From ‘vote chori’ to ‘chita andolan’: Street protests return with a new playbook | India News
NEW DELHI: Slogans are ringing out, crowds are turning up and the streets are once again abuzz with protests.On Tuesday, INDIA bloc MPs took their protest against alleged irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls to the national capital, demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. The march took an unexpected turn when Rahul Gandhi surprised the police with a last-minute change of course, turning it into a sit-in.A day later, opposition MPs were back with another dramatic flash protest on Janpath streets, where Priyanka Gandhi Vadra lay down on the road and refused to budge until the CEC agreed to meet opposition leaders.
During the INDIA bloc’s protest against the CEC, Priyanka Gandhi lay down on the road, daring anyone to move her.
And more could be coming. Cockroach Janata Party’s Abhijeet Dipke, who rallied young protesters during the anti-NEET paper leak agitation in July, has warned of a “Jantar Mantar 2.0” on October 10 if the CEC does not resign.But Delhi is not the only place, and politicians are not the only ones taking their grievances to the streets. Across the country, protests over very different issues are bringing people out in an attempt to make their voices heard.The protests differ in scale, issue and leadership. But together, they point to something familiar returning to the foreground: street politics.
The street has always been a political stage
Peaceful protests have always been a part of our democracy. India’s politics has rarely been confined to Parliament, party offices or election rallies. The streets have always had a part to play.Mahatma Gandhi turned marches, boycotts and satyagraha into instruments of mass politics during the freedom struggle. Decades later, Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement drew students and citizens onto the streets against the Indira Gandhi government.Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protests filled Jantar Mantar and Ramlila Maidan in 2011. The anti-CAA protests saw prolonged sit-ins, while farmers camped at Delhi’s borders for more than a year before the three farm laws were repealed.
How social media changed street mobilisation
Street politics, then, is hardly new. What keeps changing are the tools used to trigger, spread and sustain mobilisation. Political analyst Uday Chandra feels social media is making protests more visible while also changing who can start and sustain them.
Protest against CEC over SIR process in Delhi
“Social media certainly makes protests visible to millions, enabling a rapid or viral spread. But it also does something more important: it reduces dependence on political parties, unions and established organisations to mobilise people. A grievance may now turn into a movement before conventional political actors decide how to respond,” Uday Chandra says.But the current round of protests goes beyond social-media amplification, feels Chandra.“I think something real is happening beyond social-media amplification. Street protest never quite disappeared from politics in India, but for much of the past decade, electoral politics under a highly centralised party machinery overshadowed it. What we are seeing now is, to my mind, the re-emergence of the street as an autonomous political arena,” he said.
When the youth lead, parties follow
What stands out in this round of protests is not just the issues being raised, but who is often raising them first.On questions ranging from examinations to electoral rolls, young people have managed to create pressure outside the usual party machinery. Increasingly, political parties have found themselves responding aggressively to issues they did not start.So, have young people and students shown political parties the way back to street mobilisation? The events surrounding the NEET protests in July this year are a case in point.As students protested over the paper leak, Jantar Mantar became the centre of an agitation that continued for weeks. The CJP emerged as the pressure group leading the agitation and eventually ensuring the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union education minister.Many political parties that initially stood on the sidelines scrambled to join the agitation. On July 21, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Mallikarjun Kharge and other opposition leaders staged a sit-in outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence over police action against students protesting the NEET paper leak.
Rahul Gandhi being taken away by police during a Congress protest against police action on demonstrators at Jantar Mantar.
But Chandra argues that the CJP, as a movement, differs significantly from political parties and earlier large movements such as the Anna Hazare agitation or the farmers’ protests.“CJP is much more decentralised than the two movements you mention. The Anna movement had recognisable leaders and a national campaign/agenda. Likewise, the farmers’ protests rested on strong unions, local organisation, and the economic capacity to sustain mobilisation for months. By contrast, what we see emerging now is networked, relatively leader-light, and often issue-specific,” he said.The CJP advantage is also organisational, he feels.“Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and other online platforms can connect previously unrelated groups rapidly. Mobilisation is, therefore, not only faster but more fluid. You do not necessarily need to build and register an organisation before launching a movement. Increasingly, the movement precedes the organisation,” Chandra adds.It is perhaps this realisation that has forced political parties to course-correct their mobilisation strategies.Rahul Gandhi, who faced criticism for prioritising his “Chhatron ki Goonj” campaign instead of backing the anti-NEET protests led by CJP, has now made a more direct attempt to help Congress enter the protest space. On October 4, he launched the ‘Satyagraha’ portal, which seeks to map protests across the country and connect people agitating over different issues.
