Ruhani
Kaur
When My Daughter Marched,
and I Saw the Future Looking Back
- The Polis Project, 4 August 2026
In a couple of days, I, a 49-year-old freelance photojournalist, will become an empty nester as my Gen Z daughter leaves for college. When the Chief Justice of India used dehumanizing language about unemployed youth and linked them to journalism and activism before later clarifying that he meant people with fake or bogus degrees, he still managed to fuse two things I know intimately: the precarity of youth and the vulnerability of the press.
What the court likely intended as a contemptuous analogy was seized on by students and young people as a name for themselves, and the “Cockroach Janta Party” turned the slur into a form of satire, protest, and self-definition.
Last week, when we came together in solidarity with the thousands who found resonance in that label, I felt my daughter could see me better and me her. I had been feeling the downward curve of my chosen career in photojournalism sharpen for a while now, so I don’t begrudge my daughter for wanting to make smarter, more capitalist choices. However, her obsession with employability in the corporate world, even as she chose her university, unsettled me immensely.
But this week, as we stood in solidarity with the thousands who have slipped through the widening gap between education and employability, her insecurity became real for me.
The reason she could relate to those suffering from a competitive exam leak is her two-year stint at a private coaching center. The entrance was lined with posters of children turned into grocery items, with their All India Ranks and salary packages in lakhs per annum displayed as labels of success. I was taken aback by her choice, but supported it.
We had raised her in what we considered marginally alternative schools that didn’t burden kids with unnecessary pressure to excel only academically. We insisted on an ICSE education so the government wouldn’t alter the curriculum too much, as it is obsessed with the CBSE board. This, in hindsight, just made things even tougher for her when she had to bridge the CBSE gap to prepare for the Common University Entrance Test, another hurdle layered on top of her board exams — a grudge she blamed on her dad for wanting her to study Shakespeare that badly. Her well-rounded personality as a gymnast, dancer, and debater funneled into a singular existence where sample test papers became her life as she prepared for three sets of exams, each with different curricula. Throughout this phase, I was very careful to reiterate that I cared more about her than how she fared.
Amongst this sea of students at the protest was a father, a debt-ridden farmer, carrying a photo of his 22-year-old son, Pradeep Mahich, whom he had repeatedly told the same. Who is to be held accountable for the suicide of the 22 medicine students who cleared the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) exams, only for the seat they saw as their future to be snatched away by the paper leak?
As the protests grew, by the 20th my daughter was very excited to join the first Gen Z march to Parliament. I had been a little slow to take up, as in 2011, when Anna Hazare sat on a hunger strike, as Sonam Wangchuk did this time, I was covering it, taken in by the idealism fed in large doses. We all who had been there probably saw this as a deja vu moment with characters from the next generation taking over. In hindsight, I learned that every time we celebrate a successful protest, a political plot that was brewing all along comes back to bite us. Soon after the protests, the BJP came to power and has remained in power for 12 years. The cyclical nature of our political theatre sheds us of our naivety and leaves us cynical.
Yet I was proud that my daughter felt brave enough to go. None of her friends were going to take the chance, as the threat of police violence and even arrest was real. They had seen that play out during the CAA student protests six years ago.
We plotted our route to avoid the cops detaining the youth, stood in long lines to recharge our Metro cards as the internet was jammed, got off at the non-blocked Metro stations, and marched alongside fellow sloganeers. By the time we got there, on a 17-year-old’s morning clock, the inner stage area was barricaded, and the Gen Zs had occupied all the radials for kilometers leading to the circular center of the national capital for the protest.
“I was excited that my generation led a resistance in such large numbers against a government that has suppressed rebellion for so many years. A feat that our opposition could never garner. This uprising could possibly replace them,” my daughter reflected later.
For a child who was four when she went for her first candlelight vigil when Nirbhaya happened, she’d still rather take an auto she can jump off than be locked into a cab. Yet she felt safe here amidst thousands of men in Delhi. We, amidst the sloganeering youth and parents, were wrapped by this feeling of community. United by a singular cause and ready to risk our safety, we felt that the feeling of being part of a revolution is unparalleled. The glow of it reflected in her smile, which was rare.
I didn’t want to break the spell and strategically maneuvered us toward the parts that appeared safe. When we got back, we were hit with so many near misses of where we had been at what time, as the harshness of the police brutality was aired on Instagram.
My daughter felt her apprehensions about the men of her country fade further when she read about the multiple occasions when men tried to shield the women as police aimed for their private parts. The cops lathi-charged with nails hammered in, threw expired tear gas, shot pellet guns at close range, and used electric batons. Reels of students being treated with their heads cracked open, legs and arms fractured, eyes pelleted at Ram Manohar Lohia’s emergency ward were all over my daughter’s Instagram feed. A 21-year-old was on a ventilator; some articles even wrongly declared her a martyr, a word I have grown to despise. Thankfully, she is a bit better now.
For youngsters, to accept that they are no longer seen as the precious future of the country but to be treated like terrorists as the rule of law recedes is a coming-of-age moment for any generation. The youth was the new enemy as studios began screaming about Chinese and Pakistani funding, as expected.
I had covered how it had played out in Jamia. My daughter tells me that those days she would hear Safoora Zargar’s rallying ‘Zor se bolo march hain’ in her REM sleep as I played and replayed it during my video editing. We had been covering Safoora for a multimedia piece on Feminism and Protest Movements. However, when she was arrested and that too in her pregnant state, we were paralyzed. We put our story on hold for months, not wanting to jeopardize her chances of getting bail by putting anything out that could harm her legally. Even mobilizing to block roads for a protest was considered criminal, a lawyer warned. The courtroom claim that the protests had ignited riots was absurd fiction. The vengefulness was brazen. Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam to this day are behind bars, six years on.
