On the afternoon of 25th July 2026, my friends and I were twenty minutes from the Jantar Mantar protest site, near Bangla Sahib Gurudwara, when a WhatsApp message flashed: “Pradhan resigned!!!”
The air in the car changed instantly. Relief that some accountability was finally being held, mixed with a strange sadness at missing the Gen Z protest’s final hours. We headed straight into the protest site anyway to celebrate.
What I saw that afternoon in-person, after seven weeks of watching this movement grow online from a meme into a national uprising, raised a question bigger than who won. The media consistently framed the Gen Z protest – demanding better educational reforms and the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Minister of Education – as a tug of war between youth and a resistant government.
But treating democratic politics as a contest, where one side’s win requires the other’s loss, misses something essential: a functioning democracy runs on mutual alignment, not total surrender. To see why, it’s worth looking at what actually happened and then at what certain political theories tell us about what holds a state together – and also what breaks it.
The Posters of Victory
Walking through Jantar Mantar, past rain-drenched tents being rebuilt and volunteers handing out food near police barricades, the posters stopped me. Written in bold letters was “Hum Jeet Gaye” – “We Won”.
For readers unfamiliar with the context: Jantar Mantar, India’s designated protest ground in central Delhi, had hosted a student-led movement since early June, triggered by the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) exam – India’s medical entrance exam paper leak. For hundreds of thousands of aspirants, many from families who’d spent scarce savings believing hard work would be rewarded, it was an utter failure of the education system.
The anger over the exam paper leak absorbed more grievances – discrepancies in marking in examinations, youth unemployment, and a sense that India’s institutions were failing the current generation. By July the movement had no single leader or demand, only a shared feeling of betrayal.
Standing before those posters, I felt the weight of the framing of the protest by the parties involved in it. The youth had won, meaning – by tug-of-war logic – the government had lost. But the deeper failure isn’t which side of the rope anyone ended up on. It’s that the conflict got structured as a rope at all.
A Body Divided, and the Armour of Coercion
The organic theory of the state likens government and citizens to a body – the state as head, people as limbs, and stability depending on their functioning relationship. That relationship strained badly this summer in India. When the Chief Justice compared unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” and the NEET scandal met dismissiveness instead of acknowledgement and accountability, young people stopped feeling like participants in the system and started feeling like outsiders to it. The state, in turn, read their dissent as a threat rather than a democratic signal – managing citizens as a problem to be dealt with rather than engaging them as partners to work along with. The us-versus-them framing the media amplified didn’t just describe this drift but accelerated it.
From July 18th to 20th, that drift hardened into force. Sonam Wangchuk, fasting in solidarity with students, was forcibly removed and detained in a hospital against his will. A “Sansad Chalo” march, from the protest site to the parliament, was met with baton charges and tear gas, injuring over a hundred, while eighteen metro stations were shut to halt the protests.
This whole series of incidents throws light on Gramsci’s idea of “armour of coercion”. A government ideally rules through consent – people believing it acts in their interest. When the government turns instead to batons and blocking metro stations, that consent collapses. We had entered what Gramsci calls the integral state: power sustained not through legitimacy but through patronage and force, where dissenters are “othered” and are cast as enemies of order rather than citizens exercising a right.
Moving Beyond the Tug of War
By July 25th, “Pradhan Go Back” campaigns and our Prime Minister “forgiving” students for their anger had turned the relationship into a contest of egos. The resignation was a genuine win for student power. But the tug of war itself was the failure. A country and its citizens shouldn’t be pitted against each other but should work in alignment.
My experience on July 25th taught me that while the resignation was a success for student power, the ‘tug of war’ itself is a sign of failure. A country and its citizens don’t deserve to be in a competition with each other. We deserve a mutual alignment.
What happens when a government learns to hear that generation only when they are loud enough? It is a recurring crisis which has been deferred and not resolved.
A tug of war ends when one side wins. What India’s students, and, I would argue, young people in every democracy navigating similar fractures, actually deserve is something harder to achieve and far more important than a single victory: a system that never makes the rope necessary in the first place.
Deepika Vijwani is a dual-major student in Media and Psychology at Christ University, NCR, and a member of the Centre for Social Policy Research (CSPR). She has worked with The New Indian Express, iTV Network, RT, and Analogue Legal, including on the landmark New Delhi Railway Station stampede case