Rahul Gandhi launched ‘Satyagraha’ website for information on current protests in India
For Chandra, the move shows that Congress has recognised the risks of ignoring protests that begin online and then spill onto the streets.“The Satyagraha platform strikes me as an attempt to situate the INC within an emerging ecology of anti-BJP protests. This is an interesting shift in political organisation. It takes the party from a traditional top-heavy high command structure to a node connecting diverse and dispersed struggles against the status quo.”
Beyond Jantar Mantar: The protests away from the spotlight
The high-decibel protests against Gyanesh Kumar or over NEET are only one part of the story, perhaps the more visible one. Away from the national spotlight, peaceful protests have been taking place across the country over a wide range of issues.They may be small, localised and often unconnected: women’s safety, land, displacement, water, facilities in schools, local governance and more. But together, they show how the street remains an important space for people trying to make themselves heard.In Delhi, young women have marched over women’s safety after cases of sexual violence. Demonstrations have also spread to cities including Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Patna and Dehradun, with protesters demanding safer public spaces and greater accountability from governments and police.
Protest on women’s safety in Delhi
In Madhya Pradesh’s Panna district, families affected by the Ken-Betwa river-linking project have revived their “Chita Andolan”. Protesters have slept on funeral pyres, stood in water and gone on hunger strike over compensation and rehabilitation.
Protesters stage the ‘Chita Andolan’ in Madhya Pradesh’s Panna district, demanding compensation and rehabilitation.
In Maharashtra’s Maval, farmers opposing the Pavana closed pipeline project announced a ‘jal samadhi’ agitation while also demanding rehabilitation for families that surrendered land for the Pavana dam decades ago.Water has also brought farmers onto the streets in Karnataka, where organisations in Krishna basin districts have opposed releasing reservoir water to Telangana, arguing that drought-hit areas within Karnataka should be given priority.At IIT Bombay too, students have turned their protest over the death by suicide of student Sahil Wakode into a hunger strike, with the JNU Students’ Union joining calls for action on the demands raised by protesters.The scale and demands vary sharply. Some protests involve thousands; others are confined to a university campus, a few villages or even a handful of streets. They may target the Centre, state governments, local administrations or institutions, but the impulse is the same: take the grievance to the street.
The street is old, the tools are changing
So, street politics is old, but the mobilisation techniques have changed. Earlier movements depended heavily on student organisations, unions, public meetings and, later, television coverage. Today, a protest can begin on Instagram or X before it reaches Jantar Mantar.Social media has also changed the language of protest. A slogan shouted on the street can become a meme within hours, while posters, one-liners, chants and songs travel far beyond the protest site.Recent demonstrations have offered plenty of examples. At women’s protests in Delhi, slogans such as ‘Ek kachori, do samosa, in mardon ka kya bharosa’ quickly travelled from the street to Instagram reels, using humour and rhyme to make a serious point about women’s safety and gender attitudes.At the Mumbai protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, placards carried lines such as ‘Gyanu must go’ and the Bollywood-inspired ‘Vote churaya mera, kisne o sanam? Gyanu ne’. Days later, Rahul Gandhi carried the Gen Z-style message “Gyanesh, it’s done bro!” during the INDIA bloc’s march to the Election Commission. Whether it will culiminate into effective but what it definitely did was make people stop and notice.
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And Gen Z may not be the youngest generation learning to protest.In Lucknow, around 200 schoolgirls blocked a road in the rain over a shortage of teachers and a damaged road leading to their school. In Fatehpur, around 1,000 students staged a four-hour protest demanding drinking water and repairs to classrooms. In several cases, authorities acted after the protests.What has changed is not the instinct to protest, but how quickly a grievance can find an audience and become visible. The slogan may now become a meme and the mobilisation may begin on a phone screen. The destination, however, is often still the same: the street.
