Before 24 July, a person I will call R was preoccupied with the ordinary routines of teenage life: experimenting with makeup, grumbling over mathematics homework and hanging out with friends at a tea stall. That month, as the fever of student protests spread across the country, the 15-year-old watched on her phone as young people poured into Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site in Delhi, demanding education reform. But an 11-second video clip from the protest site, in which she made crude and profane remarks about the prime minister, Narendra Modi, upended her life.
In my own country, I am being treated like an enemy.” It’s been 86 days since that protest, but R doesn’t leave home over safety concerns, trapped in the reality the ordeal created. The summer agitation had for weeks demanded the ousting of the then-education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over repeated examination paper leaks. But after a violent police crackdown on a student march the anger spilled over to the Modi government.
I went to Jantar Mantar every night that week as people from all walks of life streamed in. Protest signs once directed largely against Pradhan now increasingly targeted Modi and his powerful deputy, Amit Shah, whose ministry controls Delhi Police. The language was often profane and sexualised, and was quickly seized on by government supporters to condemn the protesters.
Pro-government media channels ran heated debates about the disrespectful language and questioned the motives of those gathered. Women were singled out; BJP supporters identified them from social media clips and doxed them. R found herself at the centre of this storm.
A police case was filed against her for insult intended to provoke a breach of the peace, and statements that could lead to public mischief and defamation. The complainant told Scroll, an independent news organisation, that she had called R and asked her to publicly apologise. After Pradhan resigned, Modi posted on Instagram about the use of vulgar abuses against him by “some mischievous children”, saying: “It is a cultural shock.
How can our daughters speak like this?” Modi added that the children must be forgiven, instead of being punished. Meanwhile, R issued an apology to Modi. In a grainy video filmed in low light, R stands against a dull white wall wearing a striped T-shirt, her hands folded in a namaste.
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