The Gen Z protest shattered the government’s illusions of invincibility. But the protests, which continue in a different form amongst students in Jharkhand, are not just a protest against a political dispensation or Narendra Modi. They are a protest against society itself, its current architecture and institutions, and all of us who have, in different ways, become complicit in them.

This might seem like a surprising claim. The core demands of the students are hardly radical: Most of them are not here to tear down capitalism. This is not 1968. The demands are ordinary: Institutional accountability, fairness in exams, quality of education, jobs. Under the surface, there are profound issues of unequal access, but these are not going to take the form of radical caste wars. Some students have, rightly, understood that their demands are even less likely to be met under conditions of creeping authoritarianism and communalism. They speak a resolutely constitutional language. The remedies they demand still reflect a faith in institutional process: Better appointments to UPSC, resignations of ministers. Why do these protests then feel like a more radical rebellion against society itself?

These protests are radical in different ways. The first is more psychological: It is a refusal to accept fear as a social norm. Some of that fear has been induced by the exacerbating authoritarianism of the Modi government. But behind it was a deeper social norm internalised in the generation of the students’ parents. This was the idea of survival or flourishing required accommodation.

The generation shaped by economic liberalisation developed its own anti-protest sensibility. The memory of student........

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