India is protesting again. But what is it reclaiming?

These are disparate protests, but their convergence is difficult to ignore. What does it mean when questions about examinations, recruitment, admissions and institutional responsibility repeatedly leave the realm of individual grievance and enter the street?

It may be that India is witnessing not simply a resurgence of protest, but a recovery of the public as a democratic space.

From “this happened to me” to “this concerns us”

India has never been without protest. From the mass politics of the freedom movement to the JP movement of the 1970s, farmers’ agitations, environmental campaigns, Dalit mobilisation and the anti-CAA and farmers’ protests of recent years, collective action has repeatedly expanded the boundaries of political participation. The point is then not dissent’s return, but the reassertion of a democratic habit: transforming private grievances into collective claims.

A student who believes an examination has been compromised has a ‘grievance’, while hundreds gathering to ask whether the examination system itself is accountable are making a ‘political’ claim.

That transformation lies at the heart of protest.

Political scientist Subrata K Mitra, writing on Indian democracy and civil society, has argued that organised protest can bring new issues and previously peripheral actors into democratic politics. Mithilesh Kumar Jha, examining the anti-corruption, anti-CAA and farmers’ movements, similarly describes protest sites as temporary forums for democratic deliberation and solidarity. Their significance lies not only in the demands they make, but in the political relationships created while making them.

Voice, not exit

Albert O. Hirschman’s distinction between “exit” and “voice” helps explain what is at stake here. When people lose faith in an institution, they can withdraw from it, or they can stay and demand that it change. ‘Exit’ is disengagement; ‘voice’ is the attempt to make the institution responsive.

This distinction is particularly useful in understanding the recent student protests. These students are not necessarily abandoning the institutions they distrust. They are demanding a say in how those institutions function.

Jantar Mantar illustrates this movement from grievance to voice. After the police crackdown on July 20, the examination protest drew more people, including those who had encountered the confrontation online. The protest continued through the night, with strangers pooling money, bringing food and supplies and sustaining a collective presence. When the agitation eventually ended after the resignation of former Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, protesters left behind thousands of suggestions on education and governance in a feedback box.

The details matter. Strangers who had little reason to know one another began feeding, funding and sustaining a protest around a grievance they had come to see as collective. A question about an examination had become a question about the system administering it.

Students didn’t abandon institutions they distrust.

By demanding accountability from universities, examination bodies and public authorities, they asserted their right to shape how these institutions function. Protest, hence, is democratic participation, not withdrawal.

The internet can gather us. The street makes us a public

The role of digital platforms in this process should not be underestimated. Likes, shares, reposts and comments can turn an obscure grievance into a mass mobilisation within hours. The crackdown at Jantar Mantar itself showed how an encounter on the ground could become a mobilisation point for people watching online.

But they do not entirely reproduce what happens when people appear before one another physically. A protest requires participants to negotiate differences, organise themselves, sustain solidarity and remain visible to those they seek to influence.

This is where Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “space of appearance” becomes useful. For Arendt, politics emerges when people speak and act together in one another’s presence. Such a space is not necessarily a formal institution; it comes into being through collective action and disappears when that action ceases. A street, campus gate, a stadium or protest site can therefore become political when citizens use it to make themselves visible to one another and to power.

The public, then, is not simply a crowd. It is what happens when strangers recognise that their seemingly separate problems have become a common political question — and decide to make that recognition visible.

From ‘me’ to ‘us’: What’s sparking the streets?

Different protests, the same question

The recent protests show how this process can begin with remarkably ordinary institutional questions.

In Ranchi, a recruitment dispute became a wider demand for fairness and accountability. Carrying copies of the Constitution, protesters invoked it not against protest but through it, demanding equal opportunity, due process and institutional accountability. The state eventually agreed to cancel three examinations and consider an investigation into alleged financial irregularities after negotiations with student groups.

At Jauhar University, students framed the demolition order not simply as a dispute involving the institution’s political leadership or a minority discrimination, but as a threat to their education and future. The demolition order was subsequently stayed, while the protest attracted support from political parties, farmer leaders and others.

At IIT Delhi, students confronted an administration in a setting where protests are unusual, demanding accountability after a student’s death and pointing to previous deaths on campus. At Jamia, allegations surrounding spot admissions similarly turned a question of seat allocation into a demand for institutional transparency.

The common thread is therefore not ideology, but accountability.

And perhaps that is what makes these protests interesting. They do not need to look alike, agree on everything, or belong to one political camp to share a democratic instinct: the belief that institutions must answer to the people whose lives they shape.

Who gets to appear in public?

This is where democratic depletion becomes more than a metaphor. Over the years, the space in which citizens could appear as collective political actors was narrowed by increasing the regulation and policing of public assembly and dissent. Protest did not disappear, but the civic space in which private grievances could become collective claims was weakened.

As politics became increasingly seen as mediated solely through elections, parties, courts, television and social media, who gets to participate became an equally consequential question. The growing criticism of institutions that mediate public life, including the media, points to the same anxiety: who gets to speak, who gets heard and who gets to participate?

Distinguishing between civil society and “political society”, Partha Chatterjee argued that in postcolonial democracies such as India, large sections of citizens often encounter the state not primarily through the formal, rights-bearing institutions imagined by liberal civil society, but through collective negotiations and demands made upon state agencies. Political participation can therefore take forms that sit uneasily between formal representation and organised protest. The street becomes one such intermediary space, where citizens negotiate their relationship with power.

Charles Tilly’s “repertoire of contention” places these protests within India’s longer history of collective action. Today’s students are not recreating the JP or farmers’ movements, but drawing on an inherited repertoire of assembly, deliberation, negotiation and dissent.

Protest, in this sense, does not necessarily reject the institutions of democracy; it can expose the distance between constitutional promise and institutional performance.

Not every protest is democratic, but political

That does not make every protest democratic. Crowds can intimidate, movements can exclude, and legitimate grievances can be pursued through illegitimate means. Protest must remain accountable to the constitutional principles it invokes. But that qualification should not obscure what collective action makes possible.

When the examination candidate in Delhi, the job aspirant in Ranchi, the student at Jauhar University, the IIT Delhi community or a student at Jamia moves from “this happened to me” to “this concerns us”, something politically important has occurred.

The demand may succeed or fail. The movement may endure or disappear. What matters is that citizens have entered a shared space in which they can recognise a private grievance as a public question and ask an institution to answer for it.

Hence, this is not the return of protest. Protest never left. It is the return of the citizen as a public actor — someone who refuses to experience a public problem privately.