The resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan marks a monumental rupture in the long-standing immunity from accountability that the Narendra Modi government has enjoyed since it first came to power in 2014. 

This immunity from accountability has hitherto rested on three pillars: fear, the fettering of civil society and the free press, and the ability of the state to slot episodes of dissent into silos, keeping them from gaining mass empathy.

The extreme brutality deployed in the suppression of past protests, the long incarceration without trial of prominent activists under draconian laws, the use of bulldozers to punish activists, and the free hand given to right wing brutality by non-state actors have all contributed to a climate in which expressing dissent, especially for the marginalised, is an endeavour that is unlikely to be undertaken lightly. 

Further, the choking of civil society through restrictions on funding and the co-option by the government of the mainstream media has meant that the layer of society traditionally most likely to inform the public and organise collective action to demand accountability has been fettered. 

Finally, the ability of the government to slot episodes of dissent into silos in the public discourse preventing them from being framed in terms that would spark mass solidarity or general empathy is rooted in a deeper fault line in the Indian polity. Despite decades of nation building, organic empathy in India still tends to be reserved for the members of one’s own family, caste and community. In the absence of a larger sense of fraternity, a great deal of power to determine what is “national” and “anti-national” vests in the mainstream media, from which people take their cues on whom to sympathize with and whom to demonize. This has given the mainstream media a great deal of power to reroute the anger from policy failures into identity linked conflict. For example, anger about the education system or unemployment has hitherto been channeled into anti-reservation or linguistic assertions, where the fault is not of a state that has failed to provide opportunity but of someone else “stealing” that opportunity from you. Protests, even when successful, become so siloed that they do not shake the government itself. 

The Gen Z protests have managed to smash........

© The Wire