I haven’t bothered to feel guilty about how many hours I’ve spent glued to my phone over the last week. There was a revolution to keep track of, the spectacle of watching a world turn on its axis, and where else was that available but Instagram? Amid an auto-refreshing feed populated by police brutality, chaos, tear-gassing, and stampede-like situations, a video edit titled “This Genre of Woman” has made it to the top over and over again—and I have watched it every single time.
At first, there is a bindi-ed young woman—20? 21?—speaking with an enraged steely evenness. “Democracy hai, naukar hain wo humare. Kyun nahi denge isteefa? Inke baap ka desh hai?” she asks. Why won’t Dharmendra Pradhan resign, he’s here to serve us. Then the cuts quicken; other women now, at other barricades, stopping police vans and shoving back at khaki, fighting, chanting, faces flung open and howling, all set to a remix of the old cabaret number, Hungama Ho Gaya.I keep going back to the video because I still can’t quite believe what India’s young men and women have been able to accomplish in just a few days. It’s the butterfly effect made manifest. In a little over a month, a movement that began with the Chief Justice of India making an offhand slur about Indian youth being cockroaches has forced a Union education minister to resign. They have prised out of this government the one thing it is loath to hand a crowd: a concession. Last week, I ended my column wondering whether the Cockroach Janta Party and India’s students would be able to outlast a state that had all the time in the world. But India’s Gen Z weren’t, as it turned out, going to give power the pleasure of finding out. By Sunday afternoon, they had answered it.
