By Antriksh Kar Singh
India is passing through a decisive moment in its political history as young girls have become the face of ongoing student uprising in the national capital and subsequent solidarity marches across the country. These young girls aren’t only participating to support their male counterparts instead they became the face and voice of resistance against those in power.
These young girls bravely faced police brutality on 20 July when police resorted to teargas shelling, lathi charge, and other measures to prevent marching student protesters from reaching parliament. The visuals must have shaken the systems and conscience of many individuals, who make it a point to reach the protest site after the 20 July incident.
A question however comes to mind that suddenly what has changed in Indian society that young girls became so brave to publicly come forward in a movement becoming its face and voice? A few things come to mind as possible reasons behind this change.
The first and foremost is the improvement of literacy among the females in Indian society, which reached to a level of around 75% in 2023-24 alongside significant rise in female participation in the Indian labour force, which rose to 41.7%. The improvement of these two measures is a significant factor towards women empowerment. This shift became evident through issues, and policies related to women began taking centre stage in Indian elections prominently from the 2022 Himachal Pradesh Assembly Election.
And, hence, the Indian political parties used a monthly cash transfer scheme to woo the women voters for winning elections. However, such measures are only tokenism instead of any real progress but passage of a bill for giving 33% reservation to women in Indian parliament and the state assembly was a real sign of tectonic shift happening in the Indian socio-political sphere. And, the current protest at Jantar Mantar provided evidence how the young girls are now taking charge of protest by becoming face and voice through use of digital platforms especially social media, which has fundamentally altered the information ecosystem of India.
These platforms provide access to loads of transnational information, perspective, and opinions transforming their aspiration and belief systems. This transformation seemingly inculcated fearlessness, self-motivation and a carefree attitude among the Indian youngsters especially young girls, which is visible in the participants of the student protest across the country.
This technology has done one more thing, it helps in aligning views of the young generation in a particular way and now they rely more on collective connectivity instead of collective appeal and hence protest is continuing in spite of the fact of absence of proper leadership unlike previous ones. The protest is not only sustaining but using its own language employing a set of vocabulary, which is new to society in general.
The female protestors have more prominently utilised their creativity using ‘sarcasm’, ‘humour’, ‘laughter’, ‘roast’ for seeking accountability over NEET examination paper leak. And, these protestors have flooded the social media platforms especially Instagram with such content, which nobody must have ever thought of using it during a protest. It has however become a new reality making people feel more connected through the use of a multi-platform media ecosystem.
This phenomenon is fundamentally altering the mechanism of protest in India, which is witnessing its first digital movement with a resonance on the ground. The government, its security agency are facing a problem in giving response to this new form of protest with such a high women participation. Any use of force – mild or brutal, may result in strengthening the protest as evident from two instances; first removing Sonam Wangchuk from protest site and using brutal force on protesting students. As a result, the prime minister Narendra Modi tried to directly connect with these young protestors using an Instagram video in a tweaked language attempting to resonate with them.
Whether these messages, government attempts, reported tightening of police checking could result in ending the protest or not, is a matter to be seen in near future but the student protests have shown a glimpse of hope that youngsters are willing to come out on streets for the right cause and they will dictate their terms of protest. The government is walking on tightrope and so the opposition leaders in their attempt to pacify the protestors and woo them respectively. Whosoever succeeds in their attempt will depend on the fact that who understands their vocabulary, language, sentiments and belief systems first and well.
The government and system need to understand that this modern-day digital protest can’t be handled in a traditional way as the authorities aren’t budging to demands of a cabinet minister’s resignation. This protest has digital roots and can go a long way unlike traditional protest and movement. But a long protest and movement is not good for neither government nor society, which is undergoing a major churning at the moment.
(The author is a third-year PhD scholar associated with Department of JMC, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong)
