perspective, and it is a perspective of light and shadow, of rest and restlessness, and of the beautiful living force of dissent that is here to stay, to dance, to rest, regardless of how long this sit-in has lasted, and how long the sit-ins to come, will last.Ever since the protest sit-in at Jantar Mantar began on June 20, in the periods before and after the hunger strike, I have been a curious and sympathetic visitor at the site. Mingling, eavesdropping, listening to what is said on stage and what is said offstage, having snatches of conversation, drinking tea. I have been there in daytime, in the evenings and at night.At times the hours after sunset felt fallow but were still strangely restful and calming. At other times, there were moments of turbulent energy. At times there was a hint of nervousness in the air, and at some other times the space was suffused with a quiet confidence.I learnt, over days, to prefer the evenings and nights, over the mornings and afternoons. When the sun was up and about, politicians and luminaries graced the stage, and said all the things that needed to be said, and I was grateful that they were there. It mattered that they came, expressed their solidarity, took selfies with the protestors and left, and that they came and went with modesty, and in good cheer.But I could not help preferring the looser, less formal time after sundown, when the night-shift began, when no one important came calling, when nothing made the headlines. This was the time when the ordinary citizens of Delhi, working people on their way home from work, college students and school students with backpacks, mothers and aunties, and interested onlookers started arriving.Like a gathering of all kinds of species drawn to a watering hole in a forest. They came to just be there, to rest a while in the presence of strangers, and of strangers who became friends, to quench their thirst for democracy and solidarity. I wonder how many love stories began on these evenings, or how many parents had the conversations that they had wanted to have for years with their children.I marvelled at the extraordinary creativity, humour and good cheer of the young people around me. There were so many smiles, even on the days when there was reason for despair, and there were many reasons for despair. There still are. But the smiles haven’t gone away either.Inside the cordoned off section (which one entered, especially recently, after spending a long time in serpentine queues until one passed through a non-functioning metal detector that stands in for a gate) everything was civil, cordial, family-friendly. There was a library, a medical desk, an art corner where you could help make posters, portable toilets, food and water disbursal stations, sanitary pads for those who needed them (and what a phenomenal difference it made that the protesters thought of something as basic as feminine hygiene).And there were the little tents of different student organisations, the SFI’s Kranti Corner, a Disha Tent, an All India Students Federation desk, a Krantikari Yuva Sangathan kiosk, and a large AISA dormitory under a tarpaulin canopy where the AISA hunger strikers rested.Outside this section, especially in the nights after the attack of July 20, things were a touch wilder. The slogans were much more risque, there were savage, and necessarily savage, attacks and jokes about the prime minister, the posters and memes had much more bite.Photo: PTI/Kamal Kishore.This is where the skirmishes with the police that happened every once in a while, took place. This is where ‘Sanghi’ interlopers were tackled before they could do any real damage, even though every once in a while, they threatened to. This was the anarchic frontier of the protest, slightly different in intonation from its civil centre. And I did not mind that difference at all.This is where the most vigorous dancing to tracks from portable speakers occurred. This is where young women, in particular, challenged the patriarchal diktat to be sedate and subdued. So much so that a personage as notable as Shri Pinky Chaudhary of the Hindu Raksha Dal, ordinarily given to genocidal outbursts, had to make a reel all of his own to say that his Sanatani sensibilities simply could not take the ‘ashleelata’, the obscenity, of the young women at Jantar Mantar, and that is why he would be coming to the protest site with his cronies, to shut the whole thing down.He never came. It remains interesting to note, in passing, that the first target of a frustrated fascist man is always and forever a free-spirited woman.This unruly, liminal borderland of the protest is where the smartass met the badass, where young women took turns to be ‘bad girls’. There was no lamentation here, only laughter. The figureheads of the regime were made fun of in a variety of refreshingly unprintable ways, and the balloons of their pomp and circumstances were punctured, repeatedly, by memes and jibes that had a projectile force that only the very young of our times can muster.This is where I sensed that the prevailing order may not be able to survive the contemptuous onslaught of the young. If the solid, civic centre of the protest held out a promise of substance, it was at the wild edge that I could sense the possibility of the re-imagination of democracy at its most flourishingly beautiful. This is where rage met and coupled with laughter to birth hope.It was here, on a portable speaker that I first heard a track that has refused to leave the space between my ears. Its theming, utterly danceable beat, was hypnotic, and slightly incendiary. I saw young bodies give themselves over to it with joy. Women were dancing with women, and with men, and with people who refused to be either, or neither. There was an immense sensuality in the moment of the dancing, of