Ashok Kumbamu — a sociologist who grew up under a dominant-caste landlord in a Telangana village — argues that India’s Gen Z street protests are breaking the “culture of fear” that shields Narendra Modi’s Hindutva government. He names the shift the “post-fear phenomenon”: fear that remains, but loses its power to organize silence, self-policing, and deference. People are still afraid; they act anyway.
The movement began with the NEET medical-entrance paper leak and a chief justice calling unemployed youth “lazy cockroaches” — an insult Gen Z reclaimed with pride.
- Students founded the Cockroach Janata Party on Instagram, then took the mockery to the streets at Jantar Mantar
- Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned under the pressure
- When Modi attacked “dimagi Naxals” (intellectual Naxals) from the Red Fort, a mock Dimagi Naxal Janata Party formed on Instagram within 24 hours
- Anger widened to the structural core: youth are ~83 percent of India’s unemployed, while the richest 1 percent captured 23.3 percent of national income (2022–23)
Kumbamu anchors the theory in memory: Naxalites once marched his village’s dora through the streets, publicly breaking the aura of his authority without redistributing an acre. He read Gramsci later — domination is most durable when it becomes common sense.
The movement is an “unorganized united front”: united in struggle across caste, class, and region, not yet organized — fragile, as antifascist history warns. Post-fear is neither liberation nor revolution, only the condition that makes one thing possible: tomorrow may not look like yesterday. Arundhati Roy, watching Gen Z, said she could “die in peace now… die smiling.”