Every year India observes August 9 as the Quit India movement anniversary, a day dedicated to anti-imperialism which is specific to India. India in 1942 was the biggest colony of British Empire, and despite virtually continuous resistance and uprisings over the previous two centuries, the colonial rulers were still smug about the sun never setting on their vast global empire. When the Quit India resolution was passed in the Mumbai session of AICC, the colonial rulers reacted by arresting Gandhi and the entire Congress leadership. Yet the people of India took up the challenge, and 1942 became colonial India's biggest mass uprising after 1857, heralding the final push of the Indian people for nothing short of complete independence from colonial rule. The colonial rulers indeed had to quit within five years.
This year, the Quit India movement anniversary had a very special renewed resonance. Preceding the month of August was the July of Jantar Mantar. The colonial collaborators of 1942 are now the rulers of India. They tried to follow the same colonial rule book - Sonam Wangchuk was abducted and common protesters were sought to be silenced with lathis (immortalised by iconic mass singer Hemanga Biswas as the 'baton' left behind by 'Mount-baton sahib'), pellet guns (perfected in the Kashmir laboratory of state repression), tear gas shells and AK47 assault rifles. Yet, powered by the courage and stamina of Gen Z, the people of India proved themselves worthy successors of the 1942 Quit India spirit. The super-arrogant Modi government which had boasted that no minister would ever resign had to sacrifice Dharmendra Pradhan.
The spirit of Jantar Mantar of July 2026 has since been permeating the whole of India. More than 450 law graduates from NALSAR Hyderabad have openly expressed their refusal to have their degrees awarded by the current Chief Justice of India whose track record has been one of sanctifying every unconstitutional measure of the Modi government. School students are rising in protest across India demanding a functional system of public education. A powerful movement has emerged in Jharkhand against paper leaks in competitive examinations. In a welcome sign of the times, the voices from the ground also resonated loudly in the monsoon session of Parliament, demanding the accountability of Home Minister Amit Shah for the police brutalities on student protesters. On 9-10 August India also witnessed massive demonstrations of trade unions and farmer organisations.
Having failed to crush the youth upsurge by brute force, the Modi government is now using the Sangh brigade to try to launch a counter campaign to malign the Jantar Mantar protests, while using the Jharkhand protests to serve the Sanghi narrative. The Godi media, which conspicuously ignored the Jantar Mantar protests, is busy projecting the Jharkhand protests as 'ideal' protests of Gen Z where there is no chanting of Aazadi slogans, no biryani served by any Junaid to feed protesters, no 'profanity' against the Modi government. When Comrade Neha reached Ranchi, where AISA had already been an active part of the Jharkhand protests, to uphold the underlying unity between Jantar Mantar and Jharkhand, the Sangh brigade smeared her with ink. This cowardly attack only revealed the Sangh brigade's desperation and Comrade Neha rightly took it in her strides and her communist resolve to use that ink to write history has now become emblematic of India's GenZ courage which turned the derogatory 'cockroach' label into a new sign of defiance.
Can we allow the Sangh brigade to play its sinister 'divide and rule' politics with Gen Z protests? Can we allow the Modi government to incriminate the chant of Aazadi? If India cannot celebrate the slogan of Aazadi, does the Sangh brigade expect Indians to celebrate slavery? The word Aazadi connotes not just national independence, which the Indian people are determined to defend in the face of every imperialist threat, it also connotes the liberties and freedom of the Indian people as proclaimed in the Preamble to the Constitution of India. Nothing can be a more shocking insult to India as a sovereign democratic republic than incriminating the use of the very word Aazadi, call it independence, freedom or liberty.
If the Modi government is suppressing our internal democracy, it is also mortgaging our hard won economic sovereignty and strategic autonomy to US imperialism and the genocidal US-Israel axis of war and aggression. It is therefore reassuring to see that even as student protests have foregrounded the agenda of universal public education, a corruption-free examination system, institutional autonomy and accountability of governments, the developing worker-peasant protests confront the government on the agenda of security and dignity of employment, defence of workers' rights, guaranteed living wages for all and the imminent threat of sacrificing the interests of India's farmers at the altar of US agribusiness in the name of an Indo-US trade deal.
