The ‘Gen Z’ have done something which has been unthinkable for a while in the country. Dharmendra Pradhan maybe the only one who has had to resign from the government, but it’s the whole government that has been sacked by the young cockroaches of this country. The writing on the wall at Jantar Mantar and the protests across the country couldn’t be clearer. Though the official demand remained Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, the echoes of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s resignation reverberated from Delhi to Mumbai to Patna and even Prayagraj. Even Pradhan’s resignation mutated from being just about accountability of the education minister to being symbolic of the bowing down of the political regime itself. Is this the beginning of their end, or will this energy dissipate or get co-opted by the forces trying to maintain status -quo, only time will tell. What this protest has managed to bring about is an opening in the aura of invincibility of this regime. Let’s dwell in this opening for a bit and see what’s that like. While the protests from the very beginning were an expression of cumulated grievances and anger of the youth about their stolen future, things decisively turned after July 20. On that fateful, extraordinary day, young protestors from all over the country stormed the heart of the capital of this nation. While the call was the Cockroach Janata Party’s, the grit was theirs and they made their way like cockroaches, from every crevice possible. At Jantar Mantar, they were greeted with brutal violence by the state. Visuals of this violence, from batons stuck with nails, tear gas shells, pellet guns injuries on the bodies of the protesters became the archive of state of democracy of our nation. Since then, everyday there was anticipation of more violence, state’s next moves for breaking the protest, fuelled by calling in forces from different parts of the country to be deployed at Jantar Mantar, internet shutdowns, closing of shops and restaurants in Connaught Place, mass surveillance, and allegations of conspiracy and foreign funding. We know the playbook which has been and continues to be played over and over again, from Kashmir to Northeast to Bastar to Delhi. Police personnel stop Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) supporters during a protest march, near the Jantar Mantar, at Sansad Marg, in New Delhi, Monday, July 20, 2026. Photo: PTIBut nothing really stuck. The state could not play its usual game. Whatever it threw at the protesters slipped off their bodies. These bodies were not the ones the state could easily vilify and box as ‘urban Naxals’, Muslims, or foreign funded. They were from BJP’s core voting constituencies chanting ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ alongside ‘Inquilaab Zindabad’ and ‘Jai Bhim’. The nation’s conscience which has been lulled with brutalisation of Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and so-called ‘anti-nationals’, could not tolerate the brutalisation of its own children. The widespread public anger and outrage over the violence on their bodies cost this regime heavily. A space of their ownWhile all these factors played a huge role in getting this government to bow down, they also elide the specificity of the politics generated in this moment. Between the demographic advantage of the protesters and the moral outrage over state violence lies something else as well. It’s a political space created and wrenched out from the crevices of violence by the young protesters themselves. Refusing to be fully absorbed and choked by the violence, they managed to create a gap between the state brutality and its obvious injuries. In and through this gap, the protesters created a space for forms of life, deflating the psychic power and hold of the apparatus of state violence. A space of open encounter between various bodies, ideologies, slogans, songs, reels and memes, of contingent solidarities not fully subsumed by any singularity. They did not care for the politically correct language of the protests against the regime which we have gotten so used to over the years. Many, including myself, have lamented the historical amnesia about the huge anti-regime protests of the last decade which the university students led (paying huge prices for that) displayed in the current protest. There seems to be a complete disjunct from political articulation and lexicon of the previous protests and this one, only sutured by some attempts by the Left students’ groups. Paradoxically, this disjunct also enabled the protesters to completely go off script, break the usual choreography of protests which both us and the state have gotten so used to and hence manage to create cracks in the repressive power. The disjunct need not and should not be a permanent condition, but we will do well to acknowledge and learn that perhaps sometimes ‘experience’ itself can become a constraint over the energies and articulations being produced by a new movement. I am not condoning this amnesia and in fact there is a lot to be gained by connecting the present anger with the structural critiques built with our blood and sweat over the years, both against the Congress and the current regime. However, such connections will have to be built not from a space of patronage but a real engagement with the new expressions. Security personnel chase protesters during the ‘Bihar Bandh’ called over the NEET paper leak and police action against protesting students, in Patna, Bihar, Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo: PTI.Though these protesters have been subsumed under the operative term ‘Gen Z’, we do need to make distinctions between them as well. This might be a very crude categorisation, but these are the most apparent divisions I have been able to notice through consuming eight hours of protest content every day. There seem to be broadly two sections of the young protesters. There were the working-class youth who flooded the protests in Jantar Mantar and various other cities. For me, they are symbolised by the images and videos of the protesters who refused to move when being lathi