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A fifteen-year-old girl sits before her phone camera and records an apology to the prime minister for the abusive language she used during the student protests following the police action at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. It is an unusual image. A protest begins with a grievance. It should end with the state answering for its actions. Increasingly, it ends with protesters answering for themselves. Prime minister Narendra Modi responded through a series of Instagram reels, describing the language directed at him and his late mother as a “cultural shock”. The PM urged the society to guide such young people rather than condemn them. A protest over education and allegations of police violence has become a debate about the protesters themselves.

The sequence has become one of the most effective political scripts of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The first move is to classify the protester. In his Instagram reels, the prime minister described the students as “misguided youth”. Soon afterwards, social media accounts such as Bharat with RSS followed; asking if those gathered at Jantar Mantar were really students, or anti-social elements masquerading as protesters. Their civility, legitimacy and even identity has come under scrutiny. The protest had not changed, people protesting it had. Before their demands could be addressed, they first had to be identified.

When protesters first have to establish their are genuineness

During the farmers’ movement, the distinction was named. Modi separated the andolankari from the “andolanjeevi” – the legitimate protester from the parasitic one. The other described those who, in the PM’s telling, had turned protest into a profession by attaching themselves to every agitation. The distinction made legitimacy part of the debate itself. Before the government defended the farm laws, the farmers first had to establish that they were genuine protesters.

The protests against the Citizenship........

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