File photo of student protestors at Jantar Mantar on July 20. Photo: PTI
For the state, the real discomfort is not the language, but the realisation that the old instruments of control were designed for a different kind of opponent. The opponent has changed its dialect. The govt is still speaking the previous version. Efforts are now being made to understand the medium, but the state is still struggling with the message.
There is a video that refuses to leave social media timelines. A young woman at Jantar Mantar turns to a policeman, calls him “police uncle” and cheerfully delivers the line that has now entered both parliamentary records and meme history: 'Vastegunahoiya'. The group around her dissolves into laughter. The policeman stands there, neither angry nor amused, simply confused.
That short — one of several that captured the texture of the recent students’ protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, demanding accountability and reforms in education and triggered by the NEET paper leak scandal which broke out in May — is more than comic relief. It is a precise illustration of why the establishment found this particular generation unusually difficult to manage. What Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party did understand was the abusive language that some young protestors were accused of using. But their bigger worry shouldn’t be the abuses, but Gen Z’s whole new style of communicating. It is direct. It is piercing. Almost like an end-to-end encrypted language.
Gen Z did not invent protest. They simply refused to speak the dialect the Indian state has trained itself to hear. Traditional political language runs on ideology, hierarchy, fixed slogans and the occasional theatrical confrontation that both sides know how to stage-manage. This lot arrived with Korean finger hearts, national anthem as tactical shield, absurdist memes that have no fixed meaning and a refusal to perform the expected roles of either angry revolutionary or obedient student.
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Consider the national anthem. The moment the police line tensed and the batons appeared, sections of the crowd would break into ‘Jana Gana Mana’. Not as sentimentality, but as tactic. The security forces couldn’t lathi-charge people mid-anthem without looking like the villain in a particularly heavy-handed propaganda film.
The state found itself temporarily disarmed by its own symbols. The same generation that is routinely accused of lacking patriotism used the national anthem more effectively as a defensive instrument than many professional politicians have managed as a unifying one.
Then there were the hearts. The small Korean finger-heart gesture, borrowed from K-pop culture and now ubiquitous among Indian teenagers, was offered to policemen with the same casual warmth one might offer a shopkeeper. It is almost impossible to look threatening while making that gesture. It is equally difficult for a policeman to respond with force without looking faintly ridiculous. The protesters had discovered a form of non-violent resistance that did not require the moral grandeur of ‘satyagraha’. It required only the ability to look cute while refusing to move.
And then the language itself. Vastegunahoiya. Kuchu Puchu. Phrases with no stable dictionary meaning, evolved from American internet challenges into Indian absurdity, then deployed at a political protest as if they were the most natural slogans in the world. When Congress MP Deepender Hooda later uttered the phrase on the floor of the Lok Sabha and advised his colleagues to Google it, the moment was perfect.
The difficulty for those in power was structural. You can ban a slogan. You can condemn people for specific abusive language. You can declare an organisation unlawful. You cannot easily ban a gesture that means “I am being shy” or a nonsense phrase that means nothing and therefore cannot be proven to mean something seditious.
You cannot write a charge sheet against laughter. The state’s traditional tools — the FIR, the preventive detention, the narrative of “anti-national elements” — work best against opponents who speak in the same register of seriousness. Gen Z declined that register.
File photo of protestors while on a march to Parliament.
This is not to romanticise everything that happened.
There were videos, purportedly of protestors, using crude, personal language directed at the Prime Minister and his family. Those clips became the one thing the system knew how to process. Outrage was manufactured. FIR filed and the case subsequently dropped, after the Prime Minister, in a video posted on social media, magnanimously stated that he forgave the “naughty children”. The “abusive girls” narrative was allowed to occupy a disproportionate amount of media oxygen precisely because it fitted the familiar template of moral panic.
Everything else — the creativity, the tactical use of national symbols, the refusal to be solemn in the expected way — was harder for the ruling class to diagnose. So the state and its friendly platforms leaned into the part they understood.
The deeper point is that the lingo and the method were not decorative. They were functional.
The Cockroach Janta Party, which spearheaded the protest, began as a satirical response to a remark attributed to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, comparing unemployed youth and activists to parasites and cockroaches (the CJI has since claimed he didn’t mean all youth, but only fake law degree holders).
Turning the insult into a badge of identity became an example of classic internet-era politics: seize the slur, empty it of its intended power and wear it. The same generation that is often accused of living too much in the virtual world to understand real politics used the tools of the online world to force a Union minister’s resignation (Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as education minister on July 25). That is not performance. That is outcome.
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Why does this language feel like an enigma to the ruling class?
Because the ruling class and much of the traditional opposition still operate inside a twentieth-century model of political communication. In that model, legitimacy flows from ideology, organisation and the ability to control narrative through institutional media.
Gen Z’s protest language is post-institutional. It is viral by design, ironic by default and indifferent to the dignity of the powerful. It does not seek permission to be taken seriously. It simply becomes impossible to ignore.
There is a temptation, visible in some commentary, to treat the entire episode as pure theatre — a generation that knows how to make reels but not how to sustain politics. That reading underestimates what happened. Sustained pressure at Jantar Mantar, repeated attempts to march toward Parliament, the absorption of real student anger over examination integrity and the eventual resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan are not the achievements of people who only know how to say ‘Vastegunahoiya’.
The same pattern appears when one looks at how the protesters handled police. Calling an officer “uncle” is not merely polite. It collapses the distance that the uniform is meant to create. It forces the interaction into the domain of the familial and the everyday. Authority prefers to be addressed as authority. It is less comfortable being addressed as a slightly harassed relative who has turned up at the wrong family function.
A protestor holds up a copy of the Constitution of India. File photo
Among the many reels flooding social media during the protest was one of a young boy addressing his mother with a sea of angry policemen in the background. He says: ‘Mummy, I am at the protest. See, I am still alive’.
The Korean hearts performed a similar function. They made the confrontation look, for a moment, like a cultural exchange rather than a law-and-order situation.
None of this means the state is powerless.
It retains the monopoly on force, the ability to register cases and the machinery of narrative amplification. What it lost, at least temporarily, was the ability to define the terms of engagement. When your opponent answers a baton charge with the national anthem and answers a stern warning with a finger heart, the usual choreography breaks.
The cameras record something that does not fit the expected frames of either “violent agitators” or “idealistic youth being misled”. They record young people who appear to be enjoying the act of refusal.
Is Gen Z lingo therefore an enigma? Yes, as it is not pretending to be understood by all. It is not designed to be legible to those who still believe political speech must sound like political speech.
It is legible to its own cohort. It travels through platforms the establishment still struggles to dominate. And it carries, underneath the absurdity, a blunt message that requires no translation: ‘we see the failures, we are not impressed by the explanations and we will not perform the expected deference while waiting for the system to correct itself’.
That is the real discomfort. Not the language itself, but the realisation that the old instruments of control were designed for a different kind of opponent. The opponent has changed its dialect. The state is still speaking the previous version. Efforts are now being made to understand the medium, but the state is still struggling with the message.
