‘Give me some sunshine. Give me some rain. Give me another chance, I want to grow up once again.’ On July 24, hundreds of protesters in Bengaluru’s Freedom Park sang in chorus to the iconic 3 Idiots anthem, which for nearly two decades has embodied the frustrations of Indian students within an education system that prioritises grades, ranks, and results over the individual behind them.
Protesters enthusiastically sang many other songs—some borrowed from India’s bhakti traditions, others from artistes whose musical styles had nothing in common but whose music contained an anti-establishment strain. Songs such as Desh ki tabahi ka hisab dijiye (Give us accountability for destroying the country) in Bhojpuri have added to the repertoire of protest music that ‘andolanjeevis’ can draw from. All the music, like all the slogans, posters, and handmade placards, said loud and clear to the Union government: ‘We see through you’.
The sheer range of music that protesters fell back on and drew from, or created, reflected the diversity and amorphousness of the protesters themselves. The songs came from a variety of languages, histories, musical styles, and geographies, as did the people who sang them.
Among those gathered at Freedom Park, amateur singer and graphic artist John told TNM that music helps express “collective rage, collective sorrow and pain... and find commonality between different kinds of people.”
Reels, edits, and posts set to Lifafa’s Wahin ka wahin called out to those who love this country to wake up to see that this country deems love itself illegal. Through Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, protesters asked ‘How many ears must one man have before he can hear people crying?’ And how many deaths will it take 'til he knows that too many people have died?’ mourning the lives claimed by the pressures of a flawed education system and calling out the government’s silence to this pain.
Songs like Rang de basanti invoked the history of Bhagat Singh and the history of struggle and resistance that came before. Bella ciao, an Italian folk song popularised during the anti-facist movement against Mussolini’s dictatorship and the German Nazi occupation, was invoked to celebrate the martyrdom of those resisting oppression. It underscored videos of protesters in Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad alike, raising their hands, voices, and flags against the powers that be.
The protest was vibrant on social media too. An Instagram reel, liked over 73,800 times, paired the lines, ‘Do you support this Constitution? Then defend it!’ from Alexander Hamilton’s autobiographical musical with an illustrated tribute to the Indian Constitution. Originally a call to Americans to defend the ideals of their new nation, the lyrics were repurposed to ask social media audiences to shed their ignorance and speak up alongside the student movement.
Lampooning the government
A distinct feature of the music at any protest is lampooning the authorities who either caused a problem, or failed to solve it. The protesters against the NEET paper leak were scathing of the Union government, but they reserved the most incisive attacks for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
The Sanskrit verse Lavanena Bhojyam, which states that a kingdom prospers through justice the way food needs salt, entered popular culture in 2022 for the wrong reasons. Reciting the verse at a formal event, PM Modi stumbled over the pronunciation of “lavenena”, which means “with salt”. The syllables came out sounding like a common Hindi vulgarity instead, prompting a wave of memes. A recently released rendition of the verse was reclaimed by student protesters, who used it extensively over clips of the protests on social media to accuse the government of failing to uphold the very same justice it extols.
Original songs also sprung up, such as Desh ki tabahi ka hisab dijiye and Bhojpuri paper leak song. In one verse of Desh ki tabahi, the singer asks, “Yuva saare desh ke sadak par aa gaye, NEET paper leak par tum chuppi kha gaye” (The youth of the country have taken to the streets, but you have remained silent on the NEET paper leak). The songs go on to invoke the violence in Manipur, the Ram Temple theft controversy, and the labelling of student protesters as ‘anti-national’.
“People think protests are synonymous with rage,” said 22-year-old NEET aspirant Madhav Tacholi. “But with music, there’s a lot of joy that can come with protests that can break through barriers that anger may not be able to.”
It wasn’t just recorded music that added energy to the protests. On July 23, during a protest in Bengaluru organised by the Dalit Sangharsha Samithi and Adavi Arts, an anti-caste art collective dedicated to promoting folk arts, the beat of the parai rang out loud. The parai is a hollow drum that consists of a wooden frame with cow hide stretched over one side, played with sticks of varying sizes. Historically, Dalits played the instrument at funerals.
Athisaya, a member of Adavi Arts, said, “When a person dies, a parai is usually played to confirm their death. If they don’t wake up to the beat, they are confirmed to be dead. There is a running joke in our collective, where we say ‘If you don’t move to the beat of the parai at protests like this, maybe you are detached from all of what is happening’.”
They beat the parai, rapping to the collective’s song Kelra, featuring 17-year-old student Karab Surya. ‘For many ages he beat us. Here, we have to put a full stop to everything’, he raps, a lyric that speaks of the centuries long oppression by the upper-caste man, but which also lent itself easily to the government’s subjugation of the student movement and all that sparked it in the first place.
For Athisaya, that history cannot be separated from the politics surrounding education itself. She referred to Anitha, a Dalit NEET aspirant whose suicide in 2017 became a pivotal moment in the nationwide debates over merit and educational inequality. Despite achieving outstanding results in her board examinations, Anitha was unable to secure admission to medicine through NEET.
Echoing this, Harshini, a 27-year-old visual artist and member of Collective Bangalore, said, “The issues we are protesting are structural.” Bringing traditions like the parai into the movement, she argued, was a reminder that conversations around education cannot be separated from the histories of caste and social exclusion that continue to shape it.
Although there was criticism that the protests were largely driven by more affluent people who rarely take to the streets, people of all classes, genders, castes, and ages turned up everywhere across the country to participate in the agitation. At the heart of why they were there was perhaps an as yet unarticulated fear that the system was threatening their very lives, and to protect themselves, they needed to protect democracy.
“This is not just about NEET. This is for democracy because we are losing it,” Umesh, a Bengaluru UPSC aspirant attending his first protest on July 23, said. “Protest is the most powerful way to tell the government what we want, and when a protest does not gain credence, that’s when democracy is threatened.”
His words proved prophetic. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25.
This article was written by students interning with TNM.