New Delhi, India – When Kunal Choudhary left Punjab’s Ludhiana city on July 14 to join the Gen Z-led protests in New Delhi, he knew it was in effect a one-way ticket with little possibility of returning home in the foreseeable future.
Choudhary, 19, a law student at a private university in Jalandhar, another city in Punjab, was among tens of thousands of people who streamed into the national capital to demand education reforms after papers for a key medical entrance test were leaked, leading to more than 20 aspirants dying by suicide and causing widespread anger across the country.
The unprecedented challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year rule forced the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and an overhaul of entrance exams ordered by the government, exposing cracks in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government’s aura of invulnerability. Meanwhile, similar protests continue in other parts of the country.
Choudhary’s journey to join the protests in New Delhi was unlike many others.
Even after the nerve centre of the protests was cleared out and members of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), the satirical online group that organised the 36-day protests, called off its demonstrations after Pradhan’s resignation on July 25, Choudhary has not left the places where he said his life irreversibly changed. He even celebrated his 19th birthday with fellow protesters and complete strangers days before the demonstrations were called off.
“My father is a BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] member, and I was an RSS member until I left home to come to Delhi. I missed my final semester exams because they clashed with the protests,” he told Al Jazeera. “But it is what it is. I couldn’t make peace with sitting back and watching the world around us fall apart.”
The RSS is the BJP’s far-right ideological mentor . Founded in 1925 on the lines of fascist parties in Europe, the secretive paramilitary organisation presides over dozens of Hindu groups that work towards a common goal of turning a constitutionally secular India into a Hindu state. Its most common activity is a weekly neighbourhood meeting (called “shaakha”) where men typically wearing white shirts and khaki shorts take part in martial drills and indoctrination.
The RSS, headquartered in Nagpur city in Maharashtra state, was banned by the government after one of its alleged members assassinated independence icon Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The ban was lifted the next year, and the organisation floated its political wing, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, in 1951, which became the BJP in 1980.
Today, the RSS counts Modi and most other top BJP leaders among millions of its lifetime members in India and abroad.
Choudhary’s father, Jeevan Choudhary, is a businessman who has never known a life where he or his family were not RSS members. A young Choudhary inherited the legacy, rather unwillingly he said, as his “heart was never really into it”.
“They don’t teach you anything useful. They only tell you how to hate Muslims and Dalits,” he said. Dalits are India’s most marginalised caste group. They were considered “untouchables” until the Indian Constitution legally abolished the practice. But discrimination and even violence against the community, oppressed for ages by privileged castes, continues.
Choudhary said his family’s biggest problem with the CJP-led movement was that people “didn’t care about caste, religion or social strata – that everyone came together, sat side by side, and ate”.
“Their brains can’t comprehend something like that,” he said, citing the example of Mohammad Junaid, a Muslim who appeared in dozens of viral videos showing him serving free food and water to the protesters at Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory and public gathering space where the demonstrators gathered.
A video of Choudhary also went viral on social media during the protests in which he talked about allegations of government corruption, and that he was a BJP worker’s son and erstwhile RSS member himself.
“After my parents saw the video, my father asked me not to say anything wrong about the BJP and RSS. But I had not said anything wrong about them. I have experienced this all my life,” he said.
Choudhary often talks to his parents but does not want to go back home. “The difference between how I look at the world and how the people I have grown up around look at it has widened too much,” he said.
He plans to find a job as a telemarketer to pay his bills and then enrol in a distance learning course to complete his law degree. He said his mother has been “quietly supportive” of his endeavours but going home any time soon is not an option.
He is currently living at a gurdwara close to Jantar Mantar. The Sikh place of worship had opened its doors for all the communities during the protests.
“I didn’t go hungry even for a day. Now that the protest is over, it’s been a little difficult to find shelter and food. My wallet, which had some money and my ID cards, got stolen, so I don’t really have money any more,” he said.
Priya Singh’s father is a staunch BJP loyalist who threatened his daughter with physical violence when she decided to join the Jantar Mantar protests.
“When I went there, I covered my face so he wouldn’t find out from photos or videos that I was there because I had even told him that I was going to raise slogans against Modi,” the 24-year-old told Al Jazeera.
Singh’s father, 55, works at a security firm and has what she said is “blind faith” in the BJP. When she confronted her father with videos that showed a police officer sexually assaulting a female protester, her father defended the authorities.
“He said they shouldn’t have been there in the first place because the government had asked them not to protest,” Singh said.
“When I said that peaceful protests are our constitutional right, he said it doesn’t matter. He even said that the women who were gravely injured during the protests deserved that because they hadn’t listened to or informed their parents and attended the demonstrations.”
Singh is a second-year postgraduate student at Jamia Millia Islamia, a century-old institution founded mainly by Muslims.
“I appeared for the entrance test for Jamia Millia without telling anyone at home and then even enrolled in the course without informing them,” she said, adding that her father was distressed by her joining an institution with an Urdu and Arabic name that translates to Islamic National University.
“He told me the people there would treat me badly and try to convert me to Islam. But there was nothing more he could do because I had already taken admission by then. Now, when I come home, I don’t mention anything about my friends or classes to my family. I don’t even take calls from friends at home,” she said by telephone from her university library.
Living about 10km (6 miles) away from Singh is Anjali, 25, a postgraduate student of humanities at Delhi University who goes by one name.
Born and raised in the eastern state of Bihar, India’s most impoverished, she spent most of her early years growing up under the “hawk-like eye of an ill-tempered father”, who discriminated between her and her younger brother by neglecting her need for proper schooling and socialising while doing the opposite for his son, she said.
