02 August,2026 07:31 AM IST | Mumbai | Debjani Paul
Apart from CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke’s declaration of his Dalit roots and homage to Dr BR Ambedkar, there was little room in the paper leak protest for activism around marginalised communities
When the paper leak stir broke out across the country, Ravi (name changed to protect identity) was in two minds about joining the other Gen Z protestors on the ground in Mumbai. While the 19-year-old political science student found the issue compelling, his hesitation stemmed from a deep distrust of the movement and its leaders' hesitation to speak about historical injustices against Dalits in the education system.
"I thought it odd, considering [CJP founder] Abhijeet Dipke had declared he was Dalit. But I kept faith and went for a protest at Shivaji Park. There were sporadic chants of âJai Bhim' but, again, there was no mention of Anitha [Dalit student who challenged the introduction of NEET in the Supreme Court in 2017, before succumbing in the first student suicide over the entrance exam] or Rohith [Vemula, PhD scholar who died by suicide over caste-based hostilities on campus]," he recalls.
When he brought it up in a group chat with fellow protestors, "they told me âek cheez pe focus kar na', that this protest was about education rights for all. Are Dalits not part of their definition of âall'?" he questions. He left the group chat and did not return to the protest.
Similar scenes unfolded at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, when Kashmiri youths arrived to press for restoration of Jammu and Kashmir's statehood, only to be told by other demonstrators that this would confuse the protest's messaging.
In the weeks since CJP began its protest, and education reformer Sonam Wangchuk embarked on his hunger strike, many have questioned the motives and commitment of both. Some in the Left pointed out that issues affecting marginalised communities - Dalits, tribals, queer folk, minority religions - had been ignored throughout the stir. Like Ravi's peers, however, others argued that "infighting" and "gatekeeping the protest" would only weaken the momentum of the movement.
This tension has yet again raked up an old debate: Does the Left's insistence on "perfectly intersectional politics" come at the cost of solidarity? Perhaps one of the biggest assumptions that was shattered by the recent paper leak protests across the country - apart from Gen Z smashing all notions of them being politically passive - is that the Left would never be able to put up a unified resistance.
The irony that the Left combats constantly, of course, is that the more they try to bring everyone into the fold, the more their numbers tend to dwindle as people get alienated over caste, class, or other social differences.
"We have to get strategic about how we run things and define our goals," says author, anti-caste leader, and public policy expert Yashica Dutt. "Is the goal to bring more people into the fold? If you look at what CJP did, the reason it was successful is because Abhijeet Dipke applied the communication strategies that he learnt at Boston University. The movement focused on education for all, because it's an issue a lot of people can get behind."
She compares it to Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign in New York City last year. "A lot of his support base was very deeply entrenched in calls to abolish ICE, abolish the police. But when he ran his campaign, he ran it on affordability, because after the presidential election any âDEI' issue had become deeply unpopular. What Mamdani's campaign did so brilliantly is focus on a universal issue that can bring more people into the fold," she explains.
Having said that, she stresses that a political campaign's goal is to win, but a mass movement doesn't have to run the same way. "It can start as a wider movement where we include more people, but eventually you have to educate them. The Indian Left has always been about class politics and has never thought of caste as an important dimension of struggle. The recent protests could have been a chance to educate people about why reservation is important, so that today, we wouldn't see the students' movement being co-opted by the Reservation Hatao Andolan."
"What we need is empathy from both sides. We cannot expect perfect politics from everyone, but if the Left is going to dismiss the lived experiences, all the violence and oppression Muslims, Dalits, Kashmiris, Manipuris, tribals, and others have faced for decades and centuries, then they will be left standing alone," she adds.
In the past few weeks, several Northeastern and Kashmiri creators have expressed bitterness over the fact that the country only sat up and took note of State violence when it happened in the Capital.
Chingri Paul, an independent journalist who covers current events in the Northeast on his Instagram page @northeast.unfiltered, points out, "When police fired tear gas at students in Delhi, the outrage was immediate. Manipur has had that happen, and worse, for three years. And most of India barely looked up."
"The Left speaks about the oppressed, but it often decides who counts as oppressed based on frameworks that were built without us in the room," he adds.
The reasons for this myopia are manifold. "The Left tends to do well with simple moral clarity. Manipur doesn't offer that. It involves multiple communities, competing grievances, ethnic conflict, and state failure all at once," he says, "The situation is also actively kept away from mainstream coverage. But, a country shouldn't need to see pain in its capital to recognise pain elsewhere." Despite that, "people from the Northeast showed up," he says, "We understand what it means to fight for something bigger than yourself."
Paul concedes, "The âsolidarity first' camp is right that movements die when they spend more time fighting each other than the actual problem. My honest view is that the people most harmed by this debate are always the ones who can least afford to wait for the Left to figure itself out. While activists argue about perfect politics, families in Manipur are still displaced. Students are still cheated out of fair exams. Women are still denied flats and called slurs."
But, "solidarity without accountability can become complicity. If you never question your own side, you eventually become the thing you were fighting against."
The right-wing has long mocked the Left over its "paralysis" as its many camps bicker over differing ideologies. But to Zen, a 21-year-old student who was in the vanguard of Mumbai's student protests, this diversity is a strength, not a weakness. "There are a lot of clashes over who gets the right to speak for the movement, what are their politics, whether they are intersectional. Honestly, it is not possible to cover all intersectionalities because the Left is not a monolith. It shelters a staggering breadth of identities - from trans to Dalit to Muslim to socialists, Marxists, and so on. It's easy to say the Right is more united, but then hate is a quick unifier."
The important thing is to "show up first, before injustice targets you - if you wait too long, there's no one else left to show up for you, with you." The rest can be figured out along the way; the recent protests have at least shown that it is possible, she says, "and that's a good place to begin."
