Resistance Against Modi: India’s Fight to Remember Itself

by Kumar Guarav

For over a decade, Narendra Modi has stood at the center of Indian politics — part populist, part brand, part myth. To his supporters, he is the man who made India visible to the world; to his critics, he is the leader who made dissent invisible at home. But beyond the headlines, what’s unfolding in India is not just a political story. It’s a quiet, stubborn resistance — an attempt by millions to defend an older idea of India, one that refuses to vanish.

The Making of an Empire

Modi’s rise from a tea seller in Gujarat to the prime minister’s office is often told as a tale of grit and destiny. What’s less discussed is how his leadership turned politics into spectacle. His rallies look like rock concerts, his image floods billboards, his voice fills radio airwaves. For many Indians, Modi is not merely a politician but a presence — a symbol of pride wrapped in nationalism.

But power built on personality always casts a long shadow. Institutions once designed to question authority now orbit around it. The media, the judiciary, even universities — all have felt the quiet pressure of conformity. Those who speak up are branded as “anti-national,” a phrase that has become both weapon and warning.

The Language of Resistance

Yet India, with its messy, argumentative soul, does not stay silent easily. Resistance takes many forms here. Sometimes it looks like a farmer sitting on a dusty road near Delhi, holding a protest banner. Sometimes it sounds like a student shouting slogans inside a campus courtyard. Sometimes it’s a journalist refusing to delete a story.

This defiance may not always make the front pages, but it builds a rhythm of its own. The 2020–21 farmers’ protests were a turning point — the largest democratic mobilization in decades. For more than a year, farmers camped at the borders of the capital, demanding the repeal of three agricultural laws. The government eventually stepped back. It was a rare admission that power, however absolute it seems, can still be challenged when the streets speak together.

The Digital Battlefield In today’s India, resistance also lives online. Independent news portals, fact-checkers, and small creators on YouTube and Instagram have become the new pamphleteers. They expose hate crimes, question propaganda, and keep the conversation alive in a digital space increasingly watched by the state.

Of course, the internet is not a safe space — accounts are banned, cases are filed, surveillance is constant — but it remains a field of rebellion where humor, art, and truth still find cracks to slip through.

A New Generation of Dissent

Unlike earlier movements led by established parties or unions, the new resistance is fluid. It has no single leader, no fixed ideology. It draws strength from students, farmers, writers, women, and minorities — people who have little in common except a refusal to surrender the idea of India as a plural, democratic, and noisy place.

Across cities and villages, you can see the outlines of this quiet movement: young people filming police excesses, lawyers offering free defense to protestors, poets reclaiming public spaces through verse. It’s not a revolution with slogans and barricades — it’s one built on endurance and memory.

India’s Unfinished Argument

Modi’s India is powerful, but not invincible. Beneath the layer of spectacle, there’s fatigue — over joblessness, over censorship, over the feeling that democracy has been reduced to applause. And within that fatigue lies the spark of resistance.

India’s story has always been an argument between fear and freedom. Today, that argument continues in the smallest acts of defiance — in a protest that survives a ban, in a journalist who refuses to bend, in a citizen who still believes her voice matters.

Resistance here is not about overthrowing a ruler; it’s about refusing to forget who we are.