Not only are her parents staunch BJP supporters, but they are also RSS members . Anjali, on the other hand, is a student leader belonging to the All India Students Association (AISA), the campus wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPIML.
Anjali said her induction into leftist activism was gradual. She started out as a Modi fan, but by 2018, the year she stopped taking financial help from home, something turned within her and she crossed over to the other end of the political spectrum, signing up with AISA. She was also the presidential candidate for a leftist alliance in the Delhi University Students Union election last year.
Anjali said her mother sometimes secretly watches her talking to reporters on TV news channels.
“She will call and tell me how she liked my speech. She’s not someone who has been allowed to have her own opinions, and she’s not very educated either. But my father has done his master’s in political science and is an educated man. I avoid having conversations with him as much as I can,” Anjali told Al Jazeera.
But her parents, she added, remain dismissive of her politics, “using every trick in the book to shame her, guilt her, embarrass her and implore her to stop wasting [her] life”.
When the Jantar Mantar protests kicked off, her mother would check in with her to ask about her whereabouts. “I would lie and say I was busy studying or working. She would then say she has already seen me on TV or some social media reel,” Anjali laughed.
On July 20, the day the protesters marched on parliament, her mother called in tears, asking if she had been injured during the police baton charge.
“She said she saw what the police were doing and asked me if I was OK. I wasn’t. I have a ligament injury since the police attack,” Anjali said.
While on the call with her mother, she heard a comment from her father.
“He said, ‘I told her this regime will crush her, and they won’t spare anyone. Why does she like getting beaten up? Did we raise her only to get thrashed?’ He even said that he knows he is a part of this regime, and it has powerful and filthy rich people, and if someone tries to change them, they will get crushed,” Anjali recalled.
At times, she said, her father has tried to extend an olive branch, asking her to convince him about the decisions she has made, only to conclude each time that she is wasting her life “doing pretentious protests” that will amount to nothing.
So when Pradhan resigned, Anjali anticipated the usual contemptuous reactions from her parents.
But her mother, much to her surprise, was happy, almost proud of what her daughter had been a part of. “A historical moment”, Anjali remembered her mother saying. “She said that it might have taken time for us to get here, but we proved that we could do it.”
As for her father, Anjali said there has been radio silence on the matter, and she continues to ensure their paths do not cross.
Neha Bora is a prominent example of how the recent protests have profoundly impacted relationships within families in India.
Bora, 29, is the national president of AISA, the group Anjali also belongs to. A doctoral student at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bora was one of the protesters who went on a hunger strike for 23 days. Since the protests, she has emerged as one of the most vocal Gen Z critics of the Modi government.
In a recent interview with journalist Barkha Dutt, Bora revealed that her parents – an army officer father and homemaker mother – are BJP supporters who have not taken her left-leaning activism “too kindly”.
However, despite their differences, her mother travelled from their home in Bareilly, a city in Uttar Pradesh about 300km (186 miles) east of New Delhi, to Jantar Mantar after she learned of Bora’s hunger strike. She even congratulated her daughter when Pradhan resigned.
Prafulla Ketkar, editor of Organiser, the weekly English-language mouthpiece for the RSS, sees a fracture of “intergenerational communication channels” in families due to several factors.
First, grandparents who acted as “natural cushions between youngsters and their parents”, the disciplinarians, are absent from today’s nuclear family structures, he said. Second is the use of social media.
“Four people staying together under one roof basically talk to four different people through their mobiles. Everybody is hooked and conditioned by social media conversations that cater to their own perspectives, so they are stuck within echo chambers, which has led to the breaking of intergenerational dialogue,” Ketkar told Al Jazeera, adding that this is also why RSS insists on encouraging familial dialogue.
However, he did not consider the recent protests exceptional.
“My problem is not [that] government will always be government, police always will be police. That I agree. But the point is, this is happening because one particular government is there – that kind of argument is problematic,” he said.
However, Anubhav Sengupta, an associate professor of sociology at the Manipal Centre for Humanities in the southern state of Karnataka, said that while older generations adopt a “more practical approach to sociopolitical issues, student movements often tend to be value-based”. He used the calls for educational reforms as an example.
“Whether the contingent but new ideological articulations also develop into a critique of the political establishment remains to be seen and how older generations react to it,” he told Al Jazeera.
Sengupta said the protests have sparked “a possibility of ideological conversation from within”.
“In the past, we have seen left or liberal politics confronting rightist ideology. However, the form of this sort of encounter has been ‘us’ vs ‘them’. But in the current protest, we see that ‘Jai Shri Ram’ [‘Hail Lord Ram’] slogan is confronting ‘Inqilab zindabad’ [‘Long live revolution’] within the very movement space,” Sengupta said.
Back at the Sikh gurdwara near Jantar Mantar, Choudhary is battling similar concerns. He wonders why his parents continue to support a party that, according to him, will find the “next reason to divide and rule once Muslims are out of their way”.
“Then they will ask Brahmins to not mingle with lower-caste folks. After that, it’ll be something else. This cycle never ends. And when I ask my parents about all this, they say that they just have to support the BJP and there’s nothing they can do about it. What do you say to that?” he asked.
Choudhary said he recently bumped into an RSS member in New Delhi who had seen the viral video featuring him.
“I asked him why the RSS leaders can’t come to New Delhi and ask the government to mend its ways, considering they run the BJP,” he said.
“In response, he told me, ‘You seem to have become a deshbhakt [patriot]. We aren’t deshbhakts. We have our jobs cut out for us, and we will continue to do that.’”
That, Choudhary said, was reassurance enough that he had made the correct decision. “I can’t think like them. They are goons, and I can’t live peacefully around them. This is it for me.”
