As hundreds of students stood shoulder to shoulder beneath umbrellas on the winding streets of Aizawl, the demonstration suddenly stopped sounding like a protest.
Someone began singing Give Me Some Sunshine. Within seconds, hundreds of voices joined in.
The song from 3 Idiots, long associated with the pressures of examinations and youthful aspirations, echoed through the hills. No angry chants were drowning it out. No vandalism.
No attempts to turn the gathering into a larger ideological spectacle. The students had assembled to demand accountability over issues affecting their education and examinations, but for a brief moment, the protest became something quieter, a shared expression of hope.
Soon another video emerged.
Police officers, rather than confronting demonstrators, were seen helping them manage the peaceful gathering. Across social media, many viewers remarked on what they saw as an unusual image in contemporary India: cooperation instead of confrontation.
Watching those videos, I did not simply see a protest. I saw a city I had once called home.
For nearly a year, I lived in Aizawl while studying digital media and working as a journalist covering India’s Northeast. Before that, I had spent years in Delhi, studying Geography and East Asian Studies, where politics formed part of everyday life. Between the two cities lies almost two thousand kilometres of geography.
Sometimes, it feels like they are separated by something much larger, a different understanding of public life.
Two Capitals, Two Civic Cultures
Delhi taught me that protest is essential to democracy.
Whether at university campuses, Jantar Mantar or the streets surrounding Parliament, demonstrations have shaped some of India’s biggest national conversations. The capital has produced movements that challenged governments, expanded rights and forced uncomfortable questions into the public sphere.
Those traditions deserve respect.
But Delhi also exposed me to another side of contemporary political culture.
Increasingly, public debate seemed to reward outrage over persuasion. Social media encouraged the sharpest insult rather than the strongest argument. Families became fair game in political disagreements. Misogynistic language was excused because it served a larger cause. Too often, the issue that brought people together slowly disappeared beneath the performance of anger.
I carried those observations with me when I moved east.
What I discovered in Mizoram surprised me. It was not simply the mountains, the churches rising above the hills or the rhythm of life in one of India’s smallest states. It was the people.
During my months in Aizawl, I encountered a society where public courtesy appeared deeply woven into everyday life. Strangers regularly offered directions before being asked. Shopkeepers remembered faces. Public transport functioned with quiet patience. Young people disagreed without instinctively reaching for hostility.
As a reporter, I travelled across Mizoram and the wider Northeast covering stories on culture, border communities, governance and society. Again and again, I encountered a civic culture built less on individual assertion than on collective responsibility.
No place is perfect. Mizoram has political disagreements, social tensions and policy failures like every other state.
But there was something unmistakable about the way many people chose to engage with one another. Respect was not viewed as weakness.
What Makes a Protest Successful?
The recent demonstrations in Aizawl raise a larger question for the rest of India. What makes a protest successful?
Does the volume of its slogans measure it? The size of its crowds? The number of viral clips it produces? Or is it measured by whether the movement keeps public attention fixed on the issue itself?
The students in Mizoram seemed to understand something that many movements elsewhere increasingly struggle to preserve.
Discipline.
Their demonstration remained centred on education. Their conduct reinforced their message rather than distracting from it.
That does not mean peaceful protest belongs exclusively to the Northeast, nor that mainland India lacks examples of disciplined civic action. Indian history offers countless movements rooted in non-violence and moral conviction.
Nor should Mizoram be romanticised. Every society contains contradictions. Yet civic cultures, like political cultures, develop habits over time.
Some reward confrontation. Others reward credibility.
Looking East for More Than Strategy
The Northeast often enters India’s national conversation through the language of security, connectivity or geopolitics. It is discussed as a frontier, a bridge to Southeast Asia or a region of strategic importance.
Rarely is it discussed as a source of democratic lessons. That may be changing.
The recent images from Aizawl suggested that a movement can be emotionally powerful without becoming abusive, politically determined without becoming partisan and firmly critical without abandoning civility.
For me, this is not an abstract observation. It comes from having lived in both worlds.
Delhi taught me why citizens must question power. Aizawl reminded me that the manner in which we question power matters just as much.
Governments should expect scrutiny. They should remain accountable. Peaceful dissent is not a threat to democracy; it is one of democracy’s greatest safeguards. But citizens, too, shape the health of democratic life.
If public discourse becomes consumed by humiliation, misogyny and personal abuse, every side eventually loses something larger than a political argument. It loses public trust.
Listening to the Northeast
For decades, people in the Northeast have argued that mainland India sees the region only through stereotypes or moments of crisis.
Perhaps the recent student demonstrations offer an opportunity to see something else. Not because Mizoram possesses all the answers.
Not because one protest can define an entire generation.
But because, for a few days, a small state on India’s eastern edge reminded the country that disagreement need not come at the expense of dignity.
India frequently speaks of integrating the Northeast more closely into the national mainstream. Perhaps integration should work in both directions.
Perhaps the rest of us should spend more time listening to what places like Aizawl have been quietly teaching all along.
Sometimes the future of a democracy is not revealed in its loudest capitals.
Sometimes it is found in a mountain city where hundreds of students, demanding nothing more than a fair chance at their future, choose to sing together instead of shout.
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