India’s protests reveal systemic fractures: neoliberalism, caste inequality, and climate injustice collide in mass mobilisation
Original framing: “Why people across India are taking to the streets again - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The voices of Dalits, Adivasis, and rural women are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives, yet they are at the forefront of these protests. For example, Dalit women in Hathras and Una have led mobilisations against caste violence, while Adivasi women in Bastar have organised against mining and sexual harassment by security forces. These voices challenge the dominant discourse by centring issues of gender, caste, and ecological justice, which are often sidelined in elite-led political negotiations. The framing of protests as 'leaderless' or 'spontaneous' erases the strategic organising of these marginalised groups, whose leadership is critical to the movements’ sustainability.
India’s current protest wave is not a series of isolated events but a systemic response to the convergence of neoliberal economic policies, caste-based exclusion, and climate-induced livelihood crises.
The movements draw on deep historical roots—from colonial-era rebellions to modern Adivasi and Dalit resistance—while employing cross-cultural strategies of collective action, spiritual solidarity, and trickster-like disruption to challenge state and corporate power. Mainstream narratives that frame these protests as 'unpredictable' or 'violent' obscure their structural causes, including the erosion of public services, the corporate capture of land and resources, and the failure of institutions to address marginalised voices. Solutions must address these systemic failures through decentralised governance, universal basic services with equity audits, climate-resilient agriculture, and truth mechanisms for state violence, while centring the Indigenous and marginalised leadership that has sustained these movements for generations.