The protests at New Delhi's Jantar Mantar made everyone sit up and take note, laugh, get angry, and travel back in time. For some just a few years. For others, as many as 15 years.

"I have countless memories from the uprisings of 2011-2013. If I had to choose one, it would be November 2011 on Mohamed Mahmoud Street," Egyptian human rights activist Mariam Kirollos tells The Telegraph Online, remembering her time at Tahrir Square, the epicentre of protests during the Arab Spring.

Mariam Kirollos plays the drum at Tahrir Square, Cairo during the uprising of 2011 to 2013. (Photograph sourced by the correspondent)

"The sky seemed to rain tear-gas canisters over the protesters in Tahrir Square; and the protesters continued demanding their most basic human rights and the downfall of the regime that violated them. Security forces violently cleared the square. I will never forget seeing conscripts setting tents on fire and dragging bodies into piles of rubbish," Kirollos says.

"They pushed the protesters back to Abdel Moneim Riad, but we returned to Mohamed Mahmoud Street to stop the police from advancing on the square. And we did. For eight straight days. Despite the mounting death toll, protesters kept pouring into the battlefield, fearing nothing but fear itself."

All these years on, she says what has stayed with her the most is not only the courage shown in the face of repression, but the soundscape. As one of the few women drummers at the Egyptian uprising, Kirollos saw the drum as more than an instrument.

"It was a political tool that gave rhythm to chants, kept people moving, and reminded us that they were part of something larger," she says. "Simply occupying that space as a woman percussionist also challenged assumptions about who gets to lead and be heard."

Kirollos witnessed similar dynamics during Lebanon's 2019 uprising, where music, street art, public debate and performances transformed fear into solidarity and turned streets into spaces of collective imagination.

"Looking at the recent student-led protests in India, including demonstrations at Jantar Mantar, and university encampments for Gaza, I recognise the same pattern," she says.

"Each generation develops its own slogans, symbols, and cultural language, but culture remains central to protest. It builds community, sustains hope, and challenges power. If authoritarianism speaks through force, protest often answers through creativity."

Mockery turns into political weapon

Between June and July this year, Jantar Mantar became the unlikely stage for a new kind of Indian protest, one led not by veteran activists or opposition politicians, but by young people, broadly categorised into Generation Z, although such Americanisms do not really translate to India.

Born into the internet and raised on social media, these students transformed dissent into a cultural performance that was at once furious, funny and impossible to ignore.

The movement, organised by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and the Left-wing All-India Students Association (AISA), emerged in response to allegations of corruption and question-paper leaks in India's medical entrance examinations, a scandal that plunged millions of students into uncertainty.

Yet, what distinguished the demonstrations was not only what students were protesting, but how they protested.

Their language was steeped in memes and satire, and viral videos and music took centre stage. Slogans doubled as punchlines. Protest speeches circulated as reels. Mockery became a political weapon. The mood was defiantly irreverent and irreverently defiant.

Among the breakout faces was that of 19-year-old content creator Avinash Bisht, whose satirical videos from protest sites accumulated millions of views.

In one widely shared clip, with other Instagrammers and security personnel visible in the background, he got at least 160 million views. In another, he continued filming as police moved against demonstrators.

In a separate clip that spread rapidly, a 27-year-old model, Rhiya Ahir, was seen blocking a police van during the demonstrations in Mumbai. Celebrities and musicians, including popular rapper Hanumankind, lent their support, helping amplify the movement's reach.

The protest, however, was rooted in older traditions of civil resistance. An indefinite hunger strike led by the Ladakhi environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk and student activists gave the movement moral weight, even as social media supplied momentum.

From Nepal, Delhi looked familiar

For Roshani Tripathi, a Kathmandu-based educator who teaches social work to undergrads, watching the Jantar Mantar protests reminded her of a pattern most familiar.

"Every generation inherits protest and then reinvents it," she tells The Telegraph Online. "The students of Jantar Mantar did so through reels, memes and viral punchlines."

To her, Jantar Mantar belongs to a long history of student uprisings, from Kathmandu to Cairo, where culture becomes a language of resistance and young people force uncomfortable questions into public view.

"In Nepal, the student protests of 1979 helped force a national referendum on multi-party democracy. Across the world today, a new generation is doing something similar, pushing concerns that many societies have long ignored back into public view," she says.

As the events at Jantar Mantar escalated and images of police batons and tear-gas shells began to circulate, she found herself thinking about Nepal's own student protests last year.

"I was living in Mumbai at the time, watching the developments back home from a distance. There is a particular helplessness in witnessing a movement unfold elsewhere, and an even deeper fear when state violence enters the picture," she says.

"The videos emerging from Delhi, of students injured, bleeding and dispersed by force, felt painfully familiar."

Equally familiar was the public narrative that followed.

