Hum Dekhenge: Student Uprisings in the Age of Hindutva
A story of revolutionary and security internationalisms.
Police use teargas to control the crowd during the student protests at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, India, July 22, 2026. Image: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
Thousands of students filled the streets of India in July 2026 in one of the largest student mobilisations since Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. As students waged their protests, confronting police and the Rapid Action Force (RAF), a paramilitary unit of the Central Reserve Police Force, the youth did not invent a new language of resistance. Leftist students reached for the voices of South Asia’s courageous revolutionaries and poets that had long animated the subcontinent’s struggles against British colonialism, caste and class oppression, and sectarianism. Students chanted: “Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution),” “Jai Bhim (Hail Dr. B.R. Ambedkar),” “Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai (The desire for self-sacrifice now fills our hearts),” and numerous other chants. People also recited the Punjab-born Pakistani communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Bol, ke lab āzād hain tere” (Speak, for your lips are free) and “Hum Dekhenge” (We Shall See). These slogans and poetic verses were acts of historical remembrance, situating the student struggle against a corrupt and right-wing, neo-fascist BJP Hindutva regime within a radical tradition of rebellion. They were carried by left student organisations and taken up by many who had never belonged to one.
The student uprising, or Cockroach protests, sits at the intersection of two transnational circulations. One is the long, revolutionary internationalism of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist emancipatory political memory and praxis: a generation that never lived through these moments powerfully invoked Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry, Hasrat Mohani and Bismil Azimabadi’s Urdu poetics, Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary vocabulary, and B.R. Ambedkar’s anti-caste jurisprudence. The left invoked them to position themselves within a historical continuum to reimagine an India free from religious hatreds, inequality, oppressive caste and class relations and patriarchal beliefs, intensified since 2014. The other is the security internationalism of counter-insurgency doctrines: the way policing techniques, surveillance technologies, counter-insurgency training, weapons, and biometric infrastructure move between states through trade fairs, bilateral agreements, and homeland security consultancy, carrying an ideology of population management, as surely as the chants and poetry carry an ideology of freedom. Students in India inherited the first circulation by remembering and invoking it. The extreme state violence that met them in the street was built, in traceable part, by the second circulation.
Student Protests Under BJP Authoritarianism
In May 2026, India’s National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled the NEET medical entrance examination, the gateway through which more than 2.2 million students a year seek a medical career, after a paper leak. Over a dozen students committed suicide, turning the exam scandal into a national crisis. Competitive examinations in India for all professions are built on years of hard work and immense family sacrifice. For poor and middle-class families, preparing for them often means investing heavily, taking on debt, selling scarce assets, relocating to coaching centres, and forgoing essential life necessities, all sustained by the unpaid social reproduction of family members who provide emotional support, and domestic labour that falls disproportionately on women. The leaks devalued all of it, and broke the promise that education was a path to employment and a secure future.
“The protesters came from every background: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists; upper-caste and Dalit; middle-class and poor; women, men, and gender-nonconforming folks; high schoolers, farmers, workers, and the parents of protesters. ”
Out of that anger came the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), launched in May 2026 by Abhijeet Dipke as a satirical response to the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who had dismissed India’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites of society.” The cockroach became a powerful symbol because protesters reclaimed an image of disposability and transformed it into one of persistence: the people treated as unwanted would keep returning. By early June a protest encampment was put in place at Jantar Mantar, India’s most prominent protest site near Parliament in Delhi, which was joined within days by the All India Students Association (AISA), the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), and other left student unions and organisations, turning it into a mass movement demanding reform of the examination system and the resignation of BJP Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. By late June the climate and education activist Sonam Wangchuk had joined the sit-in from Ladakh with an indefinite hunger strike, alongside several AISA students. On July 18, on the 21st day of that hunger strike, Delhi police forcibly removed him and took him to Safdarjung Hospital, which ignited the protests further. Two days later, more than 10,000 people were marching on Parliament under the banner “Chalo Sansad” (Let’s go to Parliament) and were met with extreme state violence and the shutdown of mobile internet services by the government. This ignited further nationwide protests.
