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It is a little disorienting for long time observers of Indian politics to wake up to a world in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suddenly believes that profanity is unacceptable. 

While many of us have cautioned about the degradation of the public discourse in India over the last decade, most of it has fallen on deaf years. For a decade, the BJP’s online armies have used profanity to intimidate, silence and control public spaces. As an Indian woman online, it is next to impossible to escape being targeted by the BJP and their followers with gender linked slurs. Their preferred tactic of doxxing, accompanied by the unleashing of a horde of accounts spewing profanity, has successfully forced many young women (often Muslim) offline. Slurs like k*tu*, j*hadi and rice-b*g flood the replies of minorities who stand against them. A whole host of casteist slurs are used to target Dalits. 

Offline, right-wing groups have used DJs to blast profane songs outside Muslim places of worship on Hindu festivals. Kunal Purohit’s documentation of viral Hindutva pop anthems offers several examples of the use of profanity set to music to inspire violence and recruit fresh followers. The BJP has even gone so far as to use profanity to silence Muslims in the Indian parliament. 

It is safe therefore to conclude that the BJP’s sudden outrage about profanity in the public discourse is not driven by any moral concern for the quality of political discourse in India. It is simply the masters of using profanity to establish dominance over public spaces, fearing a loss of their monopoly over it. 

While the BJP’s about turn on profanity is explicable, many liberal watchers have been quick to criticise young protestors and draw an equivalence between the BJP’s use of profanity to harass and intimidate and the language used by India’s Gen Z in their protests last week. This misunderstands the role of profanity in protest. 

The role of profanity in protest

Scholars studying the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests noted that profanity, instead of being a distraction from the cause (the conventional wisdom at the time) did in fact serve a threefold practical function to protestors. First, it allowed then to escalate from generic assertions of demands to targeted aggression, without indulging in physical violence. Second, it helped in collective identity building, where the adoption of the profane slogan helped protestors identify the movement’s actual participants, and demarcate between themselves and the rest of society. Finally, as swear words themselves are emotive, they did not just express strong feeling,........

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