For much of the last decade, a recognisable feature of the educated, middle-class spaces I inhabit was the distance between what people said privately and publicly. Among trusted friends, criticism of the government was ordinary and often detailed. Publicly, many of the same people carefully hedged their words or remained silent. The gap became so normalised that it simply appeared to be how things were. The frustration was always present; what requires explanation is how it could remain private for so long without acquiring a public form. That matters because something in the conditions sustaining this silence appears to be changing.Coercion is part of the explanation. The arrests of journalists and activists, pressure on institutions and the use of expansive laws against critics helped mark the boundaries of public speech. Yet coercion alone cannot keep a population quiet. Much of the work is done by the belief that criticism is risky and pointless: that power is too consolidated and individual action too inconsequential to matter. Once widespread, this belief reproduces itself. People act publicly as though they accept what they privately reject. Others interpret their silence as acceptance, and each person imagines that the dissatisfaction is perhaps theirs alone. A grievance can be widely shared and still remain politically invisible.Also read: Indian Police and its Spectacular Failure at Policing ProtestsThe problem, then, is not that people fail to understand what they themselves believe. It lies in how they read one another. People act not only on their own convictions but also on their expectations of what others think, what they will tolerate and what they are likely to do. When everyone expects others to remain silent, silence becomes self-reinforcing even when dissatisfaction is widely shared. People may recognise the problem perfectly well and still not know that others share what they feel, that the quiet surrounding them is not agreement, or that speaking publicly may not mean speaking alone.In India, this uncertainty acquired a particular texture. For most people in professional spaces, the immediate fear was rarely arrest. The risks were more diffuse: professional vulnerability, being associated with the wrong position, social-media campaigns turning an ordinary comment into organised outrage, or being marked as outside the legitimate national community. The costs were real, but also difficult to estimate. That unpredictability mattered. When people cannot tell whether a comment will pass unnoticed or become professionally and socially consequential, silence becomes the safer calculation. Each person’s caution then becomes evidence for someone else’s.The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s political dominance was reinforced by this atmosphere, alongside its electoral and organisational strength. Elections are won by mobilising voters, but political atmospheres are sustained by shaping what people believe others will tolerate. For a long period, the calculation that public criticism would achieve little was not entirely unreasonable. The protests of recent months have begun to interrupt this logic. The movement that adopted the deliberately irreverent name Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began with anger over examination-paper leaks, unemployment and institutional failure. It later challenged the Election Commission over revisions to electoral rolls. The commission has rejected allegations of partisan conduct, yet the protests have continued despite detentions and restrictions.People hold Indian tricolours as they raise slogans outside an entry gate of Rajiv chowk metro station, ahead of Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) ‘Lehra Do Tiranga’ march at Connaught Place’s Central Park, in New Delhi on October 16, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.What has changed may appear elementary: enough people have begun to believe that others will also come. Before joining a demonstration or making a public statement, people consider the justice of the cause, but also whether their participation will register and whether the risk will have to be borne alone. A protest changes this calculation by making the willingness of others visible. It reveals that a grievance is shared and that some risks will be borne together. Every person who arrives alters the assessment of someone still deciding whether to participate. Protest movements can therefore grow in ways the original grievance alone cannot explain.Earlier demonstrations over examination irregularities drew large numbers of young people and compelled political parties to respond. The BJP reportedly recognised gaps in its engagement with the young and initiated a fresh youth-outreach effort. That response becomes evidence: it tells participants that their pressure entered the calculations of those in authority. Collective efficacy begins with this change in expectation. It is not simply the knowledge that others share a grievance, but the shared confidence that acting together can produce an effect. Victory need not appear guaranteed. There only has to be enough confidence that participation is not futile, and that an individual effort can acquire consequence when joined with others.The present moment therefore involves more than increased discontent. What seems to be developing is a conviction that collective pressure can register. In many academic and professional spaces I inhabit, people who were considerably more careful two or three years ago are now willing to speak more openly. The circulation of humour, satire and memes has been important to this shift. Humour can say what ordinary political language has become too cautious to express, while testing whether others recognise the same contradiction. People share a joke, ignore it or object to it; each response reveals something about the social world around them. A widely circulated joke can disclose the existence of a public before that public has found an organised form.This is also why spaces for dialogue remain critical. The erosion of community and of other collective foundations of social life has left people increasingly alone with their anxieties and political frustrations. Dialogue does not necessarily produce agreement, nor does every conversation lead to action. It does, however, make shared unease visible and reveal that an apparently private response has a social basis. When frustration has accumulated over time, that recognition can travel through conversations, images, humour and social media, and sometimes acquire a collective form with remarkable speed.Also read: Demanding Regime Change is Democratic AssertionIt would be premature to romanticise this development. Collective efficacy is politically neutral: democratic movements can develop it, but so can majoritarian mobilisations. The capacity to act together tells us little about the legitimacy of the objective or the political community being created. Collective action must still be judged by how it treats disagreement and distributes voice and risk. There is also a distance between believing that collective action can work and creating the structures through which it can endure. Organisation, legal support and institutional memory do not emerge automatically from a successful demonstration. A moment of courage may open political space, but it cannot by itself keep that space open.People hold tricolour flags during a protest against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, in Hyderabad on October 24, 2026. Photo: PTI.The relationship with established political parties will be difficult. Political support can provide protection and access, but it can also absorb a movement whose credibility derives from its distance from established politics. Analysts have warned that students’ concerns and leadership could be displaced as parties compete to associate themselves with the mobilisation. A movement may gain visibility while losing the social foundation that made it meaningful. The more difficult work begins after the demonstration. Shared confidence must be anchored in relationships, institutions and practices that enable people to act together after the original anger has subsided. Without such anchors, collective efficacy remains episodic. With them, it can begin to repair the weakened foundations of collective life.Something has nevertheless shifted. The assumption that public dissent is necessarily futile is weakening. It was sustained through coercion, but also through a social imagination in which many disagreed privately while each believed they were largely alone. Protest, dialogue and shared humour can interrupt that imagination by making the private publicly visible. The shift underway is not simply from political support to opposition; that movement will be slower and uneven. What appears to be changing is more basic: the sense that dissent must remain private, isolated and inconsequential. Whether this becomes durable will depend on what people build from here, but it begins with the discovery that one is not, as it turned out, alone.Soumyajit Bhar is a senior assistant professor at BML Munjal University and directs its Community Transitions Research Centre. His work examines sustainability, consumption, aspiration and collective action.