The psychological concept of the return of the repressed, first articulated by Sigmund Freud, describes how memories, desires, or traumatic impulses that have been driven out of conscious awareness do not simply disappear. Instead, they gather force in the unconscious and eventually break back into consciousness, often in distorted, fragmented, or explosive forms. What is suppressed does not vanish; it waits, gathers pressure, and returns.
When this idea is carried into the realm of politics and social movements, it offers a powerful way of understanding how prolonged state-enforced silence, structural exclusion, and authoritarian control eventually produce an intense resurgence of public dissent. In contemporary India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many analysts and sociologists have begun to read recent waves of protest through precisely this lens. The claim is not merely rhetorical. It suggests that years of systematic narrowing of civic space have created the conditions for a dramatic return of what was pushed aside.
The mechanisms of repression have been varied and persistent. Civic space for independent NGOs and activists has contracted. Dissent has been marginalized through the strategic labeling of critics. Information has been managed so that certain narratives dominate while others are starved of oxygen. Traditional “third spaces”—the informal arenas where different social and political viewpoints once collided and debated—have been steadily dismantled or rendered unsafe. The cumulative effect has been a pressure-cooker atmosphere in which economic grievances, rising inflation, questions of institutional transparency, and demands for justice have been denied ordinary channels of expression. Freud’s insight is that such material cannot remain permanently buried. It returns, and when it does, it often appears in more volatile and radicalized forms than the original grievances themselves.
That return is now visible in the streets. Student-led demonstrations, spontaneous public resistance, and sustained mobilizations across cities signal that the forced quiet has ended. A new generation of citizens, many of them young and previously outside formal politics, refuses to remain silent. Because the conventional pathways of debate and petition have been restricted, the repressed finds its outlet in direct action. The protests are not simply reactions to isolated policies; they are the delayed expression of accumulated frustrations that were never allowed to surface in measured, institutional ways.
This return is not gender-neutral. Authoritarian political structures that lean heavily on a masculine ideal of power—top-down control, rigid strength, absolute conformity, and an unyielding stance toward opposition—tend to treat emotional appeal, vulnerability, and collective care as weaknesses to be bracketed out of public life. In doing so, they push what might be called “feminine” modes of engagement into the political unconscious: empathy, horizontal networking, emotional expression, attention to systemic vulnerabilities such as safety, healthcare, and human rights. When the system begins to fracture under its own internal pressures, these suppressed energies often reappear as the very language and method of resistance.
The result is a striking inversion. The masculine authoritarian state, which sought to project unassailable strength, finds itself confronted by forms of power it is poorly equipped to neutralize. Kinetic force and aggressive labeling, effective against traditional male-dominated opposition, become far more costly when the front lines are occupied by young women and girls. Their presence introduces a moral clarity and an empathetic representation of suffering that is difficult to suppress without generating severe public and ethical backlash. The state’s usual instruments of control lose some of their legitimacy precisely because the protesters do not fit the expected template of confrontation.
Young women and girls have taken this dynamic further by actively reshaping the aesthetics and ethics of protest itself. Rather than replicating the grim, iron-fisted style of the authority they oppose, they have brought joy, satire, art, and practices of community care into the spaces of dissent. Protest sites become places of cultural and ethical reclamation rather than mere political clash. In doing so, they challenge the authoritarian claim to define the emotional and moral tone of public life. What was once dismissed as soft or secondary—solidarity, care, the insistence on human dignity—returns as a central force.
This pattern is not unique to India. Globally, women-led sit-ins and student revolts have repeatedly demonstrated the same dynamic: when patriarchal and authoritarian structures push certain forms of expression and concern out of official politics, those forms re-emerge with particular intensity among the very groups the system sought to marginalize. In the Indian context, the continuity from earlier women-led mobilizations to the present student-driven actions underscores that the return of the repressed is not a sudden eruption but the latest phase of a longer process.
The deeper claim is that the prominent leadership of young women in these protests marks the failure of a particular style of patriarchal repression. What the state worked hardest to silence and sideline has returned as one of the most visible and determined drivers of socio-political change. The rigid, unmoving structures of masculine power are being met by a flexible, networked, and emotionally resonant form of resistance that draws its strength precisely from the qualities the authoritarian framework tried to exclude.
In this sense, the circle closes. The attempt to enforce a singular national narrative through the narrowing of civic space, the marginalization of dissent, and the elevation of uncompromising strength has produced its own opposite. The grievances that were denied voice have returned with greater force. The modes of engagement that were treated as weak have become sources of moral and practical power. The generation that was expected to absorb the prevailing order has instead refused it. Karma, in this political reading, is not mystical fate but the structural consequence of prolonged repression: what is pushed down eventually rises, and when it rises through the agency of those the system least expected to lead, the challenge to authoritarian masculine power becomes both practical and symbolic.
The return of the repressed is therefore not only a psychological concept applied to politics. It is a description of a living process in which suppressed social energies, long denied legitimate expression, reassert themselves through the courage and creativity of young women who refuse to stay silent. In doing so, they expose the limits of a politics built on control rather than consent, and they remind the polity that no amount of enforced quiet can permanently bury the demand for justice, dignity, and open public life.
