The Ellulian Postscript to an Indian Protest 

Imagine thousands of Gen Z protestors filling the streets of New Delhi, their smartphones held high, not just to record the scene, but as the very lens through which they decode power. Beside them, standard political placards are replaced by viral Instagram reels and screenshots of the protest.

The 2026 Jantar Mantar protests delivered a rather rare jolt to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), triggering the resignation of a Cabinet Minister. Such yielding to popular pressure remains a rare phenomenon in recent Indian political history, punctuated only by anomalies like when M.J. Akbar resigned in the wake of sexual harassment accusations, or when Shivraj Patil resigned in the wake of the 26/11 attacks.

Yet, unlike the present upheaval, those earlier ruptures did not germinate in the crucible of mass protest witnessed at Jantar Mantar (and echoed country-wide); they merely catered to passive public sentiment rather than confronting a mobilised populace. In the past, the PM Modi-led government managed political crises through fierce state pushback or by leaning heavily on the affective appeals of “Hindutva” or Hindu nationalism.

Yet, this time, the old ideological playbook faltered. What makes this resistance puzzling is that Gen Z was born and raised under the total digital and ideological dominance of the Modi regime. To divine why nationalism and cultural belonging suddenly failed to persuade them, we require a postscript that looks beyond standard headlines.

The real shift lies in a cultural transformation brought about by, as sociologist Jacques Ellul said in Technological Society (1967), “technique”, where a generation raised on hyper-efficient digital platforms begins demanding that same instantaneous and impeccable efficacy from the state itself.

Technique encompasses technology but extends beyond it. It refers to the totality of means organised around the principle of efficiency, seeking the optimum result with the least expenditure of resources in every sphere of human activity. As the logic of technique spreads through society, it reshapes the cultural environment within which social life is organised. The large-scale diffusion of this logic occurred in India after 2014. This is not to suggest that technique was absent before the Modi government or among millennials.

What changed after 2014 was the scale of its diffusion and its spreading across every social group (castes, tribes, and other such affiliations), class, gender, region, and religion. The rapid expansion of smartphones, affordable internet, digital payments, platform services, and online communication transformed technique from something largely confined to specialised institutions into a principle organising ordinary social practices across the country.

According to the Government of India (2024), under the Digital India initiative, internet connections increased from 251.5 million in 2014 to 969.6 million in 2024, while 474,000 5G towers now provide coverage across 99.6 per cent of districts. The very infrastructure developed under Modi’s leadership to consolidate its regime also diffused the logic of technique, significantly reshaping the cultural standards through which Gen Z would eventually come to evaluate political authority.

Once technique becomes the primary milieu, it transforms everyday culture by reorganising how people communicate, build relationships, consume information, solve problems, and evaluate success. Gen Z came of age amid this transformation in the wake of Digital India. Born and raised with smartphones and the internet as ordinary features of daily life, their primary milieu was no longer organised around the cultural premises that shaped previous generations. This becomes evident if we simply look at their communicative practices.

Memes, emojis, abbreviations, reels, short videos, and viral expressions compress meaning into forms that communicate rapidly and with minimum effort. Their digital interactions reward instant feedback, rapid circulation of information, and the optimisation of attention. Ratings and reviews, UPI payments, ride-hailing, food delivery, navigation apps, and algorithmic recommendations similarly organise everyday decisions around speed, convenience, precision, and measurable performance, making efficiency less a technological feature than a cultural habit.

As these habits become normalised, they acquire the status of cultural values and become the standards through which social and political life is evaluated. Political institutions are not solely judged by charismatic authority or ideological commitment than by their perceived capacity to deliver efficient and measurable outcomes.

In Ellul's formulation, technique assumes a sacred standard: efficiency no longer appears as one value among others but as the unquestioned standard against which all social practices are judged. It is within this transformed cultural setting that Gen Z's response to paper leaks, delayed recruitment, persistent unemployment, inflation, and the poor implementation of ethanol blending policies must be understood. These failures contradict the cultural expectations through which this generation organises its social world.

They reveal a widening gap between a culture shaped by technique and a state that repeatedly fails to meet the standards of efficiency it has itself helped institutionalise. Hindutva politics struggled to mediate this contradiction because its symbolic and affective appeals confronted a culture whose expectations had become anchored in the efficient organisation of everyday material life.

It is here that PM Modi's difficulty begins.

His rhetorical performances centred on Hindu nationalism, civilisational identity, sacrifice, and cultural belonging functioned as powerful instruments of political integration for previous generations whose social world remained organised around caste, religion, and other inherited forms of social identity. Gen Z, however, encounters political authority through a transformed cultural lens. It became evident during the protests, where slogans directed at the Prime Minister or even the Instagram appeal no longer observed the symbolic reverence that had characterised earlier political discourse.

As the youth strip away at any historic, albeit feudal, reverence for political authority, the government can no longer rely on emotional appeals alone to unite voters. The integrative force of political rhetoric now depends upon its capacity to mirror the cultural expectations that shape this generation.  This is not exclusively a challenge for the BJP but a structural condition confronting any political formation seeking to mobilise this generation.

It is a crucial aspect in the understanding of the political horizon of this generation. The Gen Z’s immediate demand is not the deepening of democracy but the restoration of efficiency. Democracy may very well be strengthened through such struggles, as it has historically been, but it cannot be said that strengthening democracy constitutes the conscious objective of a generation shaped by technique. What this generation seeks, first and foremost, is a state that performs. Whether such performance is achieved through stronger democratic institutions or through some other institutional arrangement remains an open question.  

(This article has been authored by Ankit Singh, who is a teaching assistant at the Department Of Social Sciences, Faculty Of Liberal Arts And Professional Studies, York University, Toronto. Views expressed are personal)