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On June 27, one of Delhi’s hottest summer days, the Cockroach Janta Party student agitation at Jantar Mantar seemed to have reached a lull.

A few determined students sat painting posters. Looking at the placards, it was immediately obvious who was still holding the ground. The insignia of the Left’s student organisations was everywhere. I remember remarking that AISA (All India Students’ Association) seemed to be carrying the protest.

The movement was still small enough for another demonstration to share the space. Pallavi Patel of Apna Dal (K), Uttar Pradesh, had called a protest demanding an OBC quota within the Women’s Reservation Bill, and a small crowd from Uttar Pradesh had gathered around her.

Less than a month later, Jantar Mantar itself had become too small.

Protesters spilled onto Sansad Marg, Tolstoy Marg and Connaught Place. By July 20, the march to Parliament had turned the heart of Delhi into a protest site. Drone photographs revealed a sea of people. Neha Bora, president of AISA, later admitted that even the organisers had underestimated what was coming. “We knew July 20 would be big. We didn’t expect it to be this big.”

Neha Bora, President of AISA. The Left’s student organisations provided much of the protest’s organisational backbone.

Looking back after the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, much has been written about the scale of the protests and the coalition that emerged around them. The students achieved in seven weeks what a decade of organised opposition has not. They forced a Union minister out and gathered tens of thousands of people on the road to Parliament in the face of a hostile police force. They took apart, in public and with laughter and great courage, an image that had been built and maintained with enormous care for 12 years. They broke the spell that had made the regime appear too formidable to challenge.

The protest generated an entire parallel universe of political satire. Slogans, posters and imagery from the ground drew on many of the defining episodes of the Modi years. Alongside demands for education and employment were references to banging thalis during the Covid pandemic, Mann Ki Baat, and the viral “Melody” moment.

“Modiji has put his picture on posters everywhere. Why should he have a problem with us doing the same?” Avinash, a law student, said with deadpan irony.

But the victory raises a harder political question. Can a movement whose strength lay in bringing together such different constituencies become the basis of a political realignment?

The hint of an answer lies in the composition of the crowd, the very thing that made all of this possible. If its diversity was its strength, it was also an indication of what the protest was not.

Author and activist Revati Laul has written of “the organised Left and its quiet power“, which she witnessed during the ‘Chalo Sansad’ march, and it is a point worth repeating. Had there not been organisations willing to endure the initial lull, there may never have been a July 20. Neha Bora, together with AISA activists Manish Kumar and........

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