Echoing at Jantar Mantar, the loudness of feeling unheard
At New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a protest that began with NEET has become something much larger—a generation asking to be heard.
The first thing you notice is the smell, and it comes before the slogans, before the stage, before the sea of phones raised towards it. It’s the sweat under T-shirts that have been dampened by the rain, and the rajma rice that’s gone bad in the paper plates exposed to the hot afternoon sun. It’s also the overripe bananas and wet cardboard, and the sharp antiseptic smell of disinfectant someone has sprayed.
Beneath all the other stench, patiently and distinctly, there’s the smell of garbage—the sum total of the thousands of bodies who have been living, eating and sleeping on this stretch of central Delhi for days on end.
Ragpickers move through this haze, backs bent beneath sacks nearly as large as them, treading silently between the legs of protesters who barely register him. From behind comes a young woman carrying a black trash bag of her own. “Anyone has any trash?” she calls out to the crowd. She is not a municipal worker, and nobody has assigned her this task. She bends for a plastic bottle, then another, then a paper cup, a biscuit wrapper, a disposable spoon half-buried in the dust. “Someone has to,” she says, when asked why.
Her name is Soumya; she is 25 and lives in Dwarka. Every morning, she takes the Metro to Rajiv Chowk and walks the short distance to Jantar Mantar, arriving not as an organiser but simply as one more person who decided to show up. “Thousands of fellow protesters are coming here all day and night,” she says by way of explanation. “We are here to protest, not litter. We gotta clean up the trash ourselves.”
Step back and the entire protest feels like it’s being driven by people like her. One group takes turns distributing drinking water. Another hands out bananas from crates. Two young women are carrying cartons of Parle-G biscuits like torches above their heads. A man is carrying two metal containers of khichdi on his forearms and yelling out for people who haven’t eaten.
Another group, near Kerala House in the vicinity, is unwrapping samosas that are still hot enough to fog up the plastic wrap. The speakers from the stage are not revolutionaries—they are tired but patient event organisers. “Thank you for your support. Please move slowly. Please form a line.”
Young men are standing next to the growing lines, waving hand fans over the heads of strangers who are wilting in the July heat. So much food is being delivered that organisers go up on stage to make an unusual appeal: “Please do not order any more food here.”
At a protest with a moral core of an ongoing hunger strike, it is a strange thing to have to say; but strange contradictions are how Jantar Mantar seems to operate. There’s plenty here, and there’s lack. Hope and a bone-deep weariness. Rage and an almost-shocking tenderness. Phones, and phones, and phones.
A young man speaks into an Instagram Live broadcast, standing inches from a police barricade, his voice pitched somewhere between urgency and performance. Twenty feet away, another protester is filming him for a YouTube channel. Nearby a woman interviews two students for her own page while a fourth person quietly films the interview itself.
At times it feels as though everyone here is documenting everyone else in an unbroken, recursive loop. The camera has stopped being a passive witness to this protest. It has become one of its principal instruments—as essential to the machinery of the thing as the loudspeakers or the food queues.
At first glance, this is a protest about the NEET examination. Spend an hour here, though, and that tidy explanation begins to come apart at the seams. Ask people why they’ve come and very few of them begin with examination papers. They begin, instead, with life itself. “Nothing works,” says Samreen, 26, barely pausing for breath between one grievance and the next. “The air your breathe is poison. Exams don’t happen. And when they happen, the results don’t come out for years. There are no jobs. No one listens. And when you want to talk to them, they unleash the police. Are we criminals?”
Air pollution, examinations, unemployment, police violence—in her telling, none of these exist any longer as separate political issues. They have fused into a single, continuous experience: the sense that the institutions meant to serve her have simply stopped listening—that is if they were ever listening at all.
Stay long enough, and that one thing unwinds into strands. The first: a fair chance is now a thing of the past. A leak, an exam that is cancelled at the last minute, a result that can take months or years to come in—and years of preparation are lost. The risk has been inculcated in families without raising awareness of it—the families paying for the coaching fees, for the rented room close to the centre, for the extra attempt, and another attempt.
