Families divided as children of BJP supporters demand education reforms and reject politics of hate, posing an unprecedented challenge to the Indian leader’s 12-year rule.
New Delhi, India – When Kunal Choudhary left Punjab’s Ludhiana city on July 14 to join the Gen Z-led protests in New Delhi, he knew it was in effect a one-way ticket with little possibility of returning home in the foreseeable future.
Choudhary, 19, a law student at a private university in Jalandhar, another city in Punjab, was among tens of thousands of people who streamed into the national capital to demand education reforms after papers for a key medical entrance test were leaked, leading to more than 20 aspirants dying by suicide and causing widespread anger across the country.
The unprecedented challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year rule forced the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and an overhaul of entrance exams ordered by the government, exposing cracks in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government’s aura of invulnerability. Meanwhile, similar protests continue in other parts of the country.
Choudhary’s journey to join the protests in New Delhi was unlike many others.
Even after the nerve centre of the protests was cleared out and members of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), the satirical online group that organised the 36-day protests, called off its demonstrations after Pradhan’s resignation on July 25, Choudhary has not left the places where he said his life irreversibly changed. He even celebrated his 19th birthday with fellow protesters and complete strangers days before the demonstrations were called off.
“My father is a BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] member, and I was an RSS member until I left home to come to Delhi. I missed my final semester exams because they clashed with the protests,” he told Al Jazeera. “But it is what it is. I couldn’t make peace with sitting back and watching the world around us fall apart.”
The RSS is the BJP’s far-right ideological mentor. Founded in 1925 on the lines of fascist parties in Europe, the secretive paramilitary organisation presides over dozens of Hindu groups that work towards a common goal of turning a constitutionally secular India into a Hindu state. Its most common activity is a weekly neighbourhood meeting (called “shaakha”) where men typically wearing white shirts and khaki shorts take part in martial drills and indoctrination.
The RSS, headquartered in Nagpur city in Maharashtra state, was banned by the government after one of its alleged members assassinated independence icon Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The ban was lifted the next year, and the organisation floated its political wing, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, in 1951, which became the BJP in 1980.
Today, the RSS counts Modi and most other top BJP leaders among millions of its lifetime members in India and abroad.
