From 'Boycott Coke' to 'Please Like, Share, and Subscribe': How Protests Have Evolved in India

There was a time when a trip to Jantar Mantar came with a familiar script. A group of earnest protesters would gather under the shade of the trees, unfurl hand-painted banners, and launch into speeches against the evils of globalisation. Coca-Cola and Pepsi were reliable villains. So were Enron, the WTO, and, depending on the season, any multinational corporation that happened to be investing in India. Pamphlets flew around more freely than bottled soft drinks. Television cameras would eventually arrive and the evening news would carry a 20-second clip of the day’s outrage. Fast forward three decades and Jantar Mantar still protests. Only the props have changed. The banner is now designed less for those standing in front of it and more for the smartphone camera behind it. The speech is edited into a 30-second Reel. The slogan doubles up as a meme. The volunteer carrying water is accompanied by another carrying a power bank. The success of the protest is no longer measured merely by the size of the gathering but by whether the hashtag trends. History, it turns out, has a delicious sense of humour. Many of the old movements viewed multinational corporations as symbols of an unequal global order. Global brands represented corporate excess. Consumerism was suspect. Markets were to be questioned. Universities such as JNU became known for resisting the entry of multinational food chains, stating that campuses should not become extensions of corporate India. The neighbourhood dhaba was celebrated. The multinational burger was viewed with suspicion. Today, the burger may still not make it to campus, but Meta, Google , and X arrive without resistance. In fact, they are among the most important participants in almost every protest, even if they never show up physically. Every movement today has an unofficial digital headquarters. WhatsApp mobilises supporters. Instagram amplifies the message. YouTube hosts speeches. X keeps the debate alive long after the crowd disperses. The protest may begin at Jantar Mantar, but it reaches the rest of the country only after passing through the servers of some of the world’s largest technology companies. Somewhere along the way, the multinational stopped selling cola and started selling attention. None of this necessarily makes activists hypocrites. They would rightly maintain that social media platforms are simply tools. One uses the infrastructure that exists. Previous generations used newspapers and television because that was where the audience was. Today’s audience lives on smartphones. If Instagram is where people are, that is where the protest must be. Fair enough. But irony has never depended on intent. The same protest that questions corporate power also anxiously checks whether the algorithm is being kind. Organisers who once worried about foreign corporate influence now worry about whether the Reel has crossed a million views. The movement against multinational corporations now depends, at least in part, on multinational digital platforms to be heard. Perhaps that is simply how power has evolved. In the 1990s, influence travelled through products. Today, it travels through platforms. The companies have changed, but the dependence on large global networks has not. It also says something about how protest itself has evolved. The old grammar of dissent consisted of pamphlets, slogans, and press conferences. The new grammar is memes, short videos, and viral jokes. Humour has become a political language. The revolution, it seems, has acquired a social media manager. If someone were transported from the Jantar Mantar of the late 1990s to the one that exists today, the biggest surprise would probably not be the issues being protested. It would be the sight of protesters pausing midway through a demonstration to check engagement numbers, frame the perfect shot, and ask someone, “Did you upload it yet?” From “Boycott Coke” to “Please like, share, and subscribe” is not quite the journey India’s protest movement set out to make. Yet here we are. History, as always, has the last laugh.