The Comparative Anatomies of Youth Protests in 1975 and 2026

A comparative look into the Gen Z protests of 2026 and the protests of the 1974-75 brings out some interesting contrasts. While the post 1970s fall out of these protests mainstreamised the Sangh Parivar in political and social spaces, the days ahead following the 2026 protests possibly hold a promise of cross-communitarian solidarity.

The architecture of youth revolt in post-independence India has routinely emerged not from abstract ideological blueprints, but from acute material anxieties that lay bare the state's administrative decay and institutional failure. The student agitations of 1974-1975 – manifested primarily in the Gujarat Navnirman Movement and the Bihar Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti (BCSS) – erupted directly out of a severe national economic crisis characterised by runaway inflation, food grain scarcity, and soaring youth unemployment.

The moral framing of student agitations

The 1970s student mobilisation was initiated by immediate, micro-level campus triggers. In Gujarat, the catalyst was a steep hike in hostel mess bills at an engineering college in Morbi. In Bihar, it was a rise in tuition fees combined with rampant administrative corruption within university governance. In Bihar, a series of student, youth and peasant unrest was already underway in the preceding decades.

These localised campus grievances of the 1970s metastasised rapidly because they articulated broader urban middle-class economic panic. High educated youth unemployment had left graduates facing structural redundancy, rendering the escalating cost of higher education unbearable for ordinary families. The post-independence Indian university campuses had turned into volatile centres of political contestation. Institutionalisation of campus unions, combined with the rising politicisation of youth by national political parties and deep student dissatisfaction with stagnant job markets, made educational institutions prime launch-pads for broader political movements.

While Jayaprakash Narayan (JP, 1902-1979) was asked to provide the student movement a grand, elderly moral umbrella under the banner of Sampoorna Kranti or total revolution, the socio-political core of the 1970s agitation remained essentially an urban middle-class revolt against state centralism, inflation, and economic distress. The student vanguard was overwhelmingly urban, educated, and upper or middle-caste, while rural peasants and marginalised-caste workers remained largely on the margins. Of course, this also had to do with a change in the campus-demography. The newly affluent upwardly mobile intermediate castes and a few upper starta Dalits, from rural areas had entered into the urban paces through campus enrolments.

This rural-urban (rurban) phenomenon and educated unemployed youth indulged in “politics of waiting” and “timepass”,   in post-Green Revolution uttar Pradeshera. Some of such unemployed youth discovered their under-employment in an un-organised sector through “fixing futures”, by the turn of the 21^st century. Sections of Gen-Y emerged as “dubious entrepreneurs, political aspirants, star-struck strivers, masterly swindlers, lynchers, in a theatre of toxic masculinity” and as the “frontline functionaries of the state” in rural Bihar, Jharkahnd, and parts of northern India. The under-studied aspects of lower level personnel (outlaws) involved in crime-liquor nexus in the dry states of Bihar and Gujarat, all have been providing an alert or warning signals to the state and society with darker scenarios unfolding in the recent decades. Such forces have been acting as political workers of the ruling dispensations. That is where the organised electoral politics has got vitiated menacingly.

Half a century later, in 2026

Fifty-two years after the 1975 students’ protests, the 2026 Gen Z protests echoed this precise structural interplay between material precarity and moral indignation. Triggered by systemic compromises in high-stakes national entrance examinations, most prominently frequent paper leak scandals surrounding examinations like NEET, the 2026 revolt reflected a desperate struggle over dwindling avenues for upward social mobility. This protest has even spread to the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand (having sizeable tribal population), against the provincial services recruitment commission.

Now mobilisations are underway in western and southern India too. It is the education and employment which provides immediate socio-economic mobility in a graded society like India. Once this has got sort of hijacked by corruption and irregularities, desperate youth have risen in angry protests.

