I have been watching silently. Video after video has appeared on my screen—students, medical college students, ex-army personnel, parents, public figures and ordinary citizens speaking against what they believe are the excesses of those in power. They have stood peacefully despite being lathi-charged and tear-gassed.
Like many others, I have struggled to make sense of it.
The power that some people wield appears almost untouchable. We have all seen moments of public outrage before. We have seen collective energy rise and then slowly disappear while institutions carry on almost unchanged.
Like many others, I found myself oscillating between hope and scepticism. Hope that ordinary people could move something that felt immovable; scepticism born from having seen too many moments of public outrage fade away with time. For three days those two voices argued inside me. Then I realised I was asking the wrong question.
Perhaps the more interesting question isn't whether these protests will succeed. Perhaps the more interesting question is whether they are already becoming something else.
A movement.
Looking through the lens I have used for years to study social change, six things stood out.
1. A movement is built on stories, not statements.
Movements don't spread because of official statements. They spread because people begin telling each other stories. This movement is being documented almost entirely by the people living through it.
A student filming from inside the crowd, a parent explaining why they showed up, a doctor recounting what they witnessed, a phone camera capturing what a television camera may never see.
Whether one agrees with every interpretation is almost beside the point. People are not waiting for institutions to tell their story. They are telling it themselves. Perhaps Gen Z understands something that institutions still don’t - that authentic and raw reality travels further than cleverly crafted messaging. Stories travel further than statements.
2. Compassion is not an emotion. It is infrastructure.
Almost every conversation around these protests eventually turns to one question. "Who is really behind this?” Some argue that political parties are taking advantage of the issue. Others argue that different organisations are using it to further their own agenda.
The political agenda is the weaker story here. The bigger story is that of compassion. And to every person who focuses their attention on the politics of it all, I wish to ask…
What is the agenda of compassion?
What is the agenda of the stranger who sent food to people they had never met? What is the agenda of the young person offering a pack of electrolytes to a celebrity twice their age, in the middle of the sweltering afternoon? What is the agenda of someone helping another person recover from tear gas or a woman who shields the crowd gathered in front of her as the police charge towards her with a lathi? The young woman who stops the Mumbai police vehicle full of young people detained while engaged in a peaceful protest and, when questioned, says, “someone has to protect our citizens; if there is no one doing it, I will.”
No one checked political affiliations before offering a meal. No one asked how someone voted before handing them a bottle of water.
Movements survive because compassion becomes infrastructure. It allows strangers to become a community. Perhaps compassion has always had an agenda. Its agenda is belonging.
3. A grim problem does not always have to be solved in a grim way.
One of the things I noticed years ago while studying movements was that people don't always gather around fear. Many a time they gather around hope. Sometimes around music and at times around shared rituals. Watching protestors sing, clap together, beat a tambourine, chant slogans and, in some of the most difficult moments, fall back on the national anthem while facing lathi charges, just to get a few minutes of respite since the police too is supposed to stay still while the national anthem is being sung, I realised something.
Power understands anger. It understands retaliation. Violence is a language institutions know how to respond to. It is far less fluent in dignity.
It takes very little effort to lash out when one is wronged. It takes extraordinary discipline to remain peaceful when violence would be the easier response. Perhaps joy, music and dignity are not distractions from movements. Perhaps they are what sustain them.
4. Women and children change the emotional centre of a movement.
There is a reason movements often change when women and children become visible participants.
Not because they are helpless. But because they change what everyone else sees. Anyone who has seen a mother carrying a child, young women standing in the front lines, teenage students refusing to move has shed several silent tears and spent sleepless nights in the past few days.
Because suddenly the conversation is no longer only about politics. It becomes about families and the futures of children and about the country people want their children to inherit.
Movements become harder to dismiss when they begin looking like society itself.
5. Social change requires social unity.
The most successful movements rarely begin because everyone agrees. They begin because enough people decide that one issue matters more than all the things that divide them.
Watching the crowds over the last few days, I saw students standing beside parents, doctors beside veterans, public figures beside ordinary citizens. Movements emerge when an issue stops belonging to one group and begins belonging to everyone.
That shift from my issue to our issue is perhaps the most important transition any movement can make.
6. The movement before the outcome.
Watching these protests, I found myself wondering whether we have placed too much responsibility on education alone. If young people are capable of thinking critically, questioning authority, documenting events responsibly, organising peacefully and refusing to answer violence with violence, then perhaps they have already learnt something profoundly important. The more urgent reforms may lie elsewhere—in politics, governance, public institutions and law enforcement. Because even the finest education system cannot flourish inside institutions that refuse accountability.
No one knows what these protests will achieve or whether the system will absorb them.
If we expect change to come about as an immediate outcome of these protests, we may be measuring success too narrowly.
Maybe the immediate outcome of such a movement is not that it ends up changing those in power. Maybe the first outcome is that it changes the people within it - when strangers become communities, when compassion starts to feel stronger than cynicism, when lived stories infiltrate the public narrative rather than lofty statements, when dignity becomes stronger than retaliation.
Perhaps every movement begins at the moment people decide that the cost of remaining silent has become greater than the cost of speaking up.
Not when power starts listening but when ordinary people begin behaving in extraordinary ways together.
And perhaps that is why movements have to rise from the ground. Institutions can support them or resist them and, on an odd occasion, even learn from them. But they cannot choreograph the extraordinary behaviours from ordinary people that give movements life.
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