An irony lost in the current turbulence is this: A populist has been blindsided by a populist moment. An amorphous and unorganised collective has protested in the name of the people, forced a minister’s resignation, and is directly targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Over 12 years in power, PM Modi has claimed a direct connection with the people, unmediated by institutions, processes, even rules of the game. Well, the people are talking back to him now, and some of them are rude. That he doesn’t seem to understand their language, that he ends up talking down to them on Instagram, points to the rift suddenly framed by the upsurge from below.This is not like the dharna at Shaheen Bagh or even like the farmers’ agitation to which the Modi government had bowed earlier. The first was led by a relegated Muslim minority. Though the figure of the farmer at the centre of the second agitation was more irrefutable, it did not touch off emotions and empathies across millions of families like a movement that makes the young its motif. This time, PM Modi faces an intimate enemy, one he cannot demonise or easily label as the “Other”.AdvertisementIn 2014, when Modi swept to power on the claim that he is the embodiment of the people rising against the status quo presided over by corrupt Congress elites, he was the populist defined not just by anti-elitism, but also by anti-pluralism. The Modi-BJP arrogated to itself the prerogative to define who is, and who isn’t, the people — not the Muslims, nor the critics and political opponents labelled as “anti Hindu”, “urban Naxal” and “anti national”, or those propped up by inimical “foreign forces” with sinister “tool kits”. Till now, the Modi phenomenon has, in keeping with the populist script, projected him as above the fray, as the custodian of bigger pictures, not singed by the lines of accountability that are in any case long and meandering in a multi-layered polity.By taking on Modi directly now, the protests triggered by the Cockroach Janta Party against an education system besieged by debilitating weaknesses, have drilled some reality checks into his above-the-fray positioning, and loosened the stranglehold of the Modi-BJP story. This is, therefore, a moment of reclamation and relief. But the fact also is that what is being called the “Gen Z movement” rides a populist moment of its own making — it also runs the danger of making claims that need to be questioned, if not punctured, in an unequal and diverse democracy.To say this is not to say that all populisms are alike, or that 2014 is equal to 2026. In 2014, an electorate was tiring of Congress, the Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh governing arrangement was divided at the top in ways that undermined its own authority, and politics seemed not to have caught up with the polity’s rightward shift. Prodded by the Anna mobilisations, voters were persuaded and entranced by the Modi appeal, his outsized persona, us-versus-them framing and promises of quick-fixes. The students’ protest in 2026 comes at a time when a different kind of disillusion may be setting in. This time, it is against a domineering government that is colonising all spaces, amid a weakening of institutions and hollowing out of parties. The CJP, which leads the protests, is also different from the conventional populist actor or force — it is a fluid formation, with no defined organisation and no overpowering leader who is charismatic. This could keep it safe from some of populism’s ill-effects, arguably.AdvertisementEven so, the claim to speak for the authentic people in a large and diverse democracy is essentially an act of what democracy theorist John Keane calls political ventriloquism. It must be interrogated. It needs to be asked, for instance, whether a crowd will gather as easily, or build pressure on the government as effectively, if the issue was the recurring discrimination against Dalits or continuing exclusion from “sabka saath…” of the Muslim minority.The slogan of “Jai Bheem” raised from the Jantar Mantar stage does not put these questions to rest. Not just because it was only a part of the background score, not the rallying cry. It is also because more than any one slogan, leader, party or flash mob, the marginalised and the excluded, the Dalits and the Muslim minority, depend on what took a back seat at Jantar Mantar — stolid institutions and unglamorous processes, unspectacular rules of the game, ill-lit checks and balances. To be fair, the CJP has not openly or directly undermined institutions, but it has raked up a strain of anti-politics. It is also true that the rules of the game are being rewritten by the ruling establishment, which chooses its own referees. But the constitutional and political scaffolding is still where a despite-it-all trust is reposed by those at the margins and peripheries.In Dalit clusters distant from the arclights in Delhi, you sometimes catch a glimpse of what binds India’s most deprived to the political mainstream — pride in the Constitution Babasaheb gave to the country, hope in the coalition-making forced by a first-past-the-post system upon parties. “How can any one party change the Constitution that Babasaheb bestowed and all parties accepted?”, was a refrain in many Dalit localities, even in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, when the BJP’s “400-paar” slogan had touched off insecurities. A social engineering experiment of a Dalit party in search of the “plus” vote made Mayawati a four-time chief minister of UP, and that compulsion also lies behind the wooing of SCs by other parties.you may likeIn Muslim neighbourhoods, in the time of BJP dominance, you hear, again and again, alienation from leaders and parties, and signs of a community looking over their shoulder at the impersonal rules of the game. The institutions are still there, are they not? Will they not hold out against pressures, remain standing?An abiding memory from a night spent at the 2011 Anna Hazare mobilisation in the capital’s Ramlila Maidan is of the dark pierced by camera phones held up by people taking selfies, well after the stage had fallen silent. The Jantar Mantar sit-in, too, has done well to increase democracy’s repertoire of images and voices. But we need to acknowledge a paradox: A routine, non-populist politics cannot easily challenge populism, and yet all populism bruises institutions. This moment also calls for humility — the agenda of change remains unfulfilled, after the crowds have gone back home.The writer is National Opinion Editor, The Indian Express. vandita.mishra@expressindia.com