The protesters came from every background: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists; upper-caste and Dalit; middle-class and poor; women, men, and gender-nonconforming folks; high schoolers, farmers, workers, and the parents of protesters. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) opened overnight to shelter and feed the crowds, in keeping with the Sikh tradition of langar (serving free communal food), and mosques did the same. The corporate media, the shouting mouthpieces of the government known as the “godi media,” tried to brand the movement as foreign-funded by Pakistan, China, or George Soros; yet the students’ control of their own narrative broke the attempt. In an interview with Democracy Now, Arundhati Roy described a large first-time cohort of middle-class and upper-caste Hindu students, many from households that vote BJP. Some were the children and grandchildren of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sympathisers, the right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation that popularised Hindutva as a political ideology through a project of transforming India into a Hindu nation. This was the most destabilising development for the government. A movement built from the state’s “usual suspects” is easy to dismiss as ideological opposition, a movement that includes the sons and daughters of the BJP’s own voter base is a fracture inside the base itself. The protests also exposed the class contradictions of India’s education system. What began as a revolt against examination corruption became a struggle over neoliberal capitalism in which education had grown privatised, expensive, and insecure with high unemployment and an economic crisis that has captured the nation since the BJP came to office. In naming the gap between the promise of meritocracy and the lives of millions of students, left student organisations turned an educational grievance into a broader struggle over class, caste, labour, inequality, and fascism.
Political graffiti, protest slogans and spray-painted messages cover a boundary wall near the site of the students’ protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, July 2026. Image: Sayyed Abuzar Ali
For 12 years, the BJP’s governance has run on a specific architecture: Hindus and Muslims cast as the primary antagonists, with Dalits, Sikhs, and other communities in turn pitted against a Hindu centre, so that any demand to hold the government accountable could be deflected into religious grievance instead. That architecture has been enforced through a climate of sectarian polarisation and fear by Hindutva mob violence aimed at intimidating those who challenge the government or assert their rights; police complicity in violence against non-Hindus; a corporate media apparatus and BJP IT cell that together amplify the state’s narrative, producing years of fear and self-censorship. The left student unions refused the deflection, communal hatreds, and Hindutva fascism. Corruption in an exam system is not a Hindu-Muslim question, and the large coalition that formed around it was proof that the divide in Modi’s India could be crossed. One chant in particular illustrated this point: “Jab jab Modi darta hai, Hindu-Muslim karta hai” (Whenever Modi is afraid, he turns to Hindu-Muslim politics). Neha Bora, AISA’s National President, a hunger-striker and a leading organiser of the protests, accused the government of trying to recast the student movement as a communal one.
Humour, memes, masks, ridicule, and profanity punctured the BJP’s carefully crafted image and aura of masculine and religious authority that it has spent years and vast resources cultivating. Street art and protest signs caricatured Modi alongside Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, two corporate oligarchs central to the consolidation of Indian monopoly capital. This imagery drew on an iconography of crony capitalism that has circulated in Indian protest culture since Punjab’s farmers burned effigies of the same two men in 2020. Protesters traced the education crisis to the corporate influence of these billionaires, and to the pracharaks (RSS organisers) installed across the country’s key institutions, particularly educational institutions fully captured by the BJP who are destroying the education system. For the youth, this was evidence that their generation had no future under the present order. The culture of resistance the student protests produced became one of the sharpest challenges the BJP has faced. On July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan, a key party strategist and one of Modi’s most reliable cabinet colleagues resigned. Since 2014 the BJP had conceded no ministerial resignation to protest or opposition demand. The student movement generated the people power that forced the regime to bend.