the bump and the grind and of eyes locking on to eyes with allure and anger and laughter and beauty.This was on an evening after the violence of the 20th, and the song knew what had happened that day. Later, I found the track, created by a duo who styled themselves fetchingly as ‘Couple Comrade’, remixed to a mesmerising edit of snippets of videos from the protest, posters and memes, haunting my timeline, to the extent that I had to find its source on YouTube. There it sits, waiting to be shared and danced to, again and again.The song’s lyrics said, simply:Police wale babu, oh oh oh mujhe danda laga doDanda laga doDil se jo awaaz uthi, us ko kaise daba do(Policeman sir, oh oh ohThwack me with your stick, with your stickThe voice that rises from my heart, how will you silence it?)Police wale babu, mujhe danda laga doBeat ko aur badha doDJ volume chadha do(Policeman sir, thwack me with your stick, pump up the beat, DJ jack up the volume)Come on Guys!Hands in the Air!Jantar Mantar 2:00 amFreedom is EverywhereDJ wale BabuProtest wala gana laga doSaari raat hum gayengeSach ka beat baja do(DJ sir, put on that protest songWe will sing it all night,Play the beat of truth)Na ham rukne waleNa ham jhukne waleMoonlight ke nicheHam hi hain awaaz uthane wale(We’re not gonna stop,We’re not gonna bendUnder the moonlightWe will raise our voices)Police wale BabuPhoto bhi le loKal history meinCaption bhi de do(Policeman sir, take my photoAnd tomorrow write a caption for my history)Dhol bhi bajegaBase bhi baggerJis gali mein dar thaWahi pe dance bhi hoga(Drums will be beaten,Base will ring outWe will dance on those streets of fear)Azadi, AzadiCrowd bole AzadiEk sur, Ek taalSaari Raa-aat, Azad(Freedom, FreedomThe crowd says ‘Freedom’One music, one rhythmFreedom all night)Midnight ka scene haiDil ful green haiBarricade ke us paar bhiHope ki machine hai(Its the midnight scene,The heart is greenAcross the barricadeLies the Hope Machine)You can’t stop a rhythmYou can’t stop a songJitni lambi raat yogiUtni loud hongi ham(The longer the night getsThe louder we will be)Police wale babuSmile bhi dikha doUniform ke peachInsaan ko jaga do(Policeman SirGive us a SmileShow us the Human Being you areUnder that Uniform)Whistle bajaoBeat giraoHam bhi nachengeTum bhi muskurao(Blow a whistle, drop a beatWe will dance, you will smile)DJ wale babuEk aur bass gira doJantar Mantar ke raat koLegend bana do(DJ sir, drop a bass lineTurn the Jantar Mantar night into a legend)Police wale babuDanda laga doDil ki awaz, kaise daba do ?(Policeman sirThwack me with your stickThe voice of the heart, how will you silence ?)Police wale babuDJ volume badha doAaj ke yeh raat haiYaadon mein basa do(Policeman sir,DJ pump up the volumeTonight is the nightMake it live in memory)Azadi, AzadiSab milkar gao jiAwaz se Awaz MilanSapnon ko jagao ji(Freedom, FreedomEveryone must singJoin voices, awaken dreams)Midnight scene, moonlit voices, the pain of a baton landing on skin, the experience of being bruised but not battered, surveillance cameras, the azadi chant, the dream of freedom, hope across the barricades, the desire to smile, a song in unison – all this, to me represented the enormous and irrepressible significance of the night shift at Jantar Mantar in one immensely danceable track.I could not, and still cannot, shake off the easy and soft camaraderie between young men, women and non-binary people, between able and some disabled bodies. This is what solidarity feels like from the inside, when bodies and spirits are transported by a dance beat to new destinations. Or when they rest, exhausted, but not dispirited, after a hard day of politics.The protesters are in close physical proximity, they dance, chant slogans, fall asleep, tired, under the night sky, together, as one assembly of bodies. And yet, no one has till now complained of any molestation, any discrimination, any sexual or other kind of harassment.If women have complained of sexual harassment, it is only at the hands of policemen, and we have seen the videos where this has happened. Otherwise, young men and women and transgender, openly queer people, share tasks, make statements from the stage. You can see all kinds of attire, from hoodies to hijabs to tank tops to kurtas – the vast spectrum of self-presentation that young people have developed and articulate with grace and beauty.Three images stand out for me from these nights and days: one from Mumbai (seen on my social media feed) and another, and another, from Delhi.First, a young woman in a hoodie in Mumbai, stopping a police van in the middle of the street during one of the protests with the force of her body. She has turned a moment of her presence into something as iconic as the man who stood in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in 1989.All she wanted, she said, was that the people detained in that vehicle, young protesters who were being bused from a protest site to a police station after being detained, be set free.She stood her ground. The protesters were let go. A bus stopped, and a victory was won. We now know this woman’s name, Rhea Ahir, and millions of young people love her already.Second, a young teenager in glasses, stands with her arms outstretched, against a line of young men, protecting them from the raised lathi of a policeman. He is about to make it land on their bodies with all the strength in his arms, and all the might of the state.One can read fear, or worry, in her face. But her quantum of courage, and concern for the young men she probably does not know other than as fellow protesters, is greater than the fear coursing through her nervous system. I don’t know her name, but I can never forget that look on her face, half fearful, half daring the policeman to land his stick on her frail body. It’s like the words of the song, again, jest