In both historical moments – 1975 and 2026 – the administrative failure to guarantee a fair and transparent meritocratic process served as a breach of the state's implicit social contract. While the 1970s economic distress was rooted in a state-managed economy plagued by scarcity, the 2026 economic grievance was driven by high educated youth unemployment within a hyper-competitive, high-stakes, extremely centralised exam economy.

In both cases, localised material frustrations were quickly re-framed in high-moral anti-corruption (Bhrashtachar) terms, transforming technical state failures into nationwide mass movements demanding political accountability and executive resignations.

Shift in gender participation

A comparative evaluation of these two eras reveals a profound transformation in the nature, scope, and autonomy of women's participation within protest movements. In the 1974-75 movements, women participated in substantial numbers, particularly across urban Gujarat and Bihar, where middle-class women, university students, and housewives joined Thali-Belan or utensil-striking demonstrations, street marches against food hoarding, and price-rise rallies.

However, the women participation in the 1970s was strictly circumscribed by a domestic and patriarchal framework. Women were primarily mobilised around their roles as managers of the household budget or as moral preservers of community welfare, rather than as autonomous political agents fighting for their own structural rights. The early post-independence social movements frequently gendered protests, by subsuming women's demands under broader household economic concerns or moral community preservation, treating women as supportive participants rather than direct political claimants.

Leadership across student bodies like the Navnirman Yuvak Samiti and the Bihar Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti was almost entirely male, systematically excluding women from steering committees and high-level strategy sessions. When agitations escalated into street confrontations with police or formal negotiations with state authorities, female participants were frequently relegated to supportive roles or positioned symbolically as moral shields.

By contrast, in the 2026 Gen Z protests, young women moved from the margins to the absolute core of organisational strategy, public messaging, and frontline assertion. The contemporary Indian activism has seen an emergence of autonomous feminist frameworks where women articulate claims centered directly on their own bodily autonomy, institutional access, and economic citizenship.

In 2026, women acted (are acting) not merely as attendees, but as primary participants, strategists, digital communicators, and ground reporters, with independent female journalists and digital content creators playing a decisive role in bypassing mainstream media blackouts to shape public perception in real-time. Moving beyond the 1970s focus on domestic inflation, women in 2026 participated directly as exam candidates (aspirants), asserting their personal rights to equal access in higher education and professional careers. The protest space treated female students as primary economic and political citizens fighting directly for their own professional futures.

In physical protest spaces such as New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and various university campuses (including Ranchi and Dhanbad), young women led ground chants, managed security protocols against police violence, and managed logistics independently. The language of the 2026 movement rejected traditional moral-paternalistic framing, operating instead through an egalitarian, rights-based digital vocabulary. The female students used un-inhibitive languages and symbolism. Logistics such as sanitary-pads were supplied to them by the supporters defying gender-boundaries.

The geopolitical matrix of resistance

The structural mechanics of these two movements (1975 and 2026) reveal a radical evolution in how dissent is organised, who commands its frontlines, and how domestic unrest intersects with international geopolitics. In the 1970s, student mobilisation relied on formal student organisations such as the Navnirman Yuvak Samiti in Gujarat and the Bihar Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti.

These student bodies suffered from acute organisational fragility and lacked long-term strategic and ideological coherence, becoming heavily dependent on, and eventually co-opted by, established opposition political parties including the Jan Sangh, Congress (O), and Socialist factions. The organisational vulnerability becomes visible by demonstrating how student unions in India, despite their tactical fervour, frequently lacked independent institutional machinery, making them susceptible to infiltration, direction, and co-optation by mainstream political parties seeking youth foot soldiers for macro-political battles. As of now, in 2026, at least in Uttar Pradesh, since long, there haven’t been any elections for the Students’ Unions in the universities; not even in the central universities.

This period also witnessed a deep fracture within the political Left regarding its evaluation of state power and democratic institutions. In 1975, the Left had split wide open over its assessment of the Indira Gandhi administration. Bound by its Soviet-aligned "national-democratic" ideological line, the Communist Party of India (CPI) viewed Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement as a reactionary, right-wing phenomenon backed by fascist elements and foreign imperial super powers, leading the CPI to ally with Indira Gandhi’s ruling Congress and endorse the declaration of the Emergency in June 1975 as a necessary defense against "right-wing reaction".