Revolutionary Internationalism: The Poets and Revolutionaries Students Invoked
““Inquilab Zindabad,” first coined by the Urdu poet, anti-colonial leader and freedom fighter Hasrat Mohani, was adopted by the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who popularised the slogan in the Central Legislative Assembly of the British Raj in 1929, before he was hanged at 23 for resisting British colonial rule alongside two of his comrades.”
Several chants and poems recited at the student protests carried a longer, border-crossing history. That history had been quietly edited out of this generation’s school curricula. A decade of saffronisation of education and the curriculum through BJP-led textbook revisions has trimmed or removed chapters on: Mughal history, the 2002 Gujarat massacre, the post-independence ban on the RSS following Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the later ban after the Babri Masjid demolition, secularism, democracy, dissent, caste oppression and Dalit movements, and environmental issues, while expanding narratives centred on Hindu civilisational identity and mythology. Combined with privatisation, the expansion of the coaching industry, and repeated examination failures, the curriculum became another site through which the BJP government sought to shape both knowledge and citizenship. In such a context, reaching for B.R. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Hasrat Mohani, Bismil Azimabadi, and Faiz was not only paying homage, it was a revolutionary recovery of praxis.
“Inquilab Zindabad,” first coined by the Urdu poet, anti-colonial leader and freedom fighter Hasrat Mohani, was adopted by the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who popularised the slogan in the Central Legislative Assembly of the British Raj in 1929, before he was hanged at 23 for resisting British colonial rule alongside two of his comrades. Singh’s own political formation was itself an act of circulation; he was influenced by the Russian Revolution, Marxism, anti-imperialism, socialism, Irish revolutionaries, and corresponded with an international network of anti-colonial radicals, and understood the Indian freedom struggle as one front in a wider world war against empire.
Another revolutionary refrain associated with Singh, “Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna” (“the desire for self sacrifice”), was written around 1921 by the Muslim poet Bismil Azimabadi and later popularised by the revolutionary Ram Prasad Bismil, a leader of the Hindustan Republican Association, which Singh belonged to. Carried into the revolutionary movement by figures executed by the British including Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan and Singh, the poem became an anthem of resistance and a shared revolutionary vocabulary that crossed social, political and religious boundaries.
The RSS did not participate in the freedom struggle that produced these anti-colonial revolutionaries; its founding texts, on the contrary, drew admiringly on European fascism, particularly Nazism, and its early leadership counselled cadres to stay out of India’s anti-colonial movement because Hindu nationalism’s real enemy was internal, not British. What distinguishes the RSS Hindutva fascism and governance from ordinary right-wing authoritarianism is an organised paramilitary movement older than the Indian republic itself that has spent a century building towards state capture rather than merely winning an election.
“Layered with these slogans were also Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s verses, “Bol,” first published in 1941 during British colonial rule, and “Hum Dekhenge” (We Shall See) written under Pakistani martial law in 1979 and later banned by General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. ”
Within this context, when students recited slogans coined, written, and chanted by some of the subcontinent’s most beloved revolutionaries, figures whose anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-caste traditions sit uneasily with the RSS’s own historical and ideological inheritance, they exposed a documented rupture in the ruling party’s claim to represent the nation. As the government denounced protesting students as “anti-national” and “terrorists,” these chants reclaimed the language and memory of India’s anti-colonial struggle. Not everyone welcomed that inheritance fully. The CJP’s leadership appealed to protesters to hold several approved slogans, dropping “Azaadi” (Freedom)— a historic anti-colonial cry against the British, given renewed political force in the Kashmir Valley — to avoid handing the government material for “negative narratives.” The appeal did not hold. Where the CJP’s leadership kept its distance from the question of Hindutva, Neha Bora told a public gathering that Hindutva and the RSS had to be uprooted from Indian soil.
