26 July,2026 07:45 AM IST | Mumbai | Team SMD
Anish Gawande has been travelling back and forth between Mumbai and Delhi to attend protests. PIC/INSTAGRAM@anishgawande
After much back and forth, NCP (SP) spokesperson Anish Gawande and this writer finally get on a call. "The mahaul in Jantar Mantar is electric right now," he tells us from Delhi, "I have never seen something like this before. Thousands of people marched together on July 20. That morning, we started the day by singing Maa Tujhhe Salaam by AR Rahman with the constitution in one hand and the Tiranga in the other."
Naksi Timbadia, a 22-year-old Mumbai resident, has travelled especially to Delhi to attend Jantar Mantar's protests. "On July 18, when I saw that Sonam Wangchuk had been picked up by the police. I knew I couldn't just sit. I had to get there. I flew the very same day," she says.
Naksi Timbadia, a Mumbai resident, has flown especially to Delhi to protest at Jantar Mantar. FILE PIC/SATEJ SHINDE
Her initial plan was to attend July 20's "Chalo Sansad" march and fly back to Mumbai. "When I came here. I saw the way people are coming together. And the violence that is being unleashed on students is unbearable. I knew I had to help in whatever way I can," she says over a phone call from Delhi.
Timbadia has close to 40,000 followers on Instagram (@naksimanicpixie), where she grew to fame on a platform for social justice and feminism. She has decided to use this platform to raise funds to sponsor food and travel for protestors at Jantar Mantar. "Gen Z has long been told, âOh your activism is limited to posting stories!' or activism has been labelled performative. But right now, we are at the brim of a revolution," Timbadia says.
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Gawande affirms this point, "Young people were told that we don't care, that we are lazy and unemployed. Today, young people have proved everyone wrong. Today, we're ready to bear the brunt of police lathis and FIRs. And after all this, we are coming back, every day, with good spirits and humour."
How does a generation of "performative activists" take the streets? What magic does this movement have that has compelled so many to come on-ground? How does a meme movement even mobilise to become electric? How does a social media-first movement gain momentum on-ground?
Samya Korde has been organising protests in Mumbai and has been detained for attending them. PIC/SAYYED SAMEER ABEDI
Former student activist Anirban Bhattacharya, who was arrested in the 2016 Sedition Case alongside student activists Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar, has been observing the rise of CJP since its inception. On June 6, Abhijeet Dipke arrived in India and the first protest happened. "With the ripples the CJP made on social media, it seemed very likely that just as many people would show up on ground," Bhattacharya says, "But, that didn't happen. Mobilisation took time."
On July 20, the Delhi Police launched a crackdown on the "Chalo Sansad" march, where they used tear gas and lathis against students. PIC/PTI
It wasn't until June 20 that a sit-in could begin at Jantar Mantar. "They had to use some very traditional methods of protest like hunger strike by Sonam Wangchuk and [All India Students' Association (AISA) members] Neha [Bora], Ameen [Amitoj], and Manish [Kumar] to garner attention. Even then, the movement really gained attention only around the 16th or 17th day of Wangchuk's strike. Finally on July 19 when Wangchuk was taken by the police, the movement catapulted and spread nation-wide. So they still had to prove themselves on the ground for the movement to spread."
Aamir Kazi and Karishma Rawat
Although Delhi has found a sit-in site at Jantar Mantar, in Mumbai, protests remain spontaneous and sporadic. Since July 23 onwards Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) has been applicable to the city, making protesting illegal.
Advocate and activist Samya Korde, founder of Dharavi Foundation who's been organising the protests in the city, had also visited Jantar Mantar on July 17, a day before Wangchuk was forcefully taken to a hospital. "When we saw that happen, I knew Mumbai needed to show solidarity," she says, "So we organised a protest on July 20, which I could not attend because the police surrounded my house in Sion and put me in house arrest," she alleges. Korde has been detained multiple times since then.
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In Mumbai, she says, "The protests are spontaneous. There are multiple protests happening in one day, organised by different people. The movement has gone beyond the CJP or any political parties. All of us organisers are inter-connected and we are coordinating on how to organise."
With multiple organisers, information running haywire, how are organisers ensuring that protestors receive the right information at the right time? All India Students' Federation's Mumbai president Aamir Kazi, who has also been organising protests, says, "Right now, a lot of the organisers get detained and their phones are being snatched, which is making it harder to communicate. The next step for us is to centralise this. How do we take this under one roof? The police can provide us a designated free place. And we create a sit-in protest site, like Shaheen Bagh and Mumbai Bagh."
