The history of protest is a history of emotions becoming political

Every protest starts with a feeling. When a crowd gathers, something happens inside people. There is anger, certainly, but there may also be humiliation, fear, grief, compassion, affection, solidarity, or simply the sudden conviction that “this cannot be allowed to continue”. Traditionally, political theory has been speaking more about interests rather than emotions. A protest can be explained through unemployment, inequality, exclusion, rising prices, or institutional injustice, and can map organisations, leadership, political opportunities, and strategies. But none of these quite explain the mysterious moment when an individual who was a mere spectator yesterday becomes an active participant today.Why does someone leave the safety of home and join strangers on a street? Why does a student who knows that protests may invite disciplinary action still return to the campus gate? Why does a farmer remain at a protest site even after weeks of uncertainty? The answer is partly that politics is made of feelings and emotions as well. James M. Jasper, in his influential work The Emotions of Protest, challenged the old tendency to regard emotions as the irrational opposite of political reason. He argued that emotions are woven into our ideas, identities, and interests, and they can generate protest, sustain movements, and create the solidarity without which collective action rarely survives in any longer format.This observation changes how we understand democracy itself. A protest begins when the information accumulated acquires moral meaning and a feeling. A statistic about unemployment is information, but the humiliation of a young person who has spent years preparing for an examination and sees the recruitment process collapse is emotion. Similarly, figures indicating displacement are information, but the sight of a village disappearing under water is visible grief. A legal provision can be read in a statute book, but the fear that a citizen may suddenly be asked to prove their belonging is experienced in the body. Politics begins when such experiences cease to be private.Movements usually begin with what Jasper describes as a “moral shock”: an event, image, or piece of information that makes an injustice suddenly difficult to accommodate within the ordinary boundaries of everyday life. The important word here is “suddenly”, because the injustice may not itself be new, but what changes is the emotional relationship to it. India’s freedom movement is an example. Mahatma Gandhi converted everyday humiliations into experiences of collective moral injury. Even though salt was an ordinary substance, the salt tax became an extraordinary symbol, and hence the Salt March converted a commodity into a question of dignity. The genius of the act lay in its emotional intelligibility because everyone could understand salt. And when thousands followed Gandhi to the sea, an apparently modest act of disobedience acquired the emotional force of a national uprising.Anger can make us shout, but it alone cannot help us organise. For that, solidarity, another emotion, has to enter. Every enduring movement has to convert individual suffering into collective experience. The lonely unemployed graduate has little political power, but thousands of unemployed graduates discovering that their frustration is common constitute a strong collective. In the same vein, the farmer who feels abandoned is just one person, but farmers who understand the power of collective identity become a political force far more difficult to contend with.Jasper’s idea of collective identity is crucial here, as it is not simply the intellectual recognition that “we belong to the same category”. It is an emotional attachment to others who are understood as part of the same moral community. Protest can itself become a source of pride, belonging, and even joy. This explains why people return to a protest after their first demand is ignored. Because the movement has ceased to be only about the original demand. It has become about “us”. A protest site can become a temporary republic of emotions where strangers share food. Where someone holds an umbrella over someone else, and students make tea for co-participants. Songs circulate from one group to another and people who would never have met otherwise begin to recognise each other’s anxieties. This becomes politics in its finest sense.The French student uprising of May 1968 is one of the most compelling examples of the emotional energy of collective action. The revolt began amid tensions within the university system and broke the boundaries of student grievances. What followed was an extraordinary challenge to authority and the settled assumptions of French society. The slogans of May 1968 captured something that conventional political programmes could not.“Be realistic, demand the impossible.”“Under the paving stones, the beach.”These were emotional propositions telling a generation that the world it had inherited was not the only world it could imagine. The barricades of Paris represented a psychological liberation from resignation, and the street became a place where young people experienced, perhaps for the first time, the intoxicating possibility that authority could be questioned. There was anger, but there was also exhilaration. Fear was resisted by courage, and frustration was confronted with an extraordinary sense of collective possibility. This matters because movements are often misunderstood when they are examined only through their demands. One must also understand what it felt like to be a youth in that moment, to discover that thousands of others were equally unwilling to accept the world as given.

Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) courting arrest during a protest march demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged NEET exam irregularities, near Parliament House, in New Delhi on July 20, 2026. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar Protest can be an education in possibility, because it teaches people to imagine that what appears inevitable can be changed and what seems permanent can be defied. This underlying feeling called “possibility” is in itself a powerful emotion. The Chipko movement showed us that; when the village women embraced trees, the forest became a lived world, in which water, fodder, soil, memory, survival, and the body came together to form the basis of political claim.Similarly, the Narmada movement prompted the removal of displacement from the language of development statistics and into the language of human loss. A government file can say that a certain number of families will be displaced, but a movement asks a more disturbing question: Where will they go? What happens to a home when it disappears beneath water? The emotional question makes the administrative one seem immoral.In recent years, the farmers’ movements have become another example. Their demands involved prices, procurement, agricultural policy, and livelihoods. But the emotional vocabulary of the movement was equally significant: dignity, betrayal, respect, abandonment. A farmer was not just saying, “This policy will reduce my income.” The question it ultimately asked had to do with questions of exploited labour and institutional failures: Do you see the labour on which your food depends? Do you hear us when we speak? Economic grievances become politically explosive only when they become questions of dignity.The anti-CAA protests, particularly the extraordinary mobilisation at Shaheen Bagh from late 2019 to early 2020, showed yet another form of emotional politics as it transformed fear into public assertion, and women who might otherwise have been confined to the private sphere occupied a public space. The Constitution was made part of everyday political vocabulary, and in doing so, it appeared as an object of affection.The caveatsBut there is a danger in celebrating emotion without qualification because anger can expose injustice but also has the potential to distort it. Jasper points out that the desire for a concrete target can sometimes lead movements to blame convenient individuals while overlooking larger structural causes. Strong emotions can simplify complicated realities as we have seen throughout history. Anger can become a force for justice; hatred too easily becomes a justification for dehumanisation. Democratic protest therefore requires an emotional discipline of its own, and it must know how to transform anger without allowing anger to become hatred.This becomes especially important in an age in which political communication seeks to manufacture fear and suspicion. Communities are made into objects of anxiety and differences are turned into threats. Citizens are encouraged to see one another as competing moral tribes instead of fellow participants in a democracy. There is an old political temptation here: when governments cannot adequately address people’s anxieties, they offer them an enemy. A democratic movement must resist that temptation, and its emotional vocabulary must be larger than rage. It needs compassion because otherwise another person’s suffering remains somebody else’s problem.Perhaps governments sometimes misunderstand protest because they respond to the stated demand while ignoring the emotional history behind it. Governments respond to demands for recognition with committees, to accounts of humiliation with statistics, and to experiences of grief with bureaucratic explanations. Such responses may create the appearance of institutional engagement but they leave the underlying injury unaddressed and unattended. It is a mismatch between the nature of the grievance and the language of the response. Where people are seeking acknowledgement, dignity, and accountability, governments retreat into procedure, negotiating the terms of an issue without confronting the wound that produced the demand in the first place.Perhaps we should stop treating emotions as the unruly children of politics and recognise that they are among the forces through which politics is organised, sustained, and experienced. Democracy needs citizens who care enough to object but also enough to listen. It requires indignation against injustice and restraint towards opponents, and it further requires the courage to resist and the imagination to coexist. The strongest movements in Indian history have understood this balance. Gandhi’s politics was inconceivable without moral emotion, and B.R. Ambedkar’s struggle for dignity emerged from the experience of humiliation. The freedom movement, Dalit movements, women’s movements, environmental struggles, student movements, and farmers’ protests have demonstrated the same truth that private pain becomes politically transformative when it finds a public language. That transformation is the real miracle of protest.In May 1968, the French students understood something that every generation of protesters eventually rediscovers: that sometimes the first political act is to reject the emotional condition that power has prescribed for you. If power wants you frightened, you gather; if it wants you ashamed, you speak; and if it wants you cynical, you hope. And if it tells you that nothing can change, you stand in the street because accepting the existing order has become morally more unbearable than resisting it.That is the emotional threshold from which movements are born. And perhaps that is why every government should occasionally ask itself a question more fundamental than whether a protest is politically inconvenient: What has happened to make so many citizens feel that standing in the street is preferable to remaining silent at home?The answer may tell us more about the health of a democracy than any government report ever can.Manoj Kumar Jha is a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) representing the Rashtriya Janata Dal.Also Read | The atmosphere of fear is gone now: Saurav DasAlso Read | The kids are showing India a new kind of politics