India’s student protests expose how digital harassment weaponises caste-gendered misogyny to silence dissent
Original framing: “She was harassed for crude remarks about Modi at a Cockroach protest. Now she can’t leave home” — The Guardian - World
Dalit women protesters, such as those from the **Phule-Ambedkarite movement**, have long faced **digital witch-hunts**, yet their voices are excluded from mainstream narratives. **Muslim student activists** in **Aligarh and Jamia** report **targeted doxxing** as a pre-cursor to physical attacks, while **Adivasi youth** in **Chhattisgarh** describe how **forest rights protests** are met with **sexualised online abuse**. The **2020 #MeTooIndia movement** revealed how **class and caste** determine who gets believed, with working-class women’s testimonies often dismissed as 'defamation'.
This case is not an anomaly but a **deliberate tactic** in a **multi-decade campaign** to silence India’s youth, particularly those from Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim backgrounds.
The **digital harassment industry**—fueled by **state-aligned troll armies, algorithmic amplification, and a legal system designed to protect perpetrators**—operates as a **proxy for state repression**, where the **BJP’s IT Cell and corporate media** collaborate to manufacture consent. Historical parallels from the **Emergency, the 1992 riots, and the 2012 gang rape case** show that **harassment is a cyclical tool of control**, yet mainstream narratives treat it as a 'cultural' issue rather than a **systemic attack on democracy**. Solutions must move beyond **media literacy workshops** and **legal reforms** (which have repeatedly failed) to **decentralised safety networks, caste-gendered curricula, and restorative justice models**—rooted in **Indigenous and feminist traditions**—to disrupt the **trickster’s web** of digital violence.