Other frequently recited slogans were “Jai Bhim,” and “Educate, Agitate, Organize,” in doing so the students invoked B.R. Ambedkar, whose own sense of caste oppression was comparative and global. Ambedkar wrote much of India’s Constitution which affirmed equality before the law for all people, enshrined fundamental rights, freedom of religion, affirmative action reservations, and universal adult suffrage. He also drafted Article 17 which abolished untouchability and made caste discrimination unconstitutional. In 1946, writing from Bombay, he corresponded with W.E.B. Du Bois about parallels between Dalit and Black American subjugation. Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India.” A generation later, a group of Dalit writers and activists named themselves the Dalit Panthers, explicitly modelled on the Black Panther Party, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s own 1959 visit to India left him remarking on parallels between caste oppression and American racial segregation. Ambedkar was also one of the country’s foremost advocates for women’s legal rights, which is why many women organisers continue to invoke him as an enduring source of political inspiration and a debt owed.
Delhi Police and RAF detaining protesters from India’s leftist parties as they participate in an pro-Palestine solidarity protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, Oct 16 2023. Image: Sipa USA
Layered with these slogans were also Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s verses, “Bol,” first published in 1941 during British colonial rule, and “Hum Dekhenge” (We Shall See) written under Pakistani martial law in 1979 and later banned by General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. Calling on people of the subcontinent to speak while they still could, and promising “a coming reckoning” against authoritarianism, these poems have become enduring anthems of protest movements across South Asia, including the 2019–20 anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and anti-NRC (National Register of Citizens) protests in India. Yet the afterlife of Faiz’s poetry cannot be separated from the political life that produced it. His resistance to authoritarianism led to years of imprisonment and exile, eventually taking him to Beirut, Lebanon, where he edited the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association’s Lotus magazine and worked alongside Palestinian revolutionaries, including poets Muin Bseiso and Mahmoud Darwish, whom Faiz first met in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, as well as the writer Ziad Abdel Fattah and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. In Beirut, Faiz witnessed frequent Israeli incursions into the city and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and wrote elegies for Palestinian fighters and children, making Palestine not a metaphor grafted onto the poems, but part of the very soil from which they emerged.
“Situating the current student protests within the longer history of student resistance, including the anti-CAA and NRC protests, the repression of students at JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Occupy University Grants Commission (UGC), and the movement for Rohith Vemula (a Dalit PhD scholar), points to the way the BJP government has progressively refined its repertoire of surveillance, policing and repression against dissenting students. ”
The student protests did not happen in a vacuum. Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, two former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) scholar-activists who are Muslim and are India’s most prominent political prisoners, have now spent more than six years in Delhi’s Tihar jail without trial, denied bail again by the Supreme Court in January even as five of their seven co-accused in the same February 2020 Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom conspiracy case were finally released. They were arrested under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for their alleged role in organising protests against the NRC and CAA, the same movement that also sang Faiz’s poetry, popularised the slogan Azaadi and chanted Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar into Delhi’s air. Their continued detention is the material referent behind the word anti-national, or terrorist, labels deployed by the BJP and state authorities against a wide range of dissidents including Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, Kashmiris, and leftists, and since the summer protest to all youth, including Hindus.
The word anti-national does specific work. It turns a person with a grievance into an enemy-of-the-state, and once that move is made under a legal architecture built for counter-terrorism rather than crowd control, six years in a prison cell without trial stops being a scandal and becomes state policy and a lesson to intimidate others. Situating the current student protests within the longer history of student resistance, including the anti-CAA and NRC protests, the repression of students at JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Occupy University Grants Commission (UGC), and the movement for Rohith Vemula (a Dalit PhD scholar), points to the way the BJP government has progressively refined its repertoire of surveillance, policing and repression against dissenting students.
The continuity extended beyond domestic struggles: the same left student unions and organisations that were confronting the state apparatus in the cockroach protests had also spent the previous two and a half years mobilising thousands in solidarity with Palestine and against India’s deepening alliance with Israel, facing arrests, detention, surveillance and restrictions on assembly. In October 2024, more than 40 organisations collectively gathered at Jantar Mantar to protest one year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza which became a site of police surveillance, crackdown and Hindutva mob violence against pro-Palestine protestors. This violence re-emerged during the exam protests. It marked the point where the two circulations of resistance and repression collided at Jantar Mantar.