Gen Z protestors were seen holding hilarious, tongue-in-cheek signs. Pic/Tanisha Banerjee
Kazi says that social media is like a second skin to this generation, and they're utilising it very well to communicate and mobilise. Korde, too, affirms this, "Every generation has their own language to express themselves, and social media is ours. An Instagram story may last 24 hours, but it's a tool to spread information fast. We will use our 3-minute Reels to mobilise and spread our message. It has only made communication faster."
How they will proceed with protests under Section 163 remains to be seen. One such protestor who has become a useful source of information and mobilising is Oamkaar. The 29-year-old's Instagram page (@oamkaar) chronicles and updates every piece of information in the city's protests. "I receive thousands of DMs a day, asking me about where to come, how to find lawyers to help, what to do if you get detained. Right now I'm trying to disseminate this information as well as possible," he says.
Oamkaar has been actively participating in protests for close to a decade. "I've been a part of the CAA-NRC protests, stray dog protests, tree-cutting protests [against the cutting of 45,000 mangroves in the Coastal Road project], and protests supporting Palestine." What's different about this movement to him? "With CAA-NRC, we had had visible figureheads of every protest who were mainly political first, and then used social media to call for the protest. With this one, we see that the leaders were made from social media. Dipke, for example, or Ashutosh [Ranka, spokesperson for the CJP] - all of these people in Delhi were made because of social media.
"But in the other cities - Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Bengaluru - there are no leaders or figureheads. It is pretty much just people sharing that, âHey, we're going to have a protest over here. Pull up.' The CAA-NRC protest was seen as a top-down thing, while this student protest is more of a bottom-up, grassroots-level thing, which is why it seems like it's being organised on social media much more," he notes.
This, of course, comes with its own downsides. Oamkaar gives the example of those detained in the protests. Mumbai Police have booked around 400 people and registered 13 FIRs so far. "The reason people were detained on July 21 was because we trickled in. The protest time was 4.30 pm. By 4.45 to 5 pm, we still had just disjointed groups. Around 5 pm is when the group sort of fomented into a proper protest, when people realised that if you outnumber the police, the police won't pick you up. If we had a proper person at the top [to mobilise and disseminate information], people wouldn't have trickled in.
"I was wearing comfortable home clothes for the protest, intentionally, so it looked like I was a walker at Dadar and wouldn't be picked up before the protest started," Oamkaar says, "But anybody who looked like a protester - somebody with a bag, with a bandana on their head, wearing full-coverage clothes, wearing a jacket or wearing black - was being picked up and
told to leave."
Other than mobilising, social media is the only avenue to generate consciousness, argues Gawande. "Social media is the only alternative left for people's movements in India to reach ordinary Indian citizens. There has been an almost complete blackout of these protests in the mainstream television media. There are only reports of police officers who have been injured in the protests, but no television channel has the courage to show the police brutality unleashed upon young protesters in cities across the country. Spontaneous protests have broken out in more than eight capitals across the world, outside Indian high commissions and embassies to ensure that the world recognises that the shameful actions of the Delhi police will not go unnoticed. This has been made possible by the power of social media."
Behind the riot gear and barricades are also officers caught in the machinery of the state. Speaking to policemen on the ground, many admitted they receive only limited instructions and are often unaware of decisions taken by senior officials. Some said they had not been home for over a day.
"You can't just lathi charge them," one constable shook his head, "They're just kids. Even if we do, it's below the belt so they don't get gravely hurt." On asking how the anti-police sentiment at the protests affected them, one officer paused before offering a weary smile. "I can't even comment on it. I am doing my duty, they are doing theirs. All I can do is watch."
That humanity, however, exists alongside the far more visible image of policing that has defined these protests. Evidence of protestors with pellet wounds has been found as well. It was further underscored when an inspector from Mumbai was suspended after a video surfaced of him allegedly threatening three boys with false drug cases if they returned to the protests. This serves us a reminder that while some officers are silent cogs in the system, others actively become its instruments.
Practising Advocate Sulbha Chakranarayan, who has been providing legal aid to detained students, says the arrests prompted her to step in voluntarily. "I saw how badly the government was behaving with them. I'm not following any party. I am only helping students understand their legal rights." She claims many detainees, including minors, were unfamiliar with the law. "On July 21, 20 people were detained in Sion police station, six were minors.
Many hadn't even told their parents they were going to protest." She further alleges, "Police are taking advantage of the children's ignorance of the law. They are checking detained students' phones to see if they follow CJP on Instagram. You cannot do that."