meeting defiance, meeting courage – ‘Police wale babu, danda laga do’.Third, a strong young man in a green T Shirt, incidentally, named Bharat, who had travelled all the way from Nagpur to Delhi, is surrounded, on the 20th of July, during the ‘March to Parliament’ by around 15 RAF personnel with batons. They beat him mercilessly. He stands his ground, unflinching, and says to his assailants – ‘Maro sir, aur maro’ (‘Hit me, sir, hit me’).This courage to stand one’s ground, to be what one wants to be, in protest and in consideration of one’s comrades, even if they are strangers, despite every design of a cruel state, is the lesson that the young have taught us all in Jantar Mantar. This is what makes fear evaporate. And the evaporation of the fear of a brutal regime is what signals the beginning of its end.The prime minister and his cabinet may not resign immediately and there may be many struggles to come, but the process of their exit from history has begun. It may take some time to arrive where it needs to arrive, but the journey to that destination has started, and seems unstoppable for now.This protest began due to a legitimate anger against the way exams are conducted, but it has turned into an examination that the youth of India have undertaken of their government, and the regime has failed, completely. We have all witnessed its abject failure.Meanwhile, the young people have tested themselves against their own standards. Some, like Abhijit Dipke, who took to the stage everyday with his restless, matter-of-fact eloquence, or a 12-year-old girl called Nishu, who embodies an instinctive Ambedkarite sensibility, have openly declared themselves to be Dalit and that is taken as normal and natural, because diversity is acknowledged and celebrated but not turned into silos of fractional identity.There are different kinds of political currents, different left, liberal and Ambedkarite tendencies, and many people who are learning new ways of being political on their feet. All of these trends are present and no one is trying to monopolise attention, dominate the stage and the mike, or accumulate power.Strangers are becoming friends. There is a welcoming attitude towards children and parents. Many languages are being spoken, especially many different kinds of English and Hindustani. But I also heard Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali and Assamese.The crowds swelled after July 20. I was there late one evening, almost close to midnight, on July 21. It was as if all of Delhi had come visiting to see if the kids were ok after the battering of the 20th. All of Jantar Mantar Marg, from Janpath to Parliament Street, and right up to Kerala Bhavan, was completely chock a block with people. Getting into the central space took very long, as one inched one’s way in behind a rope.There were crowd ‘marshalls’, ensuring orderly movement, and keeping one hopefully inches away from the possibility of stampede, and most amazingly, there were fan-wielders. Volunteers who fanned you at regular intervals on the way to the entrance, with plastic or paper fans, so that the oppressive humidity of that evening could be punctuated by the welcome relief of some air-circulation.As I walked, slowly, I saw a family of Sikhs, a tall handsome middle-aged father, his stately wife, his graceful daughters, each wielding a broom, sweeping the tarmac. Elsewhere, a young woman with plastic gloves was picking rubbish from the street and putting it away in a large plastic garbage bag. I realised that she was not alone; there were several others like her, silently making their way through the crowd, bag in hand, bending to pick up and put away all kinds of trash. There were kids handing out toffees, a woman in a white coat offering pain-killers to anyone who needed them.There was pain, there was joy, there was anger, there was friendship, and the strange, magical experience of a city infamous for its uncouth surliness learning to be gentle and caring and poised and strong under the able guidance of its young.There was a nice flux and flow between when one is a leader, when one is a volunteer, when one is a comrade, and when one is a friend. I made my way through the dense crowd to one who is all of the above. I found her sitting on a mattress at the AISA hunger-strike dormitory, not far from the main stage.This is Neha, a 29-year-old PhD research scholar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is also the national president of AISA, and was one of the students who completed 22 days on hunger strike to press for the demands articulated by the Cockroach Janta Party at the Jantar Mantar protest site.That night, Neha looks unmistakably frail. But her smile is radiant and powerful, as is the strength of the grip of her handshake.I have known Neha since early 2021. I first met her when she came, with another Neha, to talk to me about how I understood the much misunderstood term ‘love jihad’. I had said that day, almost five years ago, that I could not think of any jihad (which means struggle, not war) better than one undertaken for the sake of love.We talked, as envoys of different generations, about what it means to live, to struggle, to love, to hope, to dream of a better world. I noticed then that Neha does not speak in cliches, not even in the practiced cliches of the Left. That she had the capacity to think every question anew.Later, when I knew her as a part of a group of student volunteers at Ambedkar University in Delhi who were helping co-ordinate the delivery of oxygen cylinders to people with COVID-19 who needed them, I discovered her formidable capacity for organisation and the way she could think on her feet in times of crisis. During the cruel second wave of the pandemic, I can say without hesitation, that she helped save the life of a friend of