Call It What It Is: The Allure of An “Apolitical” Protest

A government reveals its character not in its speeches but in its reflexes. In what it reaches for, without deliberation, the moment citizens raise their voice. Delhi has watched this reflex before — through the anti-CAA protests of 2019, and again when farmers marching on the capital were met with tear gas and water cannons at its borders in 2020–21 and once more in February 2024. This week, the reflex returned to Jantar Mantar.

On Monday, July 20th, thousands gathered at Delhi's Jantar Mantar to march toward Parliament. Students, many barely out of their teens, asked an elected government to answer for two exam disasters — a leaked NEET-UG paper that forced the National Testing Agency to cancel and re-run the exam, and parallel havoc around CUET — that have already cost more than a dozen young people their lives. Mobile service went dark before they moved, with no order issued and no authority named. Barricades were welded shut, and riot vehicles with tear-gas mounts stood ready before a single rule had been broken. Then came the gas and the batons. "The protest was peaceful," said Mohammad Anis, a 26-year-old management graduate from Bihar, describing the lathi charge that tore through it. "Many protesters were beaten... but we are braving all this now." 

Twenty days into a hunger strike over the same demand, Sonam Wangchuk was carried off the stage in white bedsheets; a High Court has since declined to order his release. Wangchuk continued his fast from his hospital bed, tying it explicitly to accountability for what Angmo described as the police's "brutal action" against the students at the Parliament march. He ended the fast on July 24th, twenty-six days in, after what he called "a long negotiation on various conditions and in view of possible violence in the country", shortly after Prime Minister Modi promised, on video, a tougher law against paper leaks. Protest organisers said they would keep demonstrating until Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.

Sonam Wangchuk removed from Jantar Mantar to the hospital on July 19th, 21 days into his hunger strike. (Source: PTI)

Here is the question I want to ask: can a movement whose leader a court is ruling on, whose members are tear-gassed behind welded barricades with the signal cut, really be apolitical? Or does the word only hold up as long as no one asks what it's covering for?

The Cockroach Janta Party was born in May, after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, presiding over a Supreme Court hearing, said there were "youngsters like cockroaches, who don't get any employment" and who turn instead to media, social media, and RTI activism to attack the system, remarks he later said had been misquoted, insisting he meant only people with fake degrees. This grew overnight into a movement of students who have been told their whole lives that their anger was illegitimate unless quiet and nonpartisan. Calling this movement apolitical lowered the cost of showing up; journalist Saba Naqvi has argued this is exactly what let a generation allergic to politics start participating at all.

 When CPM's MA Baby and CPI's D Raja visited Wangchuk, it revived the familiar narrative of a student movement, hijacked by political forces. Wangchuk and CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke insisted the opposite, stating "it is also an issue for the BJP... it is not a political platform" and opened the stage to every party, the ruling one included. A choice that widened the door to conversation. And the crowd that has since walked through that door belongs to CJP less by the day; a movement, once it grows past the people who founded it, inherits their framing whether or not it still fits.

That isn't the only sense "apolitical" carries here. But before the second meaning is explored, it’s important to distinguish between what we understand as “politics” and “political”. The theorist Chantal Mouffe draws a useful line in On the Political: "politics" is the machinery — parties, elections, ministries — a society builds to manage conflict, while "the political" is the underlying condition of contested power that makes that machinery necessary in the first place. An issue doesn't become political because a party claims it; it was already political the moment power was being exercised, denied, or fought over. That's the sense I mean here, and it's the one missing when people insist, kindly, that "This protest isn't political — this is a matter of human lives being destroyed."

I understand the instinct. A dead child is not an abstraction, and it feels almost obscene to file that grief under a category as grubby as "politics" in the partisan sense. But I want to push on this reasoning, because I think it's exactly backwards. The suicides, the leaked papers, the marking failures, these did not happen in some pre-political zone of raw human suffering that politics later intruded upon. They happened because a specific agency, answerable to a specific ministry, in a specific government, failed at the one job it exists to do. The mechanisms that might hold it accountable are the same mechanisms currently deciding whether protesters get to stay in a public square. To call that "not political, just human" doesn't somehow lift the tragedy above the political. It removes the tragedy from the only system of authority that could ever explain, or fix, why it happened.

