From andolankaris to andolanjeevis, what’s common to protestors across agitations in India

What he saw when he went there was camaraderie — small groups of students, coming out to spend some hours in solidarity with their counterparts before returning home or to their educational institutions. He saw the young protestors using social media to reach out to others of their generation and mobilise support. And he saw them using humour and satire to meet the violence directed towards them by the security forces — there were reports of laathi-charge, use of tear gas and pellet guns on the protestors during their march to Parliament on July 20.

“There was a certain innocence. Their idea, I felt, was never to politicise the movement, which was interesting,” says Raja.

Spearheaded by the now well-known Cockroach Janata Party — which had started out as an online movement months earlier — the agitation for accountability and reform in education was sparked by the NEET paper leak scandal which broke out in May. The protest culminated in the resignation of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of Parliament (MP), Dharmendra Pradhan, as Union education minister. Widely regarded as a protest by the Gen Z (those born between mid-to-late 1990s and early 2010s), the agitation has not just given the country a new language of dissent — memes, reels and irreverence sharing space with traditional sloganeering and earnest placards — but, as is being hoped by many, a generation of fresh conscientious voices, not afraid to question authority when needed.

For decades, Delhi’s Jantar Mantar has echoed with the sounds of resistance. From Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protest to farmers agitating against controversial agricultural laws, frantic moms uniting for the cause of clean air in the city and wrestlers rising against sexual misconduct. The Gen Z students are the latest to add their names to this list of protestors, tied to their predecessors not just by the space they occupied, but by the shared sentiment of dissent.

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The dictionary meaning of the word ‘protestor’ is almost too simplistic — “a person who makes a public protest”.

An article on the online platform socialwork.institute does a better job in capturing the desperation that pushes common people to take to the streets. “A protest”, it says, “is fundamentally an expression of dissent against policies, conditions, or actions that people find unjust or harmful… Unlike passive acceptance of the status quo, protests represent an active refusal to remain silent. …. Those who engage in protests are often directly affected by the issues at hand, making their participation deeply personal and urgent”. The article adds: “Protests serve multiple purposes: influencing public opinion, drawing attention to perceived injustices, pushing for policy changes and connecting people who share common concerns”.

But an agitation is hardly the only, or first step, in the process of dissent, says activist Nikhil Dey, who has spent years working in the fields of right to information and employment.

“For people like us, who believe in democratic political engagement, the process extends from just petitioning or meeting or consulting or dialogue with people who sit in positions of power and have the capacity to do something. And when all of that fails, it gives rise to a protest,” he explains.

Agrees Bhavreen Kandhari, an environmental activist and founder of Warrior Moms, an organisation fighting against air pollution. “Before protests, there is always an attempt to talk to officers, to political leaders, to look for a solution. But only when there is no result, no one listens, does it lead to a protest,” says Kandhari, whose group of moms held repeated protests against the air pollution in Delhi last winter.

At times, the aim of such protests is as much awareness building, as getting those in power to listen to demands.

“The anger and frustration at inaction has to find a release and that release is a protest,” says Kandhari.

And despite growing concerns about the “shrinking space for dissent” in our country today, India has seen some significant outpourings of angst by the common people in recent years — from the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019-2020, to the farmers’ agitation the subsequent year (2020-21) against the now-repealed new farm laws, the 2023 protest by Indian wrestlers accusing then Wrestling Federation of India president and former BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual misconduct and demanding his resignation, to the latest students’ agitation.

To actor Prakash Raj, who has lent his support to a range of causes over the years and was seen standing with the students at Jantar Mantar recently, alleged attempts at silencing dissent resulting in “more outbursts of anger” is hardly a paradox. “If it is a government, then they have ears on this kind of thing. This [the current government at the Centre] is a regime,” he alleges. “Any regime behaves like this. First it manufactures fear, makes life miserable because of the power they have. But there is a breaking point for everything. Human beings cannot take this much of pain, this much of silencing, this much of strangling. When survival becomes important… when farmers can’t do business, when students are faced with joblessness… when life becomes important, they will fight back. They will raise their voice,” he adds.

That angst against the BJP government at the Centre and its policies is what is common to all recent protests in the country, feels social and human rights activist Shabnam Hashmi.

“All these protests were against this autocratic government and its undemocratic practices. In the case of farmers, it was against the farm laws [brought in by them], for the students it was not just against the paper leaks, but what they [the government] have done to the whole education system [she cites the hold of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP's ideological fountainhead, on education]. The wrestlers were again protesting against the high-handedness of the officials, of alleged misconduct by Brij Bhushan Singh and the CAA-NRC protest was also against their policy,” she says.

