This Independence Day came close on the heels of a students’ movement that forced a powerful government to bend and became a liberating moment in its own right. The day after brings an occasion to stand on tip toe, look at what has moved, and what did not change.
Let’s begin with freedom’s heady freezeframe. Till the Jantar Mantar moment, a narrative was becoming a stranglehold. It went like this — Congress and the regional parties are in unchecked decline and the BJP, armed with a will-to-power not diminished by power, enormous resources and control over central agencies, is seizing and filling spaces vacated by Opposition parties. After the resignation of a Union minister in response to the protesters’ demand at Jantar Mantar, that story is becoming unfrozen. A third force has flashed on the public mind, putting both the main players on notice. Suddenly, the government, too, looks vulnerable, not just the Opposition. Democracy’s wet dog shake at Jantar Mantar is loosening democratic spaces.
Even though he did not mention the students’ movement by name, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s I-Day speech acknowledged it and sought to domesticate it. He profusely invoked “yuva shakti”, but asked that it be yoked to the national project. He described the young, the protagonists of Jantar Mantar, as the “labharthi” or passive beneficiaries. This is in line with the earlier recasting by his government of the rights-bearing citizen as the recipient of state largesse and as the performer of duties.
The PM identified the challenge before the nation — the threat posed by the “dimagi Naxal (one with a Naxal mindset)” well after the “hathiyari Naxal (armed insurgent)” had been defeated. In the PM’s repertoire of slurs and labels for opponents, dissenters and critics — “eco system”, “aandolan jeevi”, “urban Naxal”, among others — “dimagi Naxal” is perhaps the most unvarnished. It takes no detours, looks for no pretexts, allows no nuances. It reaches inside the mind to criminalise the thought and idea directly.
A few days before the PM’s Red Fort speech, a sessions court in Mumbai delivered an uncannily similar-sounding lesson in unfreedom as it refused anticipatory bail to two TISS students accused of raising slogans during a memorial event held in October 2025. The students had gathered to pay tribute to the late Delhi University professor GN Saibaba, who died shortly after his acquittal ended a prolonged incarceration in a UAPA case (Bombay High Court has subsequently given one of the two students interim protection from arrest). “… the act of accused persons appeared to be not limited to paying him (Saibaba) homage. They even allegedly raised slogans… “, the court said. The slogans in question sought the release of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, former student activists facing trial under UAPA, jailed now for about six years, their trial still not in sight. The court also took note of reading material recovered from the students’ electronic devices, which, the prosecution said, reflected Maoist ideology. “… though the accused have not committed a criminal offence, their act coupled with the material found… raises doubt about their conduct” — the court seemed to defer, in anticipation, to the PM’s coinage of “dimagi Naxal”.
In JNU, authorities withdrew permission for an event in which Umar Khalid’s book was to be discussed, a PhD dissertation certified by the same university. It cited “non disclosure of full facts” — opaque bureaucracy-speak by a distinguished university once celebrated for the spaces it opened, not shut down, for questioning. And in the capital’s prestigious Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, an I-day address on “Why pluralism matters” by JNU professor emerita Zoya Hasan was cancelled at the last minute, because of “security concerns”, a thin camouflage for a cave-in to right-wing threat-making.
The Bar Council of India chairman issued a diktat punishing the entire 2026 batch of the NALSAR University of Law, for criticism by some of them of the Chief Justice of India, and their opposition to him attending their convocation as chief guest. He retracted his repressive directive and apologised to students subsequently. But the lingering image is that of yet another institution cracking down on the freedoms of the young and the outspoken, in this case, also tomorrow’s Bar and Bench, in order to cosy up to the current political/judicial regime.
The last snapshot is of Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi participating in a sexist joke on stage recently, undermining his own serious critique of Modi’s personalisation of foreign policy. In a time when freedom needs to be negotiated step by difficult step, and spaces for Opposition and civil society prised open carefully, the LoP’s backsliding has larger costs and consequences.
The PM’s new label for critics, the sessions court’s constricted view, the clampdown by the premier university and school, the Bar’s arrested slide and the Congress leader’s crude joke — all these came only days after the students’ protests at Jantar Mantar scored a euphoric strike for freedom. They underline something that must be kept sight of in the post Jantar Mantar moment.
For all its spectacular arc, the students’ success story is up against the mixed and congealed realities of a layered polity. Gen Z’s success, therefore, lies more in what it can help illuminate, not just in what it has achieved. Going ahead, it will be measured by whether or not it can become a continuing catalyst.
The fact also is that though it came together at Jantar Mantar, and even as coherence is being artificially thrust upon it, Gen Z is a shifting construct. Even in electoral terms, it is not yet clear that Gen Z is a bounded category. Do the young vote in critical numbers, are they a vote bank with a defined set of issues and separate concerns, do they vote more for change than voters in other age groups — there are no clear answers.
What is clear is something much more amorphous, and at once powerful and fragile — the students’ movement has dented power. It pointed to the suffocation of the electorate because of the limited menu of political choices. It changed the subject to the ruling behemoth’s vulnerability.
Gen Z is not an actor or formula or a cliche to be co-opted or given a fixed ending. The day after the 80th Independence Day, let’s see it for what it can be. A brush with democracy’s many possibilities, an open-ended signifier that can contain many movements and beginnings, a sense of freedom that needs to be enhanced — patiently and painstakingly.
The writer is National Opinion Editor at The Indian Express
Though he did not mention the students’ movement by name, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s I-Day speech at Red Fort both acknowledged it and sought to domesticate it. (Express photos) 
Share
