The media missed the biggest story: How a generation fed on consumerism and hate found its voice

There were broken heads and broken limbs, but their spirit remained unbroken. If there is anything we can conclude about the ongoing student protests in New Delhi and other cities like Mumbai, is that there is a churning amongst India’s youth that has taken everyone by surprise – politicians, mainstream media and perhaps even the thousands of young participants.

What these last three days, since the July 20 march to Parliament called by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has also established is that the fulminations on mainstream broadcast media simply don’t matter to the young. They have their own channels where they access news and information, they have devised their own forms of communication, and they have found innovative ways to register their disgust and fury against a government that refuses to accept responsibility for the mess it has made of the education system.

If you’ve been watching independent news platforms and YouTube channels these last few days, you would realise that this generation, that has suffered an education system that emphasises rote learning instead of questioning, is now asking questions, fearlessly. The videos streaming on social media platforms illustrate repeatedly the clarity and the conviction of young women and men, coming from all parts of the country, who are expressing their frustration.  

Watch this video of two young women, first time at a protest, speaking to Manisha Pande. While one came to the protest with her parents’ backing, the other defied her parents. When the former asked her mother whether she was worried about the possibility of violence and a lathi charge by the police, she says her mother told her there was nothing to worry, that she would not die.

In fact, the number of young articulate women who participated in the protests, not just in New Delhi, but also other cities, is one of the most notable aspects of these protests.  

Here’s another video by Ajit Anjum, whose YouTube channel is popular, features young women who are graduates from IIM Kolkata and have jobs but still decided to join the protest to show their solidarity.  

An iconic image, shared widely on social media, is that of a young woman, wearing a hoodie, who stands in front of a police van loaded with young protestors who had been detained in Mumbai. She refuses to move until the police release all of them. 

Here’s the story of this young woman, Rhiya Ahir, in Hindustan Times. Asked why she took the risk, she says, “I couldn’t help myself. Their chants—they pulled me towards them. I was like, if I’m going for the protest, it starts from here. They’re taking them away, and I cannot let that happen.” 

And a video report by Sohit Mishra that caught the moment. 

Also, read this story in Indian Express about three young people who travelled from Mumbai at their own expense to join the protest. One of them told the reporter:  “It was disturbing to see what happened with Wangchuk sir. He wasn’t fasting because he had anything to do with NEET. He was demanding accountability from the government. Then I saw videos calling him a Chinese agent. That was the moment I decided to go to Delhi.” 

Social media is spilling over with much more of this. Yet, little of it is reflected in India’s mainstream broadcast media which continues to resort to its tired format of talking heads holding forth with opinions that do not count as far as the young people on the streets are concerned. They also continue to flag predictable conspiracy theories that are all too familiar to those who watch these channels. 

This latest demonstration by young people has convincingly established not just the irrelevance of these mainstream television channels but also their continued abandonment of basic journalistic norms. The job of journalists is to report and record events, especially when they are happening right under their noses in the national capital, rather than manufacturing narratives that suit the government of the day.  

Also, the fact that the demonstrations continued even after the brutal police crackdown on unarmed peaceful protestors, memorialised in hundreds of videos that recorded the violence as it happened, underlines yet again that irrespective of whether India’s mainstream media reports and thereby amplifies such protests or not does not matter anymore. In fact, on July 21, even those who had been injured the previous day and many more who had never participated in a protest, turned up.

In many ways, for mainstream media, this ought to be viewed as an inflection point, one that they must heed. Instead of dumbing down “content” to appeal to the kind of young people who are collectively labelled as Gen Z, a representative sample evident amongst the protestors, the media needs to wake up and hear their voices.  They assume that the younger generation is only interested in food, fashion and films. This stereotype is evident in how some newspapers have changed their content to appeal to a younger audience.

Yet, what we have seen is that the young women and men who have taken to the streets in these last days, triggered principally by the leaks in competitive examination papers and how this is affecting their future, are not blind to other issues in the country. They are not afraid to articulate their criticism of the powerful. In their own way, they are political even if they do not subscribe to a particular political ideology. To reduce them to a distracted generation only obsessed with themselves is clearly to misread the reality.

In fact, this is the big story that any self-respecting media house needs to pursue now. How did a generation, fed on narcissism, consumerism and hate filled political narratives over the last decade, still emerge as one that is unafraid to fight on the streets for what they believe are their rights? 

As Arundhati Roy describes July 20 in her evocative essay in The Wire:

“The cockroaches took the capital city by storm. They came by train, by bus, by air, by metro, their numbers increasing by the hour. Hours before the first rays of sun lightened Delhi’s monsoon skies, they began to pour into Jantar Mantar in the tens of thousands. By sunrise it was clear that a generation of desperate and furious young people who have seen their future snuffed out before their eyes, was going to reclaim what their parents and grandparents’ generations had conceded: our dignity as a people and as a country. Our rights as citizens of a democracy. The protesters exorcised the corrosive fear that has become second nature to us all with their sheer courage and grace.”

This is a generation that has seen the price of asking questions and of speaking out. That has understood that this government does not hesitate to use surveillance and police violence to control and squash any dissent. Yet, as this report in Scroll tells us, despite the Mumbai police using surveillance to prevent some students from participating in the protests, thousands turned up for two consecutive days. 

Neither a violent state machinery, nor the fear of arrest appears to have squashed the effervescence, the humour, the creativity seen in songs, poetry and hand-made posters, that have been evident in the protests. How did this happen?

This is the story that the Indian media has missed.  

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