Author, academic and social activist Harsh Mandar widens the discourse further, comparing the students’ protest to youth-led agitations in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in recent years. “In each of these agitations, the specific triggers were different — internet shutdown, job reservation, corruption —but it was giving a much wider populace of mostly younger people the opportunity to express their angst about the larger crisis of governance that they saw around them.”

He further explains: “We've adopted an economic model around the world which is just not producing work opportunities. In this situation, young people just don't see a future for themselves. And they are confronting a government which they increasingly recognise to be one that doesn't care about their future. Underlying most of these protests is a larger challenge to a government which is less and less democratic. And less and less responsive to the concerns and interests of its most vulnerable people.”

Siraj Dutta, a Jharkhand-based social sector worker and activist who had travelled to Delhi last week to show his solidarity with the protesting students at Jantar Mantar, cites the physical manifestations of “converging issues” at the protest site.

“The students’ demands were very specific [accountability and reforms in education]. But if you saw at Jantar Mantar, there were all kinds of placards and all kinds of demands: “Save Manipur”, “Ban RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh]. There's a broader and more systemic problem with the whole setup right now and that's something that was coming out in the protests.”

As Hashmi points out, the most important issues being raised at any protest are often not the ones being voiced from the podium.

It’s little wonder then that the students at Jantar Mantar were receiving support from those who had been part of the farmers’ protest. Kandhari was there too, with her group. “We have also taken up the issue of use of tear gas against the protestors,” she says.

As activists explain, empathy or solidarity is hardly ever contained in well-demarcated segments like the workings of a government department. There is constant overlap of interests in society.

In a 2024 paper titled “ Protest types and protester profiles: testing meso−micro‑ associations between event characteristics and participant attitudes”, writers Jan Matti Dollbaum, Larissa Daria Meier, Priska Daphi and Sebastian Haunss cite various research to state that “studies on protest participation in European countries have found that persons with low trust and high external efficacy (i.e., the conviction that their own engagement can contribute political change) are the ones most likely to participate in non-institutionalized political activities, while those with high efficacy and high trust tend to use the institutionalized channels. Moreover, protesters tend to be younger and are more highly educated than nonprotesters”.

They go on to add: “Other scholars, however, have challenged the tendency to treat protesters as a uniform crowd and demonstrate that protests bring together people with disparate political orientations, motivations, and demographic or socio-political characteristics.”

The statement is as much an acceptance of the complex character of a protestor, as the many life situations that push one to rise in resistance. In India, however, the agitator's legitimacy has not only been narrowed down to self-interest, but their motives, when spilling beyond that idea, been the target of suspicion and ridicule.

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In a 2021 speech in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi coined a new term for agitators in the country, “andolanjeevis”.

“There is a new crop of ‘andolanjeevi’ [someone whose livelihood depends on andolans or prt. They live for protests. They look for ways to start a new movement. The country needs to be aware of these ‘andolanjeevis’,” he was quoted as saying in the media. Perhaps the attempt was to draw a distinction between those rising against specific causes, who believed themselves impacted by it, and activists seen to be lending their support across issues.

Most activists scoff at the terminology.

Explaining the overlap of interest, Dey says, “When you are connected with a set of people, the people of that area are impacted by issues relating to education, water, electricity, environment, women’s health, social security, violence against women… the whole gamut. So as a worker, you can’t restrict yourself to working only one area [or pushing one cause].”

But beyond such issue-based bonding, what is also uniform to all protestors today — both seasoned activists and the spontaneous dissenter — says Hashmi, is "courage".

“We have seen some really strong brutalities by security forces against andolankaris in recent years, across agitations. But still they come to the street. Still they speak their minds. So if there is anything in common to the protesters, anything which binds them together or what is common is conviction in a democratic secular India and passion for safeguarding the Constitution,” she claims.

That courage is something Raja hopes to retain when his two sons — aged 17 and 15 — find their own causes to stand up for. “Dissent is, I feel, the only way to bring about change. And if the young generation is not able to dissent, then how do you see a future for a country? So I think, yes, my children, if they are in a situation where they need to put their voices out, I would be totally backing their demands,” he says.

The training has, in a measure, already begun.

“When we were protesting against the NRC-CAA, I took them along with me,” recalls Raja.

In a country that’s long stood by the motto of ‘Inquilab Zindabad ', a more accurate description of a protestor may be ‘andolanjeev’ (a being of dissent) than ‘andolanjeevi’.