Fourteen years apart, one movement worries me more than the other did
I covered Anna Hazare’s fast at Ramlila Maidan from the first day the tricolour went up to the last night the crowds dispersed, and I thought I had seen every mood a mass movement can wear: hope, theatre, exhaustion, betrayal, hope again. Fourteen years on, I watch this one from a distance, through screens and second-hand accounts, and yet the air feels familiar, fumes of tear gas at Jantar Mantar, and thicker fumes of misinformation everywhere else.
The Gen Z-founded Cockroach Janta Party has been sitting in since June, demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation over exam paper leaks that upended millions of futures. Sonam Wangchuk, fasting in solidarity since June 28, had lost 8.5kg by mid-July, his health worsening by the day, until he was reportedly taken to hospital by force on a Saturday not unlike the ones I once spent watching Anna’s blood pressure readings scroll across news tickers. On Monday, a march toward Parliament ended, as these marches so often do, in a lathi charge and tear gas; at least 118 police personnel were hurt, and roughly 60 protesters injured, by police and hospital accounts. I have seen this scene before. I am trying, as I did then, to find where the silver lining hides inside it.
Anna’s movement, too, had its government-versus-people theatre, its dueling press conferences, its competing hashtags. What strikes me now is how much faster and louder that theatre has become. Every faction, treasury and opposition alike, fights from its own trench, calculating optics, camera angles, viral clips, each move aimed at a scoreboard invisible to the eighteen-year-olds sitting on the road. In 2011, the blame game played out over days in newspaper columns. Today it plays out in minutes, on timelines, and the students underneath it all still just wanted an exam that wasn’t stolen from them. Somewhere between the slogans, once again, they became shields.
Underneath it all, this remains an education crisis before it is a political one. A paper leak is not a glitch; it is a mirror held up to a system that has long rewarded rote memorisation and high-stakes gatekeeping over genuine learning. Reform cannot stop at a minister’s resignation or an activist’s release. It has to reach classrooms, question banks, and the incentives that let leaks happen in the first place.
And somewhere in that Delhi hospital bed, I imagine Wangchuk turning over a harder question than any minister will ask him: how does one lift this fog and drag the conversation back to the actual issue, when the stage built to amplify young voices keeps amplifying something else instead?
Because here is what unsettles the old reporter in me most. From that same stage, some young speakers have slipped into coarse, even abusive language, aimed at ministers, at police, at “the system” broadly. I never heard that register at Ramlila Maidan, even in its angriest hours. Passion is one thing; a democracy watching its next generation curse its own institutions on live camera is another. Courage that matures into public service is a gift; courage that curdles into habitual disrespect is a warning sign, and a few voices this week swung dangerously between the two.
And yet, the silver lining persists, as it always eventually does. After the baton charge, demonstrators returned to Jantar Mantar, undeterred, some visibly more resolved. Every andolan I have watched, from JP’s movement to Anna’s fast to Shaheen Bagh, has minted a handful of leaders whose politics we may not fully share, but whose courage under fire time eventually judges fairly. A few faces from this crowd may, one day, sit in the very Parliament they marched toward, provided they mature into that role rather than merely survive this one.
I keep returning to a single image: a teenager wiping tear gas from her eyes at midnight, refusing to go home, sitting back down on the same worn tarpaulin, choosing her words a little more carefully this time. That, more than any minister’s statement, is what this season deserves to be remembered for. Fourteen years apart, two movements, one hope unchanged: that decency, eventually, prevails.
About The Author