The second is work, or the search for it or its absence: a job a degree used to provide is no longer there, and the trajectory of career has become more complex. The third is the silence that surrounds failure—if a paper leaks or a result is mishandled, the institutions concerned are slow and slow and slow to explain, to fix, to hold anyone responsible.
The fourth is future: economic insecurity plus the more difficult fears of heat, pollution and water scarcity, precipitated by a climate that is increasingly hostile. The fifth is the worst: that the state does not even speak their language, but speaks down to them, with social media bans, restrictions on internet, as if they were children to be cared for and not responded to, citizens to be looked down upon.
A few metres away stands Khalid, a tailor from Bhajanpura. He has not come alone—his family is beside him, a small unit standing firm against the crush of the crowd. “My sisters appeared for NEET in 2024 and nothing happened,” he says. “Today I am here with my whole family. I am here for the future of my 10-year-old daughter.”
The examination that brought him here originally belonged to his sisters. Now, somehow, without anyone quite deciding it, it belongs to his daughter too—a grievance inherited before she has even sat the exam.
This is perhaps why the crowd at Jantar Mantar refuses to sort itself into any of the usual categories. Engineering aspirants stand beside software engineers who have come straight from the office. Parents sit cross-legged next to undergraduates. A father who is here only because her daughter living in the US implored her to. Young professionals in ironed office shirts share space with teenagers in college T-shirts.
Former students who haven’t set foot at a protest in years find themselves back on Delhi’s most storied protest ground, pulled by something they can’t quite name. “We were also students until a few years ago,” says Kanishka, who now works in real estate. “We know how hard it is to secure a job after you graduate. When we saw how students were beaten up and chased with lathis and tear-gassed yesterday, we decided that we must come here and show support.” The lathi-charge she is describing travelled through phones long before it ever reached television.
The old iconography of Indian dissent hasn’t really vanished. Pictures of Bhagat Singh hang from the railings. Che Guevara peers out from a poster taped to a lamppost. Gandhi watches, as he always does, from a banner strung between two trees. But these images feel strangely muted here, more backdrop than statement.
The loudest language at Jantar Mantar is something else entirely—memes, reels, livestreams, selfie videos, hashtags scrawled on cardboard beside hand-drawn slogans. The grammar of protest has changed, and you can watch it changing in real time: every few minutes someone grabs a fellow protester for a quick interview. A young woman finishes recording a reel and, almost without pausing, turns her phone around to watch someone else’s.
“This whole movement is driven by social media,” says Saurav Das, spokesperson for the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). “People are coming here and finding out for themselves what the truth is. Traditional media’s time is up. The time is coming when they will have to answer to the public.”
The CJP claims its Instagram account was banned. But that’s just one account. “Uth be s**ley, bahut ho gaya tera”—a viral meme doing the rounds, reportedly quoting a policeman as he allegedly hauled Sonam Wangchuk up from the ground at Jantar Mantar the other day. Roughly translated: “Get up—you’ve had enough.”
Social media has since been flooded with protesters turning the line into a protest motif imploring people to stand up for what is right. “My Ex and Modi are Heartless”, a young man brandishes a hand-made poster as policemen watch on. This is content they don’t expect, neither do they need, the mainstream media to amplify.
The distrust of television, when it surfaces, is impossible to miss. A reporter from a national channel begins speaking into his camera, composed and practised, and before he can finish his first line, a voice cuts through the noise around him: “Kyun jhooth bol rahe ho?”
The reporter tries to continue. Others take up the shout. Some television journalists have complained of being heckled here over the past week, and the protesters don’t deny it—if anything, they seem faintly puzzled that anyone would expect them to rely on television at all, when they have built audiences of their own.
And still the food keeps arriving. Near one barricade, Dipak Bharti and a few friends are handing out samosas, tray after tray. “This is the least we can do,” he says. The movement has its own small ecosystem: those who cannot protest send food, those who cannot give speeches clean up, those who cannot stay all day transfer money instead.