Once you see the mechanism, follow it back. It has been running a long time, and most people never had the luxury of being ignorant of it: through Kashmir in August 2019, when a five-month communications blackout and mass detentions pre-empted protest before it could even gather; through Jamia Millia Islamia weeks later, when police fired tear gas into the university library during the anti-CAA-NRC protests, an incident students are still fighting to get acknowledged in court six years on; and through the transgender community's own protests against the 2019 Transgender Persons Bill, which Parliament passed over their objections anyway. 

As you read this, in Bundelkhand, more than 6,600 Gond and Kol Adivasi households are watching villages that are centuries old get marked for submergence under the Ken-Betwa dam. Organisers say more than 250 people have had false cases filed against them since the protests intensified this spring, and that leaders have been jailed. They have been evicted, and in some cases arrested, by the same machinery that cut phone networks over Jantar Mantar this week. None of this was ever apolitical. It just went unnoticed by anyone with the privilege of distance, because the system has mostly reached for people whose pain was already somebody else's problem. The tear gas at Jantar Mantar cannot be seen as a crack in the armour of a functional democracy. It is the same old reflex, finally caught on camera.

Farmers protest in Chhatarpur, Madhya Pradesh, against the Ken-Batwa dam. (Source: Dainik Bhaskar)

Article 19 of the Indian Constitution guarantees citizens the right to free speech and to assemble peaceably - the right these protesters were exercising when they were tear-gassed.  The same right that makes dissent, in a democracy, not a nuisance tolerated at the margins but the very way a government stays honest to itself. It must remain answerable, and capable of being marched towards. Calling a crackdown "above politics" doesn't spare anyone the pain of it; it just spares the people we need to hold accountable.

This is the deeper danger of framing this movement as apolitical, and it isn't really about privilege or distance, though those are real enough. Declaring an issue apolitical is never a neutral description; it's a maneuver. It takes a question about who holds power and how it should be used, and relocates that question outside the space where power can be contested, into tragedy, into fate, into "the system," a phrase people reach for precisely when they don't want to name who runs it. Once something is apolitical, there is nothing left to organize around, no one left to vote out, no resignation that would mean anything, because there was never, in this telling, anyone responsible in the first place. That is not writing a description of reality. That is a gift to whoever currently holds the pen, and it is a gift regardless of who is offering it, whether a strategist trying to widen a movement's reach or a mourner trying to make sense of an unbearable loss.

So let's not call this the death of democracy, and let's not, in the same breath, call it merely human, merely tragic, or ‘above politics’. These phrasings let this moment stand alone, severed from every eviction, every denied petition, every unanswered complaint that came before it, and in doing so, they let the structure that produced all of them stand untouched. If we refuse to recognise this movement as political, it will have changed nothing about an apparatus that has spent decades operating exactly this way. Only, the people it was operating against were never going to make the evening news. This apparatus does not retire when the headlines move on. It reorganizes and returns to work: on villages still slated for submergence, on Dalit families still waiting for a complaint to be taken seriously, on trans petitioners still arguing for standing in court. 

This movement, whatever CJP's founders intended, no longer fits inside the frame they built for it; it belongs now to everyone who marched, everyone who faced the lathis and tear gas, and by extension to everyone the same machinery has quietly worn down for years before this week gave it a camera crew. Seeing that connection asks something specific of the people newly arrived to this fight: not sympathy, which costs little, but witness — the harder act of sitting with what others have been made to live through long before it was fashionable to notice. That, more than any slogan, is what it actually means to call something political: not that you have an opinion about it, but that you have finally agreed to look.

If someone tells you, gently, that this is too human a tragedy to be political, tell them they have it backwards. Every student who didn't make it through this year had a name, a family, and a system that owed them better and knew it. Calling it merely a "human" struggle just makes it easier to forget who's responsible - and who has been, all along.

As of writing this article, Dharmendra Pradhan has tendered his resignation, the first real concession this government has made. It’s important to remember that one resignation is the first inch of the fight, not the fight itself. The demand cannot stop really about one man; it was about an exam system that let a leaked paper cost lives, and a state that reaches for barricades before it reaches for answers. 

This protest has the reach it does because it moved a demography with the privilege of degrees, data, and countless headlines behind it - a privilege that now comes with a debt attached. It is owed to the families in Bundelkhand and the students at Jamia, whose fights went unheard for years. It is owed to everyone this machinery will quietly come for the moment the cameras move on. 

[Edited by Anamta Husain]