mine by ensuring, through many phone calls, and by talking to friends of friends of friends, that an oxygen cylinder could reach him in time.Since then, I have known her and seen her mature into a person who lives a politics of freedom, justice and compassion with every fibre of her being. She has the mind of a scholar and the heart of a revolutionary, and the adventurous spirit of a young woman who wants to enjoy every moment of her life. She has a wicked sense of humour, rides a motorcycle and climbs mountains with grace, and is a friend that every one of her friends can rely on, and she makes friends easily, both within, and outside her immediate political circle.I can say without any hesitation that I have learnt as much from her as she may have learnt from me, and we don’t necessarily agree on anything, and that we see disagreement not as a problem, but as an asset that lets us encounter new positions and perspectives.Her dissertation, a work still in progress, is about ritual performance in the mountains of her homeland in Uttarakhand. She is interested in how little gods cross big mountains, she is blessed with an enormous curiosity and a fertile political imagination.Over many conversations with her, on the occasions when she comes to visit, to share tea, to talk, to borrow books, to test out ideas, to talk about politics and about things that are not at all political, I have watched her grow, ripen, acquire complexity and a range of dimensions and many registers of speech and silence.What I have witnessed is a study in contrast to the one-dimensional, cardboard-cut-out, hyper-masculinist representatives of imagined revolutionary vanguards that I have had encounters with at other times. Those ascetic knights of revolution always seemed to me to be flashes in some radical pan, but what I see in Neha and her comrades is the persistent light of a steady flame. I see patience, I see rigour, I see a complete rejection of sectarian narcissism, and I see an imaginative amplitude that has the capacity to change the grammar of politics, at least for some time to come.And the best thing is, Neha is not alone. The one amazing thing that this moment has shown us is that there are thousands of young people like her out there, in this Gen Z that was unfairly labelled as apolitical. They come from all kinds of milieux and backgrounds. Their acquisition of political understanding is as hormonal (and that is a good thing) as it is cerebral, as passionate as it is analytical, as caring as it is strategic, and that it is here to stay.A person like Comrade Neha does not come from nowhere, does not emerge overnight, but is shaped by life, by time, by history. In the background of the Jantar Mantar student protests is a long history of resistance that is coterminous with the BJP’s place in power in Delhi:The protests against the state assaults on university students and the institutional, casteist, murder of Rohith Vemula in 2016 (which brought the ‘student’ as a subject of politics on to the streets), the anti-CAA protests of 2019 and 2020 (another ‘Gen Z’ moment, because it was so overwhelmingly led by young people, especially young women, which made the preamble to the constitution their guiding light and taught as that ‘citizenship’ is a work in progress), the Kisan Movement of 2020 and 2021 (which redefined the question of political stamina and showed us the link between nourishment, food, agriculture and democracy), and the workers’ uprisings in Noida and Manesar earlier this year (that drew attention to the erosion of working-class livelihoods, and the link between dignity and a minimum wage).The Jantar Mantar protests of the last few weeks could not have emerged without this background, and they are indebted to this history. The assault on students by men in uniform in central Delhi of July 20, 2026, was already rehearsed by the assault on students by men in the same uniforms in the Jamia University Library on December 15, 2019.It is this history of resistance, on the questions of citizenship and constitutional rights, food, livelihood, dignity and education that has acted as a bulwark against the regime and its extended underbelly’s political culture of hatred towards minorities of all kinds, lynching, hyper-nationalism, militarist paranoia and a cult of personality.This is what makes Gen Z so angry, this is what makes someone like Neha a conduit and a face of that anger. She is not a heroine, has no desire to be one, and should not be treated as one – she is simply someone who focuses the rage of a generation in the same way that a prism concentrates sunlight. There is a whole constellation of prisms focusing the sunlight out there. Neha is only one crystal amongst many.She and her AISA comrades had already been involved in a protracted campaign against the NEET scandal, but when the phenomenon of the Cockroach Janta Party burst forth into the public imagination, they were quick to realise that this was a moment that they could not let pass. And so, during the past month at Jantar Mantar, we have seen Neha and young people of all kinds of affiliations and organisations grow into beings who are not just being shaped by this time, but are also shaping this time, leaving their trace on history.I also saw a welcome lack of sectarian bickering, and a spirit of solidarity between different organisations representing different legacies of the Left, and the not-so-left. AISA, SFI, AISF, Disha, and the Ambedkarites, as well as the newly minted ‘Cockroaches’, worked in concert, in solidarity and without the egotistic posturing that often bedevils ‘big tent’ politics.Neha during her hunger-strike. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.It is worth noting that this is possible, I think, because young women like Neha from AISA, Aishi from SFI and Naureen from Disha represent a new, dialogic, non-rivalrous style of politics that is worth reflecting on. Together, they embody a new political intelligence and a genuine spirit of camaraderie that I hope will endure.During the Jantar Mantar protest, I never saw Neha and her comrades trying to dominate the stage, or steal the limelight; and yet they emerged, along with Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, as a kind of informal caucus of responsible leadership.I will always remember how they disproved the expelled cockroach spokesman Vijeta Dahiya’s mansplaining insistence that assumed that women could not take leadership roles in political movements because they were pre-occupied with shopping and afraid of trolls. They disarmed Dahiya and his idiocy, not by engaging in unnecessary and time-wasting polemics, but simply by setting an example of what it means to lead from the front, as young people, as women.They were always a presence, managing logistics in the background, making sure that everyone got attention and time. It was Neha that passed the mike and ensured that the young trans people who were being mocked so cruelly by the callous mainstream media could have their say from the main stage at Jantar Mantar. That was a transformative moment in the history of popular movements in India, a moment of unqualified solidarity with queer and trans communities that will be forever remembered as a huge step forward in the inclusive opening of popular democratic spaces.The idiots who postured on social media feeds asking what ‘being trans has to do with education’ could simply never get what that gesture meant and how important it was in terms of redefining how the space of education, and of politics, was being re-imagined in front of their unseeing eyes.Neha remains an example of how to actually practice solidarity, always ensuring, like a good leader should, that the people around her can feel that they are equal to her. During the long nights when she and her comrades strategised, I witnessed her as an avid listener, unafraid of differences, always letting Anjali, Danish, Saurabh and Ameen – her co-denizens in the AISA open-air hunger strike dormitory – weigh in and have their say. These young people were learning democracy, by the minute, and Neha was learning with them.Whenever Neha spoke from the Jantar Mantar stage, or in a media interview, or in a reel, she did so with precision and passion, every word carefully weighed for meaning and impact. When questions were asked about the raising of ‘Azadi’ slogans at Jantar Mantar, Neha responded calmly, asking whether or not it was natural for young people to demand freedom from all the oppressions that surrounded them.Hours after the moment when Pradhan, maligned the protestors at Jantar Mantar as the ‘B-team of terrorists’, Neha made a reel, in which she walked from one knot of protesters at Jantar Mantar to another, smiling, saying: “Here is a bunch of terrorists quietly reading,” and “Here is a terrorist playing a guitar,” and “Here are some sleeping terrorists, they are tired”, and “Oh here are some terrorists eating snacks.”Her stroll through the protest site that evening did more than anything could have done to puncture the obscene balloon of Pradhan’s arrogance and malice. And she did it so gently, and with such good cheer.There is ferocity in the hatred and excoriating anger that Neha, like so many other young people at the protest, articulates unhesitatingly against the regime. This was evident when she spoke after the police brutality of the 20th, detailing all the injuries that an incompetent police apparatus had inflicted on peaceful, non-violent protestors.But there is also an extraordinary tenderness in the way in which she relates to the people around her. That combination of fierce strength and gentle caring is a new model of being and political practice that every young person dreaming of revolution in this country can make their own.On the night after Pradhan’s resignation, she made a passionate, deeply felt declaration. The atmosphere around her was electric as she said –“This victory is necessary because it can give energy to all the peoples movements. This victory is necessary because it will help us snatch back every inch of democracy from this dictatorship, with each or our bodies, with all our passion. This victory is necessary because it makes us realise that victory is possible, and that it is possible to win in the face of barbaric fascist order, that this victory is possible through the efforts of you and me, unarmed, innocent students. That victory in this time, is possible, and that is what the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan means.”And then they all went dancing into the deep hours of the night.Speeches, music, dancing, poetry, jokes, the sharing of memories, debate, analysis, chanting, rest and play constitute a diurnal rhythm of the new politics. Day and night constitute different realities. The day was for strategising and statements, the night for rest, recreation and the gentle, embodied, solidarity of sleeping and dreaming bodies. The night is when the Jantar Mantar dogs come to snuggle up to their human friends in sleep. The night is when breathing comes easy.Night after night, Neha and her comrades stayed steadfast, patient, and during the days of the hunger-strike, hungry. But it was night that brought relief from the hectic pace of the day. Sometimes, before falling asleep, Neha told me that she and her friends would talk to each other about what they really wanted to eat – chicken burger, jalebi, mangoes, biryani, roasted chickpeas. They would console each other with dream-like feasts that let them slip gently into sleep. Night let tired, hungry, bodies find respite.This told me that not everything