charged. Instead, they asked the police to keep beating them, not as a pacifist gesture, but one which renders visible how their lives are already marked by deep structural violence, how the lathis of the police pale in front of the bruises they already carry. Or in the Reels in front of tear gas shells declaring that it is nothing compared to the poisonous gas they inhale every day in their Jamna Par neighbourhoods, reminding us of the ordinariness of the violence which seems extraordinary to some. They turned the water cannons into a rain dance party and rode away on the barricades of the police. There were the youths from the sections of the middle class, hooked to their phones, obsessed with turning everything into content. That’s what they did to every act of police violence and repression. Everything turned into an Instagram Reel trend – from “GRWM (‘get ready with me,’ even I didn’t know the abbreviation till yesterday) to get beaten up by Delhi Police” – to turning the lathi charge into a fitness exercise, to endless mockery of the police and the state machinery, every allegation thrown on them became a reel or a meme. Even the prime minister’s midnight friendship attempt was tick-tack-toed by them. They zoomed into his eyes and found the teleprompter. I am not arguing that this is the most revolutionary strategy forever fixed now, but the point is to keep moving out of the limits and scripts we sometimes set ourselves in. Without flattening the differences, together they created a protesting body which not only got violated and brutalised, but a body which also became irreverent to it. They cared for each other and managed to build a community which felt safe amidst so much violence. They created an ecosystem of friendship, care and joy, taking upon themselves the responsibility of keeping the protest space running. They became volunteers who distributed food, medicines, water, even offering the much-needed air amidst Delhi’s sweltering heat by literally fanning each other. To not inhabit this space, alongside them and see things from there, risks folding these forms of life into state’s violence and the compromises of the CJP leadership. What enabled this togetherness is perhaps the reproductive rift both are inhabiting, albeit very differently. As everything on earth gets squeezed more and more by capital for its own survival, the means through which people reproduce their lives, like wages, natural resources, healthcare, education, everything is getting squeezed and destroyed. Imagining a future in the world of nowWe are in a moment marked by the simultaneous breakdown of the economic and social and the environmental infrastructures of life for the majority of population in the world. Ecosystems are being shattered, every season is a season of floods, droughts and fires simultaneously. Along with rampant inequality, repeated economic recessions, forms of work are being ever more extractivist and precarious. The feeling of being choked, of no way out, is seeping into the bones of the majority of the working and even middle classes world over. What is being choked is not just the present, everyday life, but the future or any imagination of it. Amidst this, education holds a significance for not just everyday reproduction but for aspirations and visions of a future, with a promise of mobility from one’s current state and situation in life. Especially in India, it is seen as a vehicle of upwards mobility, condensing aspirations of a better life, a different future. To have that choked hits a nerve which has a very powerful symbolic value for the middle classes and lower middle classes in India. Whereas for the working class, this denial of future and upward mobility has been embedded since long. It can be and has been debilitating and immobilising for the people whose future has been snatched away. But here, this very shared condition provoked and produced a kind of mobility and irreverence in the young protesters, who in the proverbial sense have nothing to lose. When all hopes are shattered by the system, it also loses its hold on people. As it is these very hopes that give the system its legitimacy and also keep us attached to the forms of life which sustain the very system we think we are fighting against. I am not saying we are at that point fully, where everyone, even among the protesters is done with the system. But we did see a glimpse of it and what power it holds. Injured protesters who were hurt by security personnel on Monday, at Jantar Mantar during an ongoing demonstration over the NEET issue, in New Delhi, Wednesday, July 22, 2026. Photo: PTI.The fight is far from over. Apart from the other larger fights towards strengthening of democracy, there are things to be done urgently in the immediate context of this movement itself. It is heartening to see continued demonstrations across the cities demanding accountability for police violence on the protesters, but there must be a fight against police detentions and arrests of students. The state has detained protesters – although now there are claims of withdrawing FIRs – and as usual it is the Muslim and working-class bodies which are and will be further targeted. There has been news of firing on protesters and widespread detentions in Bihar. Muslim neighbourhoods in Delhi are under extra surveillance while the police have been creating their database of ‘anti-social’ elements by randomly picking up students near Jamia Milia Islamia University. Mohammed Junaid, whose crime is that he was helping with food arrangements for the protesters at Jantar Mantar has been harassed by the police by detaining his family members in UP. Muslim lawyers and students have been arrested in Assam and West Bengal. Assam has vouched for the quashing of its FIRs, though there is no word from Bengal yet. The community of care established at Jantar Mantar must extend to all these people, otherwise the regime still wins. The fight against this regime cannot be fought and won without challenging its infrastructure of hate and violence, as that is the crux which sustains it. Natasha Narwal is a feminist activist based in Delhi and Haryana.