On July 20, 2026, India witnessed another grim chapter in its unfolding spiral of violence. Student protests, sparked by long-simmering grievances over education access, joblessness, and perceived state repression, erupted into clashes that left young people caught in the crossfire literally and figuratively. Reports described baton/lathi charges by police, counter-mobilizations by rival groups, and online campaigns that vilified the protesters as either radicals or pawns. Yet the students were not merely participants; they emerged as victims from every end of this vicious cycle. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between subjective and objective violence offers a clearer lens to understand this tragedy, revealing how visible outbursts mask deeper systemic forces. Whether this spiral could culminate in what Walter Benjamin called “divine violence”, a radical, purifying break capable of forcing regime change remains an open and perilous question.
Žižek, in his reflections on violence, urges us to look beyond the spectacle. Subjective violence is the kind that grabs headlines: identifiable agents committing direct harm. A police officer swinging a lathi, a stone thrown by a demonstrator, or inflammatory rhetoric from political figures are dramatic interruptions of the “normal” order. They demand immediate condemnation and appear solvable through better policing or dialogue. In the events of July 20, students faced this subjective violence head-on. Videos circulated of young protesters beaten, tear-gassed, or detained en masse. Some students, radicalized by frustration, may have retaliated, feeding the narrative of mutual aggression yet the arrival of truck with stones early morning on the 20th July 2026 and the police caught pelting stone on camera manifest the students are victims from every side: state forces, opposing ideological factions, even opportunistic media. The students bravely absorbed blows that were painfully visible and personal and appeared brutal and cruel.
But Žižek insists that subjective violence is only the tip of the iceberg. It erupts against a background of objective violence, which is invisible, normalized, and far more pervasive. Objective violence takes two intertwined forms: symbolic and systemic. Symbolic violence resides in language, representations, and cultural norms that shape reality without overt force. It is the way dominant discourse frames student demands as “anti-national” or “entitled,” eroding their legitimacy before any clash occurs. Systemic violence, meanwhile, is the quiet brutality of economic and political structures, systems of education and processes of examination. The smooth operations of a system that produces inequality as its byproduct is violent . This is invisible violence. In India’s context, this includes chronic underfunding of education, a job market that favours connections over merit, paper leaks of competitive exams, agrarian distress pushing rural youth into urban despair, and a political economy that concentrates unmerited opportunity while preaching meritocracy.
The students of July 20 were victims of this objective violence long before any protest turned physical. They inherited a system where degrees yield diminishing returns, where debt-financed education burdens families, and where policy decisions often made in distant corridors of power that uyltreat youth as demographic dividends rather than citizens with rights. This is not the work of a single villainous leader or corrupt official, but the anonymous logic of a developmental model that prioritizes growth metrics over equitable distribution. Žižek compares systemic violence to dark matter: undetectable in isolation yet essential for explaining visible chaos. The students’ rage was not born in a vacuum; it reacted to years of this background pressure rising costs of living, shrinking public sector jobs, and a sense that the future has been foreclosed.
This creates a classic spiral. Objective violence generates discontent that erupts as subjective violence. The state then responds with more subjective force (curfews, arrests, media blackouts), which deepens the objective conditions by eroding trust, polarizing society further, and diverting resources from genuine reforms to security. Students find themselves trapped: demonized by one side as disruptors, abandoned by another as naive idealists, and exploited by yet others seeking to channel their energy into electoral gains. They suffer physical harm in the streets, psychological trauma from surveillance and doxxing (symbolic violence amplified by digital tools), and long-term systemic exclusion as their academic lives are disrupted and employment prospects dim.
Žižek’s analysis warns against the liberal temptation to focus solely on condemning the visible acts while ignoring the structures that sustain them. Humanitarian appeals for “peace” or “restraint” often serve as ideological cover, allowing the system to continue uninterrupted. Charity drives for injured students or platitudes about dialogue become the remedy that masks the disease. In India’s polarized landscape, where narratives fracture along regional, caste, and ideological lines, this dynamic intensifies. Students from marginalized backgrounds may face compounded objective violence, layered discrimination that makes their protests inherently more “threatening” in the eyes of authority. Those from privileged strata might experience subjective crackdowns as a rude awakening to a system they once trusted.
The spiral risks becoming self-perpetuating. Each cycle of protest and repression normalizes greater force, coarsens public discourse, and entrenches divisions. What begins as demands for better education or jobs morphs into broader challenges to legitimacy. Here, Žižek’s engagement with Walter Benjamin becomes relevant. Benjamin distinguished “mythic violence”, the law-making and law-preserving force of the state, which merely rearranges power while reproducing the cycle from “divine violence.” The latter is not instrumental or vengeful; it is a pure, expiatory strike against the entire edifice of unjust order. It interrupts the spiral not by mirroring its logic but by exposing and shattering its foundations. Divine violence, in this sense, carries a messianic quality: it is the revolutionary moment when accumulated objective contradictions can no longer be contained by subjective responses.
Could the events of July 20, 2026, and their aftermath precipitate such a break in India? The signs are mixed. Student movements have historically played catalytic roles from anti-colonial struggles to demands for social justice. If the objective violence of inequality, institutional decay, and authoritarian drift continues unchecked, the subjective explosions may multiply, eroding the state’s monopoly on force and legitimacy. Widespread youth alienation, amplified by social media and economic stagnation, creates fertile ground for a broader uprising. A regime change, whether through elections, mass civil disobedience, or more turbulent means, could emerge not as planned reform but as an unintended rupture, the “divine” intervention that clears space for new possibilities.
Yet Benjamin and Žižek caution against romanticizing this. Divine violence is rare, unpredictable, and carries immense risks. It demands not just anger but a genuine confrontation with the Real, the traumatic kernel beneath ideological fantasies. In India, fragmented identities, entrenched elites, and the seductive pull of majoritarianism could derail any such moment into new forms of mythic violence: a stronger authoritarianism or chaotic fragmentation rather than liberation. Students, as the most visible victims, would likely bear the heaviest costs. History shows that spirals often consume their catalysts before delivering transformation.
Ultimately, the lesson from Žižek is sobering. To escape the spiral, society must address objective violence directly through structural reforms in education, employment, and governance rather than cycling through condemnations of subjective acts. For the students of July 20, this means recognizing their victimization as symptomatic of deeper failures, not isolated incidents. True change requires stepping back from the immediacy of clashes to interrogate the system that produces them. Without this, the spiral tightens, and the promise (or threat) of divine violence looms larger, not as salvation, but as the explosive release of pressures long ignored.
Whether India stands on the brink of such a rupture depends on how leaders, citizens, and the youth themselves respond in the coming months. The students are victims today, but they may yet become agents of a reckoning. The choice between perpetuating the spiral and risking a break lies in our collective willingness to confront the invisible violence that shapes every visible tragedy.