State Violence against Protesters and Movements
“This is what a doctrine of population management looks like: a grammar of suspicion, biometric sorting, shooting at unarmed protesters and bystanders, religious targeting, family harassment, and family-as-hostage detention, normalised over a decade of violence against Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, leftists, the working class and poor.”
Students faced barricades, police and RAF lathi charges (beatings with batons), tear gas, AK-47 and pellet gun bullets, arrests, detention, harassment, sexual assault, and some sustained severe injuries. Delhi Police also deployed an AI-enabled surveillance van equipped with 360-degree cameras and facial-recognition capacity, called Ikshana. Police officers were seen wearing AjnaLens smart glasses. Police used video feeds and database matching to identify people at the demonstration, later used to witch-hunt protesters specifically Muslims, Dalits and leftists. Digital-rights advocates challenged the absence of clear legal authorisation, retention limits, notification procedures and independent oversight. The use of such technologies transformed these protests into biometric checkpoints, allowing police to record faces, identify participants, and create enduring databases of dissent.
A day after the Delhi crackdown, in Bihar’s Siwan district, a constable was filmed opening fire with an AK-47 during the Bihar Bandh, the statewide shutdown. Three people wounded, among them a 15-year-old shop worker named Md Arif, shot in the neck on his way home from work; he survived. In the Bihar crackdown, police arrested hundreds of protestors, including many leaders of left student unions. And in Delhi, Mohammad Junaid, a Muslim volunteer who spent weeks distributing meals to protesters at the Jantar Mantar encampment, said plainclothes police officers blindfolded him, detained him overnight, and abandoned him 250 kilometres away in Mussoorie. At the same time, police in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh and Meerut detained his father, his minor brother and his sister’s in-laws, confiscating the family’s PAN cards, Aadhaar cards and bank passbooks until Junaid turned himself in. Danish Ali, Joint Secretary of the JNU Students’ Union, said police visited her family home and village in an apparent attempt to intimidate her as well. This is what a doctrine of population management looks like: a grammar of suspicion, biometric sorting, shooting at unarmed protesters and bystanders, religious targeting, family harassment, and family-as-hostage detention, normalised over a decade of violence against Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, leftists, the working class and poor.
A member of the Rapid Action Force (RAF) fires tear gas towards protesters in New Delhi, India, 20 July, 2026. Image: REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis TPX
Gender was a central dimension of both the repression and the public response to the student protests. Women reported that police officers or members of far-right Hindutva mobs struck, verbally abused, groped or molested them, while videos and testimonies described torn clothing during the police crackdown. Such violence carries significance beyond crowd control, as the humiliation or displacement of women’s clothing invokes patriarchal ideas of honour and respectability that can discourage future political participation. The government’s response also revealed the gendered policing of dissent. Modi’s criticism of women and girl protesters for using “abusive language,” coupled with his unsolicited paternalistic forgiveness of them in an awkward Instagram reel, reflected a gendered expectation that “respectable” women and girls remain polite and deferential, even as male anger, profanity, and violence are more readily accepted. Following the protests, many women have reported facing doxing, rape threats, and online BJP IT cell harassment, as well as police harassment of their families. This is intended to humiliate them nationally and intimidate them into withdrawing from public life. Yet, in openly expressing rage, women and gender non-conforming folks challenged both political authority and patriarchal gender norms, exposing the BJP’s hypocrisy of policing women’s speech while repeatedly defending and protecting men convicted of rape, such as the rapists of Bilkis Bano in the Gujarat massacre. The godi media turned its coverage towards character assassinations of student protesters, especially women and girls, the most notorious was the case of Ruchika Singh, a 15-year-old girl who mocked Modi in an online video and was coerced to apologise and forced to flee her home. Modi, Hindutva mobs, and the godi media are making an example out of her, to show the country that ridiculing the Prime Minister is closer to sedition than protected political speech.