The protest feeds itself, sometimes almost too literally—this week the CJP removed its own spokesperson after a video of her eating a burger during the protest went viral—the leadership calling it insensitive while Wangchuk and others continued their hunger strike a short distance away. Even eating, just as fasting, has become political here.
“I want to live. I want to return to my students, to education, and to the work that has defined my life. But I cannot do so at the cost of the very young people for whom this movement began,” Wangchuk says in an open letter addressed to Union ministers J.P. Nadda and Jitendra Singh, from his ICU bed at Medanta Hospital, Gurugram. “The future of our democracy depends not on how it treats those who agree with it but on how it treats its young citizens when they dare to speak with courage, hope and conviction.”
Standing in the drizzle, handing out little packets of Parle-G with two friends is Tia, 27, originally from Nagaland. She has lived in Delhi for eight years now, studying sociology first at Ashoka University and later at Ambedkar University, and has seen her share of protests in that time. This one, she says, feels different. “This is the first time I see a protest, a cause I can identify with,” Tia says, and then explains what she means by it.
“All protests have always been about political parties wanting this or that. I won’t say this is not political; but this is not about any political party. And its issues I understand because they affect me.”
That sentiment recurs, in one form or another, through conversation after conversation. People arrive speaking about examinations and leave, an hour later, talking about governance, jobs, pollution, dignity, and about simply being heard.
From Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, Deepak Kunju has travelled hundreds of kilometres with a friend to stand here, and his demand, when he finally states it, sounds almost painfully modest. “You are unable to give jobs; at least hold exams properly so children can stand on their own two feet,” he says. Then, after a pause that seems to carry more weight than the sentence before it, he adds: “At least admit that you are wrong.”
Not victory. Not revolution. Recognition—the simple, elusive act of being told that something went wrong, and that it mattered.
“I am not fighting for myself. I am not a NEET aspirant,” says Shreeja, a 23-year-old who arrived with two friends from Thiruvananthapuram to take part in Abhijeet Dipke’s ‘Chalo Sansad’ march. There is Prakash and his friend from Telangana, waving handwritten posters in Telugu. “They are forcing us to breathe dirty air, forcing us to use faulty petrol in our cars, cutting down forests…They will sell the country behind our backs if we don’t stand up now,” says Prakash, who identifies himself as an aspiring actor.
CJP’s social media channel daily shows visuals of protests in small scales happening elsewhere in India—Indore, Pune, Goa, and elsewhere, by people who couldn’t be in Delhi.
When evening settles at Jantar Mantar, people change, but not the crowd. New clusters continue to sprout from Rajiv Chowk Metro station, flaring in the floodlights. The waste pickers continue to pack huge bags with plastic bottles. The volunteers continue to wave fans over queues. The loudspeakers are continuously thanking people for coming. The more phones stream into the dusk, the more reels are recorded, the more strangers are pulled aside for interviews. Meanwhile, in the midst of the mass, Soumya is still collecting garbage.
The reason for the protest, officially, is the examination which first brought these thousands together, and the demands are specific: accountability for the failures of the examination, resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan and justice for students who feel failed by the system that was supposed to serve them.
However, spend a day at Jantar Mantar and another story emerges from behind the official one. This is a generation whose frustration is no longer contained in any one issue, whose politics has been pieced together from lagging exam results and dwindling employment, from polluted air and police batons, from viral videos and a long and deep sense that the institutions that are over them speak at them, not to them.
As Wangchuk put it in his letter: “Their only ‘offence’ has been to raise their voice for a fair and accountable education system.”
The slogans matter. The speeches matter. But the defining sound of this protest may turn out to be something quieter than either—the click of a phone camera switching to record as thousands of young Indians decide, one livestream at a time, that they will tell their own story before anyone else gets the chance to tell it for them. And beneath all that, one question: why won’t you just stop and listen?
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