ords have a way of returning to haunt one. Prime Minister Modi’s “Mera desh badal raha hai (my country is changing), uttered as a boast, has turned into a diagnosis.

What makes a movement a powder keg is a grievance that cuts across class, age, gender and religion — something everyone lives with, even when they can’t quite name it. This one had plenty to draw on: the slow bleed of GST-inflated prices; potholed roads and collapsing bridges sold as world-class infrastructure; a petrol crisis worsened by an ethanol-blending scandal; and the daily humiliation of an examination system that millions cling to and no one trusts. Layer on top the harassment of minorities, the brazen seizure of land, rivers and forests from the communities that depend on them, and a political climate where opposition parties are broken up with impunity — and you have not a grievance but an atmosphere. Sooner or later, the atmospheres ignite.

Jantar Mantar drew the cameras like it always does. But the real story was elsewhere — in Begusarai, Narnaul, Aurangabad: towns that exist, as far as the national gaze is concerned, only for the people who live in them. They were all speaking the same language of accumulated frustration. That’s the tell. When places nobody watches start saying the same thing as the places everybody watches, you’re not looking at an outburst; you’re looking at a movement.

It has certainly behaved like one — surviving a crackdown that wasn’t a single day’s overreach but a sustained campaign, with young people showing up afraid, showing up in tears; showing up anyway. That persistence is the crucial evidence. This was never about a single resignation, or a single leak, or a single villain. It has had many faces and many moments — Sonam Wangchuk, Abhijeet Dipke, Neha and other left-leaning students; Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi — each drawing on a different well of legitimacy. There was a cauldron of causes and a cauldron of leadership. That plurality is precisely why this movement has runs broader and cut deeper than anything since the farmers’ agitation and the anti-CAA/ NRC protests.

Jantar Mantar drew the cameras like it always does. But the real story was elsewhere — in Begusarai, Narnaul, Aurangabad: towns that exist, as far as the national gaze is concerned, only for the people who live in them.

The government’s playbook has been familiar: ignite, mock, smear and beat; in the end, negotiate, hoping to shrink the whole thing down to a single, symbolic resignation. But movements of this kind rarely resolve in one stroke. Some will go home satisfied. Others won’t stop until they’ve seen the regime through to its end. That is exactly what the government fears, which is why it wanted to open the parliamentary session with an even more aggressive slate of bills to curb civic freedoms, with delimitation looming in the background. One can only hope that it has learnt something instead, because a new generation — supposedly too anxious, too Instagram-addled, too online to organise — has just shown it is afraid of very little.

To those still asking “if Modi is bad, what’s the alternative?” — the question has answered itself, three times over.

First: had that logic held, no alternative would ever have emerged to Indira Gandhi at the height of her power after the 1971 war and in the shadow of the Emergency. The opposition was weak. It found Jaya Prakash Narayan — not unlike a Wangchuk figure — to rally around, and it was enough. That confrontation matured Indian politics, seeding the regional and national alternatives that followed, and eventually pushed even the Congress towards reforms and liberalisation.

Second: colonial rulers made the same argument about Indians as a people — that they were incapable of self-rule and without British hands on the wheel risked destroying themselves. Gandhi’s answer was: leave India to its fate, whatever that fate might be. We know now what that fate turned out to be.

Third: tellingly, at the peak of the euphoria, it was Dipke who told the crowd not to turn him into a hero because democracies don’t run on heroes, and that he, too, must always be held accountable. That instinct is the clearest sign of a democracy still capable of maturing: no individual is allowed to be above its institutions. When that line is crossed - as it was with Indira Gandhi and far more dangerously with Modi - what a country needs isn’t a saviour but leaders agreeing to be no more than first among equals, permanently answerable to public scrutiny. So “who, besides Modi?” is not a serious question; it is a trap dressed up as one.

The author has been in the development sector for more than a decade and currently works with an International non-governmental organisation based in Delhi. He may be reached at: [email protected].