need happen under illuminated conditions. There is space in the shadows, in dreams. Not everything needs to be said aloud, a lot can be communicated in whispers, and even in shared silences. Not everything happens on the stage, a lot happens in knots on the ground, at the margins and on mattresses.People eat together, stay hungry together. There is feasting as well as fasting, langar strike and hunger strike, as there should be, without any moral hierarchy between them. For the fasting, there is always ORS and water, and the awareness of the importance of hydration. There is none of the casteist paranoia about who should be eating what. There is no enforced vegetarianism.Food is quietly being arranged by helpers from gurdwaras and restaurants run by Muslim friends. Medicine and other essential supplies are quietly organised on WhatsApp groups run by volunteers. One of the people arranging food and drinking water, a young man from Ghaziabad called Mohammed Junaid, has had the Uttar Pradesh police harass and detain his family members in Ghaziabad and Meerut, simply because he fed the hungry and quenched thirst. The Uttar Pradesh police knows no shame.I have now seen the video in which he talks about how he, himself, was abducted from outside Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital just days ago by plainclothes policemen of the Delhi police, detained and blindfolded overnight, made to undergo psychological torture, and then taken far away, to the vicinity of Mussoorie in Uttarakhand, and abandoned, in the middle of nowhere.The gross illegality of this conduct truly boggles the mind. I want to understand what gives an officer in the Delhi police, of the IPS, the gall to issue the orders to simply abduct and harass a man simply because he was feeding the hungry and quenching thirst, and primarily because he is identifiably Muslim? What are the decisions in the chain of command that makes this kind of viciousness possible, and who will be held accountable for it?But no amount of police viciousness can dent this dense rainbow coalition, in which nobody’s perfect, nobody is making the claim to be perfect, but everyone is equal and of significance. This sensibility is something we need vitally, especially now. I hope this energy stays and builds and helps us learn another new language of politics and solidarity.Night shifts at Jantar Mantar made a plain truth visible and tangible. The night shifts at Jantar Mantar. Here, I am using the word ‘shifts’ not as a noun for a period, a term, a watch of the night (like ‘day-shift’ and ‘night shift’) but as an intransitive verb, a signifier of alteration, of transformation.In this past month of long days and strange nights, something has shifted. There is a scent of change in the air. Every year in Delhi there comes a time in July when the rains and the humidity spur the blossoming of Mogra, or Jasmine, in the night. Its heady scent is a quiet but strong undernote to the otherwise rancid air that plagues our city through the year. By heralding the advent, and persistence, of rain, the scent of Mogra signals change. It shifts the register in which we access the sensory experience of night time.I wonder if it is possible to think of the night shift at Jantar Mantar through the scent of the strings of the jasmine flower that are sold under the nocturnal glow of so many New Delhi traffic signals. That maybe, like the Mogra blossom, they animate our sense of waiting for the lights to change, as we wait, on buses, cycles, two-wheelers, auto-rickshaws and cars, for a signal, to move.Lazy, half-baked dictatorships and wannabe tyrannies of all kinds always want to stun us into stasis. Gen Z kids, many of whom have spent most of their lives under the grimace and within the audible range of the nasal cadence of Modi, have grown up watching the stupor of their immobilised parents. And then they decided that something needs to give, to shift.The Paper Leaks, which they turned into an occasion for the examination of the chronic leakage of the regime’s sinking ship, are just a means to a larger transformation that accompanies the radicalisation of an entire generation.Perhaps this has something to do with an intersection between the clash of expectations between the desires of the largest youth demographic in the world and a contracting capitalism overseen by a decadent fascist state that knows only how to extract and repress.The question of education is at the vortex of this confrontation. And striated through it is the nexus between paper leaks, coaching classes and a ridiculously standardised and centralised examination protocol that was designed to be vulnerable to corruption.Who can forget the fact that the National Testing Agency, the shadowy public-private partnership that administers the leaky NEET exam, is the brainchild of the former vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, who was a diligent and committed violator of student rights during his tenure? For his devoted service to the regime’s agenda of making the life of young people and students miserable, he was awarded this year with a Padma Shri.Let’s face it, NEET and the NTA are abominations. No student can crack exams like NEET without coaching classes, and coaching classes are the incubators of paper leaks. A surprising number of ties connect the ‘coaching industry’ to the ruling party in many states. The extreme monetisation of education, through coaching, or leaks, is directly connected to the way the BJP handles political influence at the state level. This is education turned into a playground for a kind of predatory crony capitalism.Coaching classes are also an admission of the failure of the education system. If schools were equipped to teach, there would be no need for coaching classes. The failure to provide