A fifteen-year-old girl sits before her phone camera and records an apology to the prime minister for the abusive language she used during the student protests following the police action at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. It is an unusual image. A protest begins with a grievance. It should end with the state answering for its actions. Increasingly, it ends with protesters answering for themselves. Prime minister Narendra Modi responded through a series of Instagram reels, describing the language directed at him and his late mother as a “cultural shock”. The PM urged the society to guide such young people rather than condemn them. A protest over education and allegations of police violence has become a debate about the protesters themselves.The sequence has become one of the most effective political scripts of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The first move is to classify the protester. In his Instagram reels, the prime minister described the students as “misguided youth”. Soon afterwards, social media accounts such as Bharat with RSS followed; asking if those gathered at Jantar Mantar were really students, or anti-social elements masquerading as protesters. Their civility, legitimacy and even identity has come under scrutiny. The protest had not changed, people protesting it had. Before their demands could be addressed, they first had to be identified.When protesters first have to establish their are genuinenessDuring the farmers’ movement, the distinction was named. Modi separated the andolankari from the “andolanjeevi” – the legitimate protester from the parasitic one. The other described those who, in the PM’s telling, had turned protest into a profession by attaching themselves to every agitation. The distinction made legitimacy part of the debate itself. Before the government defended the farm laws, the farmers first had to establish that they were genuine protesters.The protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) took the pattern a step further. There is an irony here that would have been amusing had it not been so politically consequential. A movement that sought to debate the meaning of citizenship gradually found itself defending its own. Somewhere between the Constitution and the television studio, the question quietly changed. Instead of asking whether the law was constitutionally defensible, public attention increasingly turned to the people opposing it. Modi’s remark that those indulging in violence could be recognised “by their clothes” crystallised that shift. The constitutional arguments against the Act did not disappear. They simply had to compete with another question: who exactly was claiming the Constitution’s protection?The Constitution begins with a simple premise: citizens possess rights because they are citizens. The anti-CAA movement increasingly confronted a different proposition. Before constitutional arguments could be heard, the identities of those advancing them acquired political significance.The script does not stop at identity. It also questions political agency. Democratic protest assumes that citizens act because they choose to. Allegations of funding, hidden organisers or political handlers reverse that assumption. During the anti-CAA movement, the women of Shaheen Bagh were repeatedly portrayed as paid, funded or mobilised by hidden actors. BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya circulated a video alleging that women were being paid to participate, a claim later challenged by the protesters and debunked by independent fact-checkers. The allegation relocated the debate from the protest to its supposed authors. Citizens asserting constitutional rights became instruments of someone else’s politics.If the farmers had to prove they were genuine protesters and the women of Shaheen Bagh had to prove they were acting on their own, the wrestlers confronted a different demand altogether. Their patriotism was already on record. It was their loyalty that was now on trial.India’s Olympic wrestlers had spent years embodying the citizenship every government celebrates. They won medals draped in the tricolour, stood through the national anthem and became symbols of national pride. When several of those same women accused BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment, the conversation shifted once again. Their medals did not disappear. They simply stopped carrying political weight. Brij Bhushan repeatedly dismissed the protest as a conspiracy orchestrated by “one family”, “one akhada” and opposition parties rather than by the wrestlers themselves.The contradiction is revealing. Representing the nation had made them exemplary citizens. Confronting the BJP government transformed that citizenship into something that once again required explanation.Democratic politics has rarely been a polite enterprise, and Indian public life has never lacked invective. Personal insults have travelled from election rallies to Parliament itself. Sonia Gandhi has, over the years, been described as a “Jersey cow“, “Congress ki vidhwa” and subjected to a range of deeply gendered slurs. None of those moments produced a national conversation about India’s “cultural shock”. Profanity alone cannot explain why this episode acquired such significance.The answer perhaps lies in a deeper idea of citizen-making. For over a century, the Sangh has understood politics as a project of vyakti nirman – the making of the ideal individual. Politics, in this imagination, does not begin in Parliament. It begins in the family, the neighbourhood and the shakha, where discipline, service and sanskar are cultivated long before they enter electoral politics. Citizenship is not simply a constitutional status but a moral identity that must be continually performed.The BJP appears to have added a few unwritten Fundamental DutiesWomen occupy a distinctive place within this imagination. Political theorist Paola Bacchetta points to a revealing distinction. Men join the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Women join the Rashtra Sevika Samiti. The absence of swayam – the self – captures an older idea of political belonging. Women are imagined first through family and nation before they are imagined as autonomous political subjects. Read through this lens, the PM’s invocation of a “cultural shock” begins to sound less like the language of constitutional disagreement than the language of sanskar.The Indian Constitution does imagine an ideal citizen – one who upholds the Constitution, promotes harmony, develops scientific temper, protects public property and safeguards the country’s composite culture. They express the Republic’s civic aspirations. They do not establish a moral test that citizens must pass before their constitutional rights become meaningful.The politics traced across these protests suggests a different understanding of citizenship. In the BJP’s political imagination, the citizen is repeatedly asked to establish something more: the farmers their authenticity, anti-CAA protesters their belonging, the women of Shaheen Bagh their agency, and the wrestlers their loyalty.Apart from the eleven Fundamental Duties, the BJP appears to have added a few unwritten ones. Be genuine, belong. protest for the right reasons. remain loyal. And, as a fifteen-year-old girl discovered, mind your language while doing it. Perhaps that is where the political meaning of her apology lies. When citizens must establish their character before their claims acquire legitimacy, the burden of democracy begins to travel in the wrong direction. The state asks fewer questions of itself, while citizens are left answering for who they are.Anurakti Vajpeyi is an independent journalist and Co-founder of Let’s Mike, a digital media platform covering politics, society and public affairs. She is also pursuing a Master’s in Political Science at the University of Delhi.