Mridula Links Gandhi’s Satyagraha to Cockroaches

Hyderabad:A smartphone in every hand has changed what non-violent protest can do, and eminent historian Mridula Mukherjee used that to connect Gandhi’s satyagraha to recent youth mobilisation at Jantar Mantar. “Every protester has a phone and every protester becomes a reporter,” she said in her Ajay Gandhi Memorial Lecture 2026, Non-violent Resistance: From the Mahatma to the Cockroaches, delivered at Vidyaranya High School, Hyderabad, on Friday.

Mukherjee, who taught history at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, for more than four decades and is general president-elect of the Indian History Congress, 2026, built the lecture around a larger political question. Gandhi’s non-violence, she argued, worked because it allowed ordinary people to enter political action in large numbers, stripped fear from participation and placed the state in a difficult position when it chose repression. The recent youth protest initiated by the Cockroach Janata Party, she said, showed that those mechanics can still appear in a very different political and technological moment.

Her starting point was Gandhi’s belief that non-violence made mass participation possible. A movement of millions, she said, could place the government in a “no-win situation.” If the state ignored open defiance, its authority weakened. If it used force against peaceful protesters, it risked appearing brutal and losing public sympathy. She cited Gandhi, Nehru and Bipan Chandra to explain how non-violence forced the government onto “the terrain of moral force,” rather than the state’s terrain of weapons and coercion.

“A close look at the contours of this youth protest demonstrates all the typical features of a Gandhian protest,” Mukherjee said. Participants did not have to describe themselves as Gandhian, she clarified. What mattered was the character of the protest: a grievance people immediately understood, repeated declarations that it would remain peaceful, sit-ins, fasting, slogans, songs, satire and refusal to leave after police told them to go home.

Why did those methods matter? “It removes the fear of authority by showing it is possible to fight and often win in very adverse circumstances,” she said, noting that even seasoned activists did not defy the 6 pm deadline at Jantar Mantar, but these young people did. Police action brought more youth to the protest site; some came with parents, others sent food and donations. Humour and memes also had political use, helping people mock authority and shed fear.

Mukherjee referred to Bhoodan, Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan, anti-liquor protests, tribal movements and campaigns for transparency, food, work and forest rights. She cited Shantha Sinha, who led the MV Foundation movement in Andhra Pradesh against child labour and for the right to education, as a precursor to this mobilisation based on the same principles.

The lecture ended cautiously. Mukherjee said she did not want to name the present moment too quickly or make broad generalisations but was trying, as a historian, to understand what made such protest work, what impact it could have on society and what it could mean for future resistance. Her own description was that this was an attempt to connect “the Mahatma to the cockroaches.”