Rather than engaging seriously with what students were saying, many commentators wanted to know who were funding and influencing them. Protesters were portrayed as naive, manipulated or incapable of independent political thought. Tripathi found it deeply frustrating.

"What we saw at Jantar Mantar was not the trivialisation of protest, but its adaptation to a new generation's language," she says. "It wasn't entirely different from how the student movement began in Bangladesh."

Déjà vu in Dhaka

Watching the developments from Bangladesh, Shuzosh Rahman, a Gen Z student who participated in 2024 student protests in Dhaka, felt a sense of déjà vu.

Across South Asia, he argues, a growing gap has emerged between what young people expect from governments and what those governments have delivered.

"I think governments across South Asia, and even in countries like the US and the UK, have consistently failed to live up to the expectations of younger generations," he tells The Telegraph Online.

Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the CJP, has said that the protests in Bangladesh and elsewhere were being used to defame them. "We are different," he has insisted.

To Rahman, however, the Indian protests echoed dynamics from the July Uprising in Bangladesh two years back.

"From my perspective, it wasn't entirely different from how the student movement began in Bangladesh," he says. "What stood out was the attitude of state authorities toward their own students."

While he notes significant differences in scale and consequence, Rahman believes the protests reveal a common regional story: a generation increasingly unwilling to accept being dismissed as politically immature.

For him, the movement at Jantar Mantar was not simply about an exam scandal. It was another example of young people demanding a greater say in the systems that shape their futures.

"I find it hopeful," he says, "that young people are standing up for their rights and refusing to stay silent."

Columbia crackdown on Gaza camps

Meghnad Bose, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Memphis, was at Columbia University as a student journalist during the Gaza solidarity encampments of 2024. The atmosphere, he recalls, felt unexpectedly familiar and lively.

It reminded him of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, where thousands gathered during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019.

"Like Shaheen Bagh, the encampment was filled with signs, placards and posters. It was born out of an immense sense of frustration and yet, there was music everywhere. People sang songs of solidarity and togetherness. Art occupied a central place in the movement," Bose tells The Telegraph Online.

The Gaza encampment at Columbia University in New York City in 2024. (Photograph by Meghnad Bose)

"One of the striking features of contemporary youth-led protests is that they move beyond traditional sloganeering. Students bring creativity, performance, visual culture and humour into political expression."

Yet, the encampments also drew on older traditions of dissent. Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with its own history of anti-war and anti-apartheid activism, and renamed it Hind's Hall in memory of Hind Rajab, the Palestinian child whose death became a rallying symbol for many protesters.

Days later, the rapper Macklemore released Hind's Hall, a protest anthem inspired by the movement.

Across continents, the symbols may change but the grammar of protest remains strikingly similar. At Columbia University, students carried photographs of Hind Rajab and invoked her memory. At demonstrations organised by the CJP at Jantar Mantar, protesters held up placards with the names of students who had died by suicide.

Amid music, dancing and celebration, there were also moments of mourning, a reminder of the lives lost and the human costs that had brought people to the streets.

The parallels extend beyond protest culture to the treatment of dissent itself.

"I have often thought about the parallels between Mahmoud Khalil and Umar Khalid and what has been written about them," Bose says. "These are different cases in different countries, but there are striking similarities. One is a Palestinian activist whose detention became a symbol of the Trump administration's approach to student protest. The other is an Indian Muslim scholar who was targeted following his advocacy during the movement against the CAA-NRC."

For Bose, both cases raise larger questions about due process and the use of prolonged legal proceedings as a form of punishment. He also notes that during the Columbia encampments, some of the most visible targets of state action were Palestinians, Muslim students and scholars, a pattern that has prompted similar concerns among activists in India.

Those concerns surfaced during recent protests in Delhi and Kolkata, in the main, and elsewhere in India.

At a demonstration at Jantar Mantar, Mohammad Junaid, a 24-year-old law student and volunteer with Campaign for Justice and Peace, alleged he was detained by Delhi police for hours, threatened and intimidated before being released at a distant location.

In Bengal, organisers have pointed to the disproportionate number of Muslims among those arrested during the protests.

"The unfair burden of this protest has been on women and Muslims," Ahan Karmakar, a doctoral scholar at IIM Calcutta and a former student of Presidency University, tells The Telegraph Online.

But he also believes the movement has reshaped the language of student politics. "If you look at the posters and slogans at Presidency, 'Jai Bhim' has been the driving slogan, and that is a welcome change."

From Tahrir Square to Shaheen Bagh, from university lawns in New York to protest sites in India, movements separated by geography often share a common visual and emotional vocabulary.

"If there is one lesson I carry from Tahrir, it is that solidarity is not the absence of disagreement or fear. It is the decision, renewed every day, not to leave one another isolated," Kirollos says.

"That kind of solidarity is difficult to sustain, especially under intense repression, but it is what gives movements their resilience. Even when protests are dispersed, the relationships, memories and political consciousness they create often endure far longer than the moment itself."