Built With Israel: The Counter-Insurgency Doctrine Behind Police Crackdowns
“ Occupied Kashmir has been the laboratory: biometric monitoring, facial recognition, internet shutdowns, arrests, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, heavily armed crowd control, all of it justified in the language of “counter-terrorism” and “national security.” ”
The security doctrine that met the student protesters has a face, and this summer it was put on camera again, as it was in Kashmir in 2019 after the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A, and during the farmers’ protests of 2020–21. The extreme state violence and crackdown on student protestors across the country this summer was not freelance brutality by officers improvising under pressure. It was produced by a decade of training exchanges, cybersecurity MOUs, and homeland security seminars. A police force has been retrained to read a protest not as people with grievances exercising their democratic right but as a threat to be sorted, tracked, neutralised and criminalised.
The doctrine decides in advance what kind of thing a crowd is, once that decision has been made in Israeli classrooms and Delhi seminar rooms, the baton and the bullet only enforce it. Occupied Kashmir has been the laboratory: biometric monitoring, facial recognition, internet shutdowns, arrests, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, heavily armed crowd control, all of it justified in the language of “counter-terrorism” and “national security.” What was developed through the oppression and control of Palestinians and adapted through India’s militarised occupation of Kashmir, has returned to Delhi, Mumbai, Patna and, above all, Manipur as “ordinary policing.”
India’s diplomatic ties with the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid state opened in 1992, with covert defence purchases going back further, but the relationship changed character after 2014 when the BJP came to power. In 2015, 150 Indian Police Service (IPS) officers visited the Israel National Police Academy to study counter-insurgency, low-intensity conflict and warfare, counter-terrorism, and policing technologies; IPS trainees have gone every year since. Trainees observed Israel’s Border Police and airport-security operations, while SIBAT, the Israeli Defence Ministry’s international defence-cooperation arm, introduced them to Israeli homeland-security companies and the use of technology in “live situations.”
“India became the world’s largest buyer of Israeli arms, spending upward of a billion dollars annually. Increasingly, those weapons were also made on Indian soil, as the 2022 India–Israel Vision on Defence Cooperation paired Israeli military technology with Modi’s push for domestic manufacturing under the “Make in India” initiative.”
Modi’s 2017 visit to Israel, the first by a sitting Indian prime minister, marked a decisive deepening of the India–Israel alliance, producing roughly $2 billion in Israeli defence and intelligence purchases, a cybersecurity agreement, and, according to a New York Times investigation, India’s acquisition of Israel’s Pegasus spyware, later used against Indian journalists, academics, activists, and opposition leaders. What began as police training soon became institutionalised: by 2018, an India–Israel Joint Steering Committee on Homeland and Public Security formally committed the two states to sustained cooperation in police “capacity building and modernization” and border management. Israeli security expertise was thus entering India not simply through weapons purchases, but through the training, technologies and institutional practices of the police themselves.
India became the world’s largest buyer of Israeli arms, spending upward of a billion dollars annually. Increasingly, those weapons were also made on Indian soil, as the 2022 India–Israel Vision on Defence Cooperation paired Israeli military technology with Modi’s push for domestic manufacturing under the “Make in India” initiative. Adani Enterprises and Elbit Systems established a joint venture in 2018 to manufacture the Hermes 900 drone for the Israeli military, the only production line outside Israel, while Bengaluru’s Alpha Design Technologies and Elbit produced SkyStriker loitering munitions for the Indian Army. By 2024, Israeli arms companies including ELTA, Rafael, Elbit, and Skylock were using a standing forum in Delhi to develop further defence and dual-use partnerships. But as Azad Essa argues in Hostile Homelands, this convergence is ideological as well as material. RSS ideologues drawing on Savarkar and Golwalkar had long admired Zionism as a model of ethno-religious nationhood. Under Modi, a lifelong RSS member, that affinity increasingly shaped state policy, from suppressing domestic criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to attempts at withholding support from UN resolutions calling for its end.