Conversely, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) firmly rejected this alignment, viewing the ruling Congress as an autocratic instrument of landlords and the big bourgeoisie, placing itself in direct opposition to state repression alongside student agitators, and thereby disregarding their alignment with the right wing majoritarian forces.

Academic historiographical evaluation reveals that Indira Gandhi’s apprehensions regarding foreign covert intervention and majoritarian destabilisation were grounded in historical reality. The opposition mobilisation under JP posed an extra-parliamentary challenge that sought to unseat an elected government through street agitations, destabilising constitutional democracy and Indian secularism. Crucially, opposition to the Emergency was heavily sustained through international networks and the Indian diaspora, by the "Smugglers of Truth", in the self-description of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The overseas Hindu majoritarian networks organised themselves extensively across North America and Britain to run covert communications, print underground literature, and lobby Western governments. During this Cold War juncture, covert intelligence favours were extended by U.S. apparatuses, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), toward anti-Congress and anti-Soviet opposition networks. This foreign support utilised Gujarati diaspora funding channels to sustain long-distance anti-incumbent campaigns against Indira Gandhi government, confirming that Indira's fears regarding foreign conspirators and majoritarian coalitions working to destabilise her regime were supported by global covert dynamics.

By 2026, the organisational anatomy of protest had shifted from formal party tutelage to a decentralised, internet-native collective. Moving away from traditional student union hierarchies, 2026 organisers deployed algorithmic amplification, satirical digital nodes, short-form video broadcasts, and online mutual aid to circumvent state narrative control and traditional broadcast blackouts, maintaining a fluid, horizontal command structure during physical sit-ins at Jantar Mantar (New Delhi), as also in Ranchi.

The trajectory of communalisation

The long-term political impact of these two youth movements reveals a fundamental shift in how religious identity, majoritarianism, and secularism operate within the Indian public sphere. As Arvind Rajagopal argues (2003 and 2011) – the 1975-1977 Emergency served as a decisive turning point for Hindu majoritarian politics. Prior to 1975, the RSS and its political wing, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), were treated as social and political pariahs within the mainstream Nehruvian consensus, tainted by their association with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948.

However, Jayaprakash Narayan’s decision to embrace RSS cadres within the Bihar Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti and the broader anti-Emergency coalition granted the Hindu right unprecedented mainstream legitimacy. Rajagopal demonstrates that the joint imprisonment of RSS activists alongside socialists, liberals, Jamaat-e-Islami, and CPI(M) cadres under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) permanently erased their pariah status.

This post-1975 accommodation enabled Hindu majoritarian forces to get integrated into the Janata Party government of 1977 and lay the institutional and middle-class foundation for the majoritarian politics that dominated in and after the 1980s. Competitive communal politics of Hindus and Muslims increasingly occupied socio-political spaces. This legitimisation shifted secularism from an established state norm into a contested, frequently delegitimised concept.

In stark contrast, the 2026 Gen-Z protests represent a moment where this long-standing majoritarian narrative experienced visible dilution and fatigue. Confronted by shared material ruin – symbolised by widespread youth unemployment, systemic examination leaks, and administrative failure – the 2026 movement fostered cross-community solidarity.

Unlike earlier decades where student mobilisations were fractured along communal or caste lines, the 2026 agitation resisted sectarian division. The shared, inclusive identity of the "aspirant" (pratiyogi chhatra) subsumed majoritarian rhetoric, replacing polarised identity politics with a pragmatic, constitutional focus on civil rights, institutional integrity, state accountability, and economic fairness.

Professor Mohammad Sajjad teaches Modern and Contemporary South Asia in the Aligarh Muslim University. His X-handle is: @sajjadhist

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