If the students’ movement is important for the light it throws on others and the silences it breaks long after its full-throated voice has faded — if “Gen Z” is not merely shorthand for a new player of the old game — the question is: What has it made more visible, what looks clearer after Jantar Mantar, even if just a bit? From this vantage point, take a look at the BJP and Congress, the ruling party and its main Opposition, as they face the people, and as they go about their inner lives.
The BJP is in its third term at the Centre, staleness is creeping in. There is restlessness, even among the believers. A journey through poll-bound Uttar Pradesh in June, just as the Jantar Mantar agitation was taking off in Delhi, turned up signposts of a sputtering Yogi-Modi double engine, and of the paper leaks issue gathering other discontents around it.
The issues are not new — price rise and corruption, education and jobs. But a faraway war has given the first a sharper edge, and the students’ upsurge frames the last two more starkly. Education and jobs present a twin challenge that defies the poll-eve quick-fix. On education, the BJP’s choices over 12 years are returning to haunt — despite the boasts of the National Education Policy, it has focused, to the exclusion of all else, on conquering institutions and advancing ideological projects.
Voices can also now be heard against the pall of fear that has made speaking up against the government costly, and the wielding of “bulldozer justice” by BJP state governments against a voiceless minority, copying the template set in UP. Add to that the “chanda chori” controversy at the Ram temple in Ayodhya that singes the BJP-RSS intimately, and the reopening of the caste question by anti-reservationists and the backlash against the UGC regulations on discrimination — the BJP seems back on the ledge on Mandal, and newly defensive on Mandir.
The party that faces these vulnerabilities bristles with rising resentments within. The tight Modi-Shah grip at the centre means that discontents are not voiced openly, at least not in Delhi, but down the line, the cracks are showing.
The Bihar BJP leaders’ glee at their own party’s rout in Bankipur pointed to unease with the anointment of Samrat Choudhary. Choudhary’s elevation as chief minister is part of a pattern of uninspiring state-level promotions and appointments by a high command that wants to retain control, above all. Or take the rumblings in the BJP’s West Bengal unit about opening the door too wide, letting the defeated opponent in. The spectre of “Trinamoolification” of the party, after a mandate that was more against the TMC than for the BJP, is made worse by the absence of state-level leadership that could manage the friction between old and new.
Murmurs can also be heard in the BJP’s upper echelons against the increasing outsourcing of decision-making to professional political consultancies. A party that has prided itself on its sprawl of committed karyakartas and its perfectly oiled machine is being presented to-do lists and perception indexes by the omnipresent external agencies.
On the other side of the political fence, it is now being said that Rahul Gandhi is pulling ahead of his own party. The journey through UP also showed that voters acknowledge, more than before, that Gandhi raises resonant issues, persists in taking the fight to the BJP.
But Gandhi’s outreach to the young, or his dharna outside the PM’s residence, or his sit-in at a police station to force an FIR over a student’s pellet injuries — all frame the leader without the party. The latter two events showed the leader taking his party by surprise. Like his two cross-country yatras, they frame Gandhi’s breakthrough, while pointing to a Congress standstill.
The Bharat Jodo yatras helped Gandhi climb out of the corner he had been backed into by his lack of a strong politics/government CV, and by the BJP’s propaganda machine. But Gandhi seems to be making his way forward without carrying his party with him ever since. This is not just because Congress, out of power for long, is burdened with inertia and slowed down by factional infighting. It is also because of Gandhi’s scepticism towards his party.
There are images of this distrust. Of the yatris who flocked to Gandhi from civil society, marched alongside him during his two yatras, made common cause with him, only a handful were later inducted in Congress, little effort was made to create room for them in the party. The coterie that surrounds Gandhi is made of those who did not come up from the Congress ranks, that also seems to be his inner circle’s USP. It is Gandhi’s apolitical team, not his party’s youth wing that curates the stage during “Chhatron ki goonj”.
Gandhi may have decided to take the plunge alone, until the party he owns becomes the party of his dreams. But by not working through it, by distrusting its processes, he is complicit in leaving its crises unattended.
The toll is visible in the poll-bound states of Punjab and UP. The Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee, dissolved in 2024 to jumpstart an overhaul, is still to be reconstituted. In Punjab, the party is openly divided into jostling camps that do not meet.
In the aftermath of the students’ movement, then, are two parties, which did not expect the sudden shaft of light on them, and still seem blinded by it. They need to find their bearings, and a way forward. That is their test, after Jantar Mantar.
The writer is National Opinion Editor at The Indian Express
vandita.mishra@expressindia.com
In the aftermath of the students’ movement, then, are two parties, which did not expect the sudden shaft of light on them, and which still seem blinded by it. (Express Photo) 
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