high-quality and free education paid for by the tax payer to every child and young person is one of the biggest failures of Indian politics and society. That failure has been hugely amplified by the current regime.Coaching classes are expensive. That is what S. Anitha, the first victim of NEET, an excellent student from a working-class Dalit family in Tamil Nadu, who scored well in her school exams but could not afford the coaching classes designed for NEET, who was insulted by the Supreme Court, reminded us about, before taking her own life in desperation. This exclusion is what perpetuates the cruel inequalities of class, caste, gender and language hierarchies at their very foundations.That foundation is the basis on which the RSS and the BJP are trying to build the edifice of fascism, Hindu-style.No ‘Indian Knowledge System’ garbage (which, under the present dispensation, is only a euphemism for the force-feeding of Brahminical values to all students) or ‘Skilling’ (which is only a euphemism for dumbing down) can replace a solid, egalitarian, democratic education system geared towards fostering critical thinking, analytical ability, curiosity, creativity, imagination, compassion and solidarity. The National Education Policy brought in by this regime only amplifies the class and caste biases of previous education policies. It does not replace them.The entire examination system and rote-learning exercise that children and young people aids and abets mental degeneration and suicide. National Crime Record Bureau statistics show that no less than 1,28,918 students died by suicide in the period from 2014 to 2024, that is, since the BJP came to power.The regime has turned the education system into a killing machine and the prime mover of a mental health epidemic amongst the young. At the same time, the government’s own documents (NITI Aayog) show that schools are being shut down every day, and the enrolment in colleges and universities is experiencing a decline.The vast majority of schools and colleges that do remain (and the hostels that go with them) are structured like prisons with outmoded regulations that are designed to humiliate students and repress their autonomy. That is why we don’t produce original thinkers, or world-class mathematicians, or path-breaking scientists anymore. Because all Indian children are taught to do in schools is to repress originality and creativity.And despite all this, state governments like Uttar Pradesh see it fit to actually demolish university infrastructure that exists with bulldozers. Orders have gone out to destroy buildings and academic facilities in the Jauhar University, an institution catering predominantly to students from the minority community, at Rampur. The chief minister of the state seems to have some animus against the university’s founder, who is a politician, but must that be addressed by actually ordering bulldozers to take down buildings where more than 3,000 students are enrolled? This regime clearly hates education.We do not need a ‘reform’ in education. We need revolution. And that will come from this alive generation. That is why Gen Z is where it is today. They have run out of patience.In the last few days and nights, I did not hear so much about Pradhan, except from the stage and the main speakers. The demand for his resignation had become the common sense of the movement, something that was obviously necessary, but also no longer the only binding force that held people together. Something else replaced it. What I could hear on the ground, however, was one name, whispered with cold hatred, laughed away in a meme or screamed out in rage, in contempt, and with a refusal to be polite or respectful in any way. That name was Modi.There was for instance, that infectious incantation of the rhyming doggerel fragment, accompanied by gestures that mimicked the trope of an infant being cradled, that emerged from the SFI’s Kranti Corner at the protest site, but then travelled like a breath of fresh air – everywhere, and it went like this:‘Chappan Inch ka Chhota BandarBal Narendar, Bal NarendarPaper Leak kar gaya bandaBal Narendar, Bal NarendarDekho kaise cchup gaya bandaBal Narendar, Bal Narendar’(‘This little monkey, just fifty six inches tallBaby Narendra, Baby NarendraHe did the Paper LeakBaby Narendra, Baby NarendraLook how he hides nowBaby Narendra, Baby Narendra’)This was one of the gentler, softer and more ‘family-friendly’ chants. Others were far more risque, and risky. It appeared to me that the young women expressing them had experienced the onrush of an overwhelming absence of fear, and that this contagious abandonment of caution was also their test of how willing the community around them could, and would be, to bear witness to their rage. They were listened to, and applauded.This overflowing cauldron of rage was not being channelled by the experienced student activists. Their ‘training’ has disciplined them into not giving space in their vocabulary to ‘salty’ language. The contempt for Modi was audible in curses, and visible in signs and memes, amongst the vast mass of the ‘non-activist’ students and young people, particularly amongst young women.The regime faces the rage, not just of the well-honed political activist, but also of the young person who may have never been to a demonstration or a dharna before in their life. This is their political ‘coming out’ into the world, and this ‘coming out’ is predicated on the very just pillorying of a now almost universally hated figure.This is an inflection point – the ‘Cockroach’ movement, amorphous as it is, has blurred the distinction between the ‘activist’ and the non-activist. And in many senses, it is the unruly non-activist who is taking the initiative in extending the horizon of the imagination of dissent. I find this a very