What happens when half a country can't see what the other half is protesting?
The student protests exposed two Indias living in different realities — and a fight over which one gets to be the news
A quick personal note before the essay. I’m taking a bit of a break from traveling across India, and am back in the UK for the next month or so. If you’re around London, Oxford, or Edinburgh and fancy a coffee or a pint — to talk politics, travel, philosophy, or to offer me a job — do drop me a line. It would be lovely to see some of you in person.
I shared an early version of this argument on Instagram last week — here it is properly worked out.
So, it is over, for now. On Saturday India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigned. Within hours the government had conceded the rest of what it had spent weeks refusing — compensation for the families of students who took their own lives in the wake of the NEET paper leak, and the withdrawal of the cases filed against those who had come out to protest. The three demands were the Cockroach Janta Party's, the improbable outfit that had turned a scandal over leaked question papers into a national agitation; with all three met, it told its supporters the fight was won and asked them to go home.
Governments here do not usually buckle like this, and almost never to people this young. In one sense what happened is exactly how a democracy is supposed to run: citizens organise, the state feels the pressure and gives ground, and public life absorbs the shock and moves on. But the weeks before the resignation exposed something larger than the examination system, and it is worth looking at now that the crowds have gone.
For most of a month it was as though Indians were living in different countries. For some, the protests were the whole of daily life — feeds full of students marching through Delhi, of interviews outside coaching centres and parents who could not keep the fear out of their voices, of paper leaks and graduate unemployment and the sense that the old bargain between education and a decent quality of life had come undone. For others, the same weeks barely registered; and when the protests did surface, the talk slid almost at once away from the exams and towards the marchers themselves — who had organised them, who stood to gain, what hidden hand might lie behind it all. It was not really a disagreement, but a symptom of the fact that the two sides were not perceiving the same thing.
More than a century ago the biologist Jakob von Uexküll said that every animal lives in its own version of the world — its Umwelt — built from the handful of signals its senses can catch, and from which it assembles what it takes for reality. The physical world may be shared; the experienced one never is. A bee sees ultraviolet paths lit along flowers that look plain white to us, and is blind to the reds we cannot take our eyes off. A bat wraps a dark room in sound and reads its shape back from the echoes. Each of them is somewhere the others cannot follow — and so, though we rarely notice it, are we. The Umwelt is the world as you have learned to perceive it, taken — as it is by every creature that has one — for the entire world.
Most of the time these worlds overlap quietly and no harm comes of it. The trouble starts when one of them is handed power over the rest. For example, humans build glass towers and light them through the night because they make sense to human eyes; and every year, migratory birds that navigate by starlight mistake the glow of our skyscrapers for the open sky, fly into the glass and fall. They are not confused. Their environment has simply been arranged around somebody else’s way of seeing. Power is precisely that: the ability to turn your own Umwelt into everyone else’s environment.
Although Uexküll was talking about the biological world, it describes the political life of countries unnervingly well. We do not all live in one India and merely disagree about it. We live in different Indias, each stocked with its own facts and its own villains, its own instinct for what deserves attention and what is only noise, and each convinced it is simply seeing what is there.
Beyond passing laws and winning elections, power carries a quieter authority: the power to decide what enters a country’s field of vision, which stories open the bulletin and which remain somebody else’s problem. Every political movement competes to shape attention, but governments possess instruments no one else does. They choose which questions to answer and which to leave hanging; which events warrant a ministerial visit and which pass without acknowledgement; what official campaigns amplify; and — through party messaging networks, sympathetic television channels, social media ecosystems, and the sheer advantage of incumbency — how millions are handed a pre-interpreted event before they have had the chance to interpret it themselves.
Much of the divide, though, is simply age, and the yardstick each generation reaches for. Older Indians measure the present against the country they remember, and often find it improved. The young measure it against the future they were promised, and find it wanting. If you are twenty-two, this government is nearly the whole of your conscious political life; it came to power when you were a child in school. It is no longer the insurgent promising to sweep away an old order. For Gen Z, it is the order. That shifts the questions worth asking. A comparison with governments you never lived under carries little weight against the things you meet every morning. Will the exam I have bled two years preparing for be conducted honestly, or sold to the highest bidder? Some two million school-leavers sit the medical entrance each year; to them the leak was never just a talking point, but the hinge their futures turned on. Will there be work on the far side of the degree? National pride is not nothing, but it simply cannot answer questions like those on its own.
None of this hands the young a monopoly on truth. Instagram has its distortions, as television and WhatsApp have theirs, and every generation ends up talking mostly to itself. But lived experience has a stubborn way of resisting the story told over it. It is hard to convince someone the exam crisis is overblown when they have spent two years studying for the exam in question, and harder still to tell graduates that unemployment is a matter of perception while they and their friends are still looking for work.
That is why the protests mattered. It’s true that not everyone agreed on much beyond the need for accountability, but for a few weeks they widened what the country was willing to notice. A leaked question paper came to weigh as much as the evening’s manufactured controversy, and the coaching-class economy took airtime usually kept for the culture wars.
We like to describe democracy as a machine for settling disagreements. Its first task may be more basic than that — to keep enough reality in common that disagreement stays possible at all. When citizens stop noticing one another’s troubles, they stop arguing about how to fix them, and drift instead into parallel republics that don’t even agree on the issues themselves. The month just past was a reminder that the drift is not a law of nature: that one generation’s reality can still force its way into another’s, and that a government can still be made to listen. Perhaps that is democracy close to its best — two ways of seeing colliding hard enough to widen, if only a little, the country both sides are able to see.