Youth and satyagraha | Gandhi’s motto was truth and non-violence, just like Gen Z

As an educator who has taught high school students for the past three decades, I often say that teachers observe shifts in social morality more closely than most. Young people are often the “canary in the coal mine” of society and are usually the first to reflect on the deeper changes taking place around them.

I had a disturbing glimpse of one such shift three years ago when I screened an auditorium full of IX students. class Richard Attenborough’s 1980 film Gandhi. The film opens with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and as Godse pumps three bullets into the frail old man, the students in the darkened hall start clapping, cheering and whistling to my amazement.

That evening I emailed all the students asking why they thought it was okay to applaud murder. A large number of them wrote back and apologized, saying that they were ashamed of what had happened and that they had caught themselves in the moment. But several of them proudly admitted to leading the cheering, saying, “Gandhi was a bad man and deserved to be shot. But I was comforted that they were in the minority.

Disturbed by the behavior of the students, the school principal insisted that I show the film to class VIII as well. Several students again shouted and clapped at the scene of the assassination. I paused the movie and asked how they would feel if something like this happened to an elderly person they loved.

The famous ‘pin-drop silence’ followed. They got the point.

After the film ended, I asked them if it was still possible to launch and win a Gandhian revolution in this day and age. The students were unsure, so I showed them a video I had taken of the 2020-2021 year-long peaceful and courageous farmers’ protest on the Delhi border that had resulted in the Modi government repealing three controversial, pro-corporate farm bills it had unilaterally passed.

I interviewed many farmers, including one who said on camera, “They can beat us, maim us, or shoot us. We will take the blows, but we will not fight back. We will sit here until these laws are repealed.”

At that moment the student jumped up and shouted excitedly, “Gandhi zinda hai!” (Gandhi lives).

Echoes of another time

Those of us who felt we would never see a Gandhian movement like the farmers’ protest, at least in our lifetime, were pleasantly surprised when Gen Z dug in at Jantar Mantar a few months ago and refused to back down until Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan stepped down.

Abhijeet Dipke and the Cockroach Janta party he founded have emphasized time and again that their resistance will be non-violent, no matter what the other party does. And even as the state unleashed brutal and horrific violence on the protesters on July 20, General Z returned to the protest site in larger numbers that evening and remained there until Pradhan resigned.

Refusal of gen. The retreat reminded me of the Dandi march scene in Gandhi, where row after row marched forward and defied police strikes as they tried to enter the salt pans in defiance of the British. An American reporter, played by Martin Sheen, begins his report in the film: “They walked, both Hindus and Muslims, with their heads held high, without any hope…” and ends with “…Any moral ascendancy the West had is lost here today.

Whatever last vestiges of morality the Modi government still claimed were similarly lost on July 20.

Gandhi’s credo was satyagraha — truth and non-violence. So does Gen Z, as they have amply demonstrated, with the addition of some colorful language to communicate their satya more effectively.

Gen Z, at least in India, could be called Gen G (G for Gandhi).

The writer is a teacher, writer and journalist.

Published – 01 Oct 2026 15:08 IST