Modi’s most recent 2026 visit to Israel, two days before the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, crystallised this transformation at a moment of full-scale regional war in West Asia. Addressing the Knesset, the first Indian leader to do so, Modi told the chamber that Indian-origin Jews in Israel hold that “Israel is their fatherland and India their motherland,” that he was born on the day India recognised Israel, and that India stood with Israel with full conviction. He was awarded a medal for strengthening the alliance and embraced Netanyahu, who remains subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The material consequences of this alliance became still clearer in July 2026, when Amnesty International’s Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel documented 2,596 shipments of arms, ammunition, and military components from Indian companies to Israel between October 2023 and November 2025, including artillery-shell casings and components for SkyStriker drones. Against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures in the genocide case, India could hardly claim ignorance of how these supplies might be used.
Indian police cadets at the National Police Academy in Israel (Beit Shemesh), August 1st, 2018. Image: Israeli Ministry of National Security
For India’s left and people of conscience at home and across the diaspora, this marked the culmination of a reversal decades in the making: from a global leader of non-alignment and supporter of Palestine and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to a government supplying the Israeli war machine, integrating Israeli surveillance and security practices at home, and aligning itself ever more closely with Israel and Washington in ways an earlier generation would not have imagined. Yet it was against this architecture of repression and alignment that the students won their immediate concessions.
Reformist Victories, Making Revolution Imaginable
The Cockroach movement’s immediate gains were reformist: the education minister’s resignation, a signed agreement with the government on compensation for the families of students who died by suicide, a parliamentary commitment to reform the examination system, and assurances that protesters would not face police arrests and detention. These were the terms on which students suspended their hunger strike and called off their mass protest. But the movement never declared the struggle finished. If the protest’s achievements were liberal in form, its political significance was far larger. It exposed fractures in the BJP’s claim to unquestioned authority, it disrupted the ideological confidence of Hindutva and exposed its inner fascist workings to the country, ruptured over a decade of fear and censorship, revealed the failure of neoliberal capitalism, and sparked the emergence of a generation willing to confront the state through many forms. The threat to the regime posed by this generation was perhaps evident in Modi’s 2026 Independence Day address, he branded youth protesters “dimagi Naxals” (“intellectual Naxals”), invoking the language of Maoist insurgency to recast political dissent as an “internal security threat” to be dealt with.
The protests radicalised and awakened millions of young people and have instilled a sense of hope for another India, and protests continue across the country in the present. People have called for the resignation of BJP Home Minister Amit Shah (responsible for the police, RAF, and their brutality) and Modi himself, captured powerfully in the chant “Desh bachao, Modi Hatao” (Save the Country, Get Rid of Modi). The protests also ruptured the borders meant to divide them, as Pakistani students sent moving messages of solidarity to India’s students, one blogger specifically identifying them as the “children of divorce,” referring to the subcontinent’s Partition. Student movements in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also asked what they can do in solidarity with the left student unions who are committed to advancing the struggle further.
The protests also confirmed what the two circulations traced throughout this essay had always implied: internationalism is never politically neutral. Each gives rise to a distinct political world, one producing a generation capable of creative collective resistance, imagining revolution, and cultivating hope (despite internal contradictions); the other produces institutions capable of administering immense state violence and human rights violations.
Revolutions rarely arrive fully formed, they begin by making the existing order appear vulnerable. In that sense, the student uprisings may be remembered not as the revolution itself, but as the moment one became imaginable. The surveillance cameras on the mast are still running, compiling a database for whom the state will target in the days to come. Hum Dekhenge records something else, written in the future tense, it promises that there is still more to be seen: the world it anticipates has not yet arrived, and students continue to organise and struggle for a different future. They are remaking and ushering in a new world in these fascist times.
To them: Inquilab Zindabad!
Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is working on a book tentatively titled Revolutionary Circuits: Cadres, Culture, Internationalism and the Palestinian Revolution.