What India’s student uprising asks of Hindus

Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond

(RNS) — On July 20, I stayed up all night watching terrifying livestreams from Delhi. Student protesters including teenagers faced tear gas and police batons as they tried to march toward the parliament building demanding an accountable education system in the wake of repeated exam failures and a chief justice calling unemployed youth activists “cockroaches.” 

For more than a decade, through Hindus for Human Rights, I have tried to mobilize Hindus in India and the diaspora against the erosion of civil rights, minority rights and democracy under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, whose politics are rooted in the Hindu nationalist ideology of Hindutva. The ideology uses Hindu identity to justify majoritarian rule and can make equality feel, to some Hindus, less like justice than the loss of a privileged place.

Hindus must take note: This uprising is different. This protest reached deep into the Hindu constituency Hindutva claims — Hindu and middle-class families — and then refused the communal politics Hindutva offered.

This protest is different because it showed that Hindus can be mobilized in large numbers, in solidarity with people whom Hindu nationalism has taught us to see as outsiders.

For weeks, the protesters confronted failures that reached directly into their homes: leaks of exam answers, cancelled exams, joblessness and a disappearing future. Yet they did not turn that grievance into a narrow or exclusionary politics. 

Their Cockroach Janta Party began as satire after Chief Justice Surya Kant used the word “cockroaches” in remarks widely understood as contempt for unemployed youth. Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit Indian graduate student in Boston, answered with a meme: “What if all cockroaches unite?” The joke became a movement. Over weeks online and then in person, Indian youth built a movement in which Hindu identity, constitutional democracy, anti-caste politics and interfaith solidarity could share the same stage. 

At Jantar Mantar, Delhi’s most iconic road for protests near the parliament, protesters carried roses and copies of the constitution. They sang, danced and mocked a government that cultivated an image of invincibility. Some went on hunger strikes. After weeks of protest and the July 20 brutal police crackdown, Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25, a rare concession from a government that has seldom yielded to public pressure.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India has seen courageous resistance before. Muslim women sat round-the-clock through the winter at Shaheen Bagh to oppose the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. Students at Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University resisted police violence. Farmers camped outside Delhi for a year and forced the repeal of three agricultural laws. Dalit students have repeatedly challenged caste violence and institutional discrimination.

But the government and its supporters found ways to isolate each of those movements. Muslim protesters were called “jihadists.” Sikh farmers were called “Khalistanis.” Students were branded “urban Naxals,” a term trying to link them to far-left insurgencies. The identities of the protesters became a weapon used to distract from their demands.

The youth “cockroach” movement was harder to label and contain. Young Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits and people from many regions stood together. Student leaders shared space with young people who had never joined a protest. The Hindu epic “Ramcharitmanas” and the constitution appeared on the same stage. “Jai Bhim,” a salute to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who helped write India’s Constitution, rang out alongside bhajans and popular music. I watched on livestream a Muslim student dancing joyfully to a Hanuman bhajan. 

Hindutva politics often present constitutional secularism and Hindu civilizational identity as competing visions of India. Gandhi and Ambedkar, too, are frequently placed on opposing sides of India’s political memory. Yet at Jantar Mantar, protesters invoked both. Almost every speech began with “Jai Bhim,” a salute to Ambedkar. The hunger strike and other aspects of the peaceful protest or “satyagraha” invoked Gandhi. The students refused to be divided. 

They showed that Hindu participation in public life need not require anyone else’s humiliation. They also showed that young Hindus can recognize their own suffering without denying the harsher and more sustained repression faced by Muslims, Christians, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis and other dissenters and minorities. 

This is the lesson Hindus cannot afford to miss. The machinery of repression does not remain neatly confined to minorities. A state accustomed to demolitions, detention, surveillance and the criminalization of dissent will eventually turn those tools against anyone who threatens concentrated power. When Hindu students were beaten, many middle-class families witnessed the machinery of repression firsthand. That recognition should deepen solidarity, not shrink it.

State retaliation against students has continued unabated despite the minister’s resignation. Despite the government’s promise to withdraw cases against peaceful protesters, arrests, detentions and police violence have continued to be reported in several states. We have now seen footage of police brutality and arrests of students in Bihar, Goa, Assam and beyond. In fact, police in Bihar fired AK-47s at students.

India’s upper castes and middle classes are horrified by this violence because Hindus are not being spared. Unsurprisingly though, India’s minorities have faced the most sustained and severe forms of  extreme violence and state targeting.

The movement’s victory will be fragile if India celebrates one minister’s resignation and abandons students facing intimidation, surveillance or legal cases. It will become smaller if Hindu participants return home without acknowledging the Muslim, Dalit, Sikh and Christian movements that preserved India’s democratic conscience through far more isolating years. Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, Muslim student activists associated with the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act, remain imprisoned without trial. Their fate is part of this story too.

Hindus of conscience now have a responsibility. We can speak about these protests in temples, family WhatsApp groups, community organizations and diaspora institutions. We can support legal defense for targeted students, challenge the use of Hindu symbols to justify state violence and refuse efforts to split this movement along religious or caste lines.

At solidarity gatherings abroad, I saw Hindus who had rarely joined an Indian political protest stand beside Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and secular Indians. Some feared consequences for their families or their ability to return to India. They came anyway.

This uprising initiated by an international student in Boston has grown into a large and unusually inclusive movement in India and returned to our shores in the U.S. in the form of huge solidarity rallies. The hatred and violence of Hindutva — as well as the resistance to it — are undeniably global.

That global circulation matters because solidarity does not have to look the same everywhere. In Delhi, it meant sleeping at the protest site, enduring the heat, and practicing nonviolent resistance in the face of police brutality. In the diaspora, it meant turning up outside consulates, calling journalists, translating testimony, raising legal funds and speaking in family and community spaces where silence is often mistaken for neutrality. These acts are not equivalent, but they can strengthen one another.

The students also gave us a language that traveled. “Main bhi cockroach” (I’m a cockroach too) was funny, defiant and instantly understood. It allowed people to recognize themselves in the struggle before they had mastered every detail. Humor opened the door; the students’ courage and demands kept people there. That combination created something rare: a movement rooted in a specific injustice but capable of gathering a much wider public around questions of dignity, fairness and the future.

We should not underestimate the value of that wider public. Movements need committed organizers, but they also need to meet and welcome people where they are and mobilize them. The work now is to keep those relationships alive across borders and generations.

We in the diaspora now have a concrete example of a way to resist Hindutva together, refusing to be divided. 

The “Bhagavad Gita” names “abhaya,” freedom from fear, as the first quality of a divine nature. We saw it in young people carrying handmade signs, sharing food in the Delhi heat and returning after being beaten. My prayer is that Hindus in India and throughout the diaspora remain beside them. Let us carry Tulsidas and the constitution together. Let “Jai Bhim” be heard in our satyagraha. Let us defend those whom the state finds easiest to isolate. Let us help the opening created at Jantar Mantar grow into a country where no one has to starve, bleed or surrender years of freedom simply to be heard, and a diaspora and a world where we see the interconnection of all oppression and all resistance.

(Sunita Viswanath is the executive director of Hindus for Human Rights. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

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