Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has resigned, and the protest at Jantar Mantar that spread across the country has been called off after the government accepted the students’ principal demands. Students across the country are jubilant – as they should be. They have shown extraordinary courage and irreverence that has brought this government to its knees. But this is just the beginning. Before our screens switch back to GRWM (get ready with me) reels, before protest sites are cleared, we owe each other careful reflection on the events of this past month.

For me, this begins with a protest I attended at Bengaluru’s Freedom Park on Sunday, July 19. I carried a poster with two sides, one that read “MODI RESIGN” and the other, “FREE UMAR KHALID,” to this gathering. A young man, tall, muscled and wearing a blue Team India cricket jersey, walked up to me. Can we talk? he said. By bringing up all this – he gestured at my poster – you are diverting attention from the main cause.

I asked him a few times to explain what he understood “all this” to be. He deflected, instead cross-questioning me on what this protest was about. I was very clear on that, I maintained. But did he know the history of Umar and India’s student movement, of which the protests against the NEET irregularities are a continuation? He refused to answer. You are diverting attention, he insisted. This is only about the NEET paper leak and education.

He wasn’t the only one. Over the next few days, I was approached by many others. Some cautioned me against raising my poster, afraid that onlookers would suspect this movement of having “political” motives when, really, it should be focused on students and education – “apolitical” matters, in their understanding. But they weren’t wrong in worrying that the message would be used against the movement.

Then another friend sent me a link to a Reddit post featuring my poster (and my hands); users were debating removing “such protesters” from these public protests. While the Reddit debate seemed genuine, with many users upvoting comments to free Umar Khalid, I have also seen what appear to be less innocent, coordinated Instagram carousel posts, all sharing the same three pictures, two of my poster and another of the crowd, with alarmist captions suggesting that the protests are “funded” and support terrorism. On Thursday, July 23, a police officer grabbed and ripped apart a similar poster that my friend had taken to Freedom Park. Yesterday evening, the “Free Umar Khalid” Instagram account was blocked in India.

What about the fence-sitters, some people at Freedom Park asked me. They won’t understand why you’re bringing up Umar Khalid. The history of the contemporary student movement in India is in the public domain, I told them; they could ask their fence-sitting friends to do their homework. But now, seeing something I’ve seen before – legitimate disaffection with the state being rebranded as violence; student expression bent to fit narratives of “links” to outside actors; Adivasi livelihoods and jal, jangal, zameen erased by the rhetoric of “development” – I now feel the need to do my homework. And my assignment is to remember.

As I recall the student movement I participated in, I hope to remind today’s students – courageous, delightfully non-serious and angry – why we need to go beyond the resignation of one education minister, why we need to learn from the past, especially when armies of trolls attempt to silence it. The collective act of piecing the truth back together is the only antidote to systematised gaslighting.

Consider the Delhi police posting on X (formerly Twitter) that protests are being handled “professionally” and an “injured” Rapid Action Force (RAF) officer denying that the police brutalised students in Delhi – even as the internet is flooded with images of police personnel beating protesters on July 20. The pro-establishment media similarly rewrites events: “Thousands of protesters ran into police barricades, lathis and tear gas,” reads a front-page story on the Times of India. Such language suggests that protesters invited police brutality. It makes us question what we see and hear with our senses, what we believe in our hearts.

But the documentation of this violence might work against the state. These images can break our assumptions of those frequently painted as suspect simply for resisting far more ruthless state excesses. Think of the military raining pellets on young Kashmiris in 2016; opening fire on Manipuris earlier this month, resulting in the death of an eight-year-old; and of the police lathi-charging Adivasis peacefully protesting the Ken-Betwa Link Project on July 19.

Slow-mo reels of a student throwing tear-gas shells back at the RAF in Delhi receive thousands of likes, but a Kashmiri youth picking up a stone is seen as an act of radicalised terror. While we applaud the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) for demanding accountability from........

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