How would I look back on these moments from this protest of our kids in idealistic abandon and on an adrenaline high, if it were to come back to haunt me or worse, them? The hard truth is I wouldn’t want to face it at all. She, though, will come up with her own answer in times to come, as each rite of passage like this one will inform her future choices.
In the coming days after the battle lines were drawn, my daughter’s generation, Gen Z, responded with such irreverence, humor, satire, misogyny, crassness and sexualisation that it disintegrated the 3D hologram of our moral brahmachari Prime Minister and his fellow men. They flipped the protest crackdown rulebook the establishment had mastered on its head. Obviously, my daughter wanted to join back, be it as an observer rather than an aggressive protester. Even as I try to discuss it now, I can see she is still processing. Still cautious, I suggested we go back together rather than her with her friends, as they were detaining kids on the way to the protest site; we could pretend to go shopping.
With 83% of Gen Zers considering themselves content creators, Instagram became the platform of choice for this self-sustaining Gen Z protest. They took control of their narrative; they got their boards stuck with AI-generated photos and cutting messages in their lingo, shot selfies of each other, and produced and aired it on Instagram as memes and reels. They made me redundant — nullifying the very need for my profession.
A young girl wearing a bandana and a crop top held up a sanitary pad on which it was scribbled ‘I’m leak proof, but NEET is not’. The Education Minister was seen in a Bhaag Milkha Bhaag poster running for his life in a vest. There was a photo of Prime Minister Modi, draped in a sari and with a towel wrapped around his head, making pancakes for US President Trump, who was in a vest. His Melody video was the butt of most posters. After the Prime Minister put out the selfie video that broke his month-long silence, addressed to his GenZ Phriends (that Instagram later inadvertently deleted for a bit) the jokes never stopped. The proficient IT Cell of the Prime Minister woke up to the bursting of his carefully crafted backlit god-like aura.
While my daughter was surprised by the graphic posters and language, she felt it juxtaposed the puritanical and brahmanical ideology that the BJP was built on. In a country that fares appallingly low in the press freedom index, resistance needs to be loud and brash to attract attention. Still, she felt, some of the oversexualisation and the free use of ma-behan gaalis tipped into misogyny.
The one poster that tried to define the protest’s irreverent tone had the slogan, ‘PM with a fake degree will never respect students’. The moral high ground had been tilted by an educational one.
My daughter was surprised by how many in this protest were older students who had already put years into getting through their competitive exams, intensifying the heartache to a level that could feel fatal. The throngs of unemployed who were just aiming for ticket conductor jobs in railways were probably more qualified than our prime minister and many in the cabinet who have to implement our policies. If so many of them don’t have jobs, it’s the government’s failure.
When the Finance Minister remarked patronizingly to children about the importance of hard work, I wondered how she would feel about being operated on by a doctor whose seat or job had been bought. The ineptness of the police, the sheer stupidity and vileness of our politicians made many students preparing for the police exam and UPSC feel too disgusted and even want to opt out.
This was all happening while we, in our nuclear reality, were choosing between a Delhi University college for sociology, full of UPSC aspirants, and a liberal arts private college for my daughter’s psychology and economics. She chose the latter.
While we had the privilege of choosing, the sheer numbers and the demographics we saw at the protest deepened her belief that reservation was still needed. Ironically, within days, a 5.5 million anti-reservation movement had mounted. She felt that while she could concentrate on her studies at the private coaching center, many from less well-off families had to work alongside to just pay for these expensive institutes. How was that an even playing field?
Within hours of victory being declared, Gen Z humbly swept the roads and packed up the litter. The morning after, in the wee hours of Sunday, painters were seen whitewashing the ‘Wall of Shame’ and ‘Graffiti of Dissent’. But the database — protesters logged by the facial-recognition CCTV cameras and the Meta glasses worn by the forces — will remain. In parallel, reels of police brutality were being archived by the Gen Zs even as Meta had reportedly begun erasing them.
Threats to revoke passports, months after we were told even that too wasn’t proof of citizenship during the SIR exercise, hadn’t deterred the crowds. Even as DU and JNU warned their students not to participate or post, cops came to student hostels to arrest them, and yet an unparalleled number from this 400 million still stepped out. Many young influencers turned down money offered by government PR companies to defame the protests. The goons in plain clothes who’d carried out the lathi charge were identified, and their numbers were flashed on social media. Many who did wear masks were hiding from their parents who were either government employees or BJP supporters. Mine, like most there, refused to wear one. None of the earlier scripts worked.
It wasn’t only the establishment; many Gen Zs also called out the duplicity of their parents — who justify the compromises they make on their ladder to success by pointing out that it awards their kids’ private privilege.
As the threats of arrests around the country began to surface the day after victory had been declared, I felt the same sensation in the pit of my stomach that I had felt when Safoora had been arrested. And as a parent, I wished my daughter had agreed to mask up. The cowardice of love.
My daughter felt that a student movement had finally held to account a government that had remained unflinching in the face of the most heinous accusations. This shows the true power of the masses — as it should be in a democracy.
The fear of speaking up that seemed to have been paralyzing us till a month back has dissipated like sand through clenched fingers. What more can a parent hope for as her child steps out into the world? Maybe this generation will help abandon our cynicism and fear that had begun to take root and unfetter our collective conscience again.