welcome development. It means that a sense of what it means to be political has seeped into the bones of an entire generation.That is why the prime minister looked so haggard and so anxious during his midnight plea for friendship. Because he knows by now that he doesn’t have any sympathy or loyalty anymore amongst the young. So much so that he felt that he could crawl back to some semblance of significance in their consciousness only by offering a pawn sacrifice through the acceptance of Pradhan’s resignation.And what has the resignation altered? Pralhad Joshi, a diehard RSS man, the current minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution, and new and renewable energy, is also now the minister for education. That gives you a sense of the way this regime prioritises the matter of education, by placing it somewhere between biogas plants and ration shops, in the hands of a man who defended the premature release of men convicted of a gang-rape of a Muslim woman during the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.That said, the resignation of Pradhan is not an insignificant victory. Because it means an obstinate government can be made to bend. Moreover, it produced the conditions that can make young people think that they can snatch and safeguard a moment or two of dignity from the arrogance of this regime, or as Neha said in a speech last evening, “because victory shows that victory is possible”.Whether or not this moment represents the beginning of the end of this regime is too early to say. There are many tricks, especially dirty tricks, still remaining in the regime’s sleeve. And it has deep pockets, and a pliant media eager to do its bidding. But the fearlessness of India’s Gen Z has given it a sense of what defeat might taste like to this regime, and once they get that bitter taste, it won’t leave them; it will stick to their throat and to their tongue. That bitterness may provoke the regime to act in all sorts of horrible ways in the coming days.My sense is, the quantum of repression might increase to meet a rising tide of dissent. There may be more arrests for all sorts of arbitrary reasons. Already, there has been a crackdown, selectively, on Muslims, in West Bengal (where the horrible new Goonda Act is being used to put away 11 people who took part in the Kolkata protest, ten of whom just happen to be Muslim), and in Assam, where three Muslim men have been detained simply because they were part of some solidarity actions, and in Bihar, where the leadership of AISA and some CPI (ML-Liberation) have been arrested, and some of their whereabouts are still unknown (later, on Monday evening, the state government said it would release those it detained and arrested).The Cockroach Janta Party has announced that the government agreed to their demand that no punitive action be taken against any protestors, and that all FIRs that have already been registered be rescinded. If that is the case, then it is their responsibility to ensure that the protesters who have been detained in West Bengal, Assam and Bihar be released, immediately, and cases registered against them be withdrawn. Otherwise, this ‘victory’ will ring hollow.I returned from across the river towards west Delhi late last night. As I drove through the city’s dark streets, around the Tolstoy Marg-Janpath intersection, there was one last knot of dancing protestors, now on their way home. Jantar Mantar was like a glacier giving rise to streams, rivulets and rivers of protesters flowing outwards into the city to meet the ocean of everyday life. The lessons learnt during the daydreams and night-shifts of Jantar Mantar were being digested into a million reasons to continue to dissent. Something was turning, something had shifted.The Jantar Mantar that gives the protest site its name is a giant astronomical apparatus made up of many jantars, instruments. These marvellous structures were used a few hundred years ago to tell the nature of cosmic time, to read the heavens for signs and wonders.A night-shift at Jantar Mantar in the late 18th century in Delhi would have been an occasion to make some forecasts and calculations. I set my eyes on the night sky, and like an 18th century astronomer in Delhi, took my bearings, and I thought I saw a sign of change. The auguries seemed to indicate that this regime’s nights are numbered.I remembered the words of Shailendra’s song, ‘Tu Zinda Hai, to Zindagi main Yaqeen Kar’ (‘If you live, believe in life’) that I have heard in so many protests throughout my life, including, most recently, in a video of a protest from the heart of ‘Modi Territory’ in Gujarat in recent days, where a popular Gujarati actor, Jigna Vyas, chanted its words as she was being physically dragged away from a protest site in Ahmedabad.The words were – ‘Yeh din bhi jayenge guzar, guzar gaye hazar din’ (‘these days too will pass, like thousands of days’).No amount of midnight Instagram reels from inside a prime ministerial cavern is going to change that.When I returned to my desk to continue writing this essay on that welcome night of celebration and well-deserved relief as the protest was called off after Pradhan’s resignation, I wished that Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Srishti Gupta, Akriti Chaudhary and Yogesh Meena and countless others (including Dipankar, Dhananjay, Sandeep Saurav, Saba Afreen, Naushad, Divyam and Parvez, and 50 other student activists arrested days ago in Bihar) who languish in prison today for standing up to a cruel regime were free to join us in our celebrations.No one is free, until they are free. This is a pause. To rest, to reflect, to imagine what comes next. The fight is not over. The night is not over. The night shift is not over. Not yet.Shuddhabhrata Sengupta is with the Raqs Collective in New Delhi.