Editorial

As 2025 draws to a close, social movements across the world reveal a defining truth of our times: even as political power becomes more centralised and institutions more rigid, public resistance refuses to disappear. The year did not witness one grand revolution, but rather a mosaic of movements—fragmented, localised, yet deeply interconnected—each challenging authority in its own way.

In India, social movements in 2025 were shaped by a complex mix of economic anxiety, identity politics, and democratic unease. Protests around unemployment, rising living costs, and agrarian distress resurfaced in different forms, though often facing tighter administrative controls. Student movements, particularly on university campuses, continued to articulate concerns about academic freedom, ideological conformity, and shrinking spaces for dissent. While many protests remained peaceful, the state’s response—marked by surveillance, detentions, and legal action—signalled an increasing discomfort with organised public opposition.

Women’s movements retained moral urgency throughout the year. Calls for safety, justice, and equality intensified following incidents of gender-based violence. These movements were notable not only for street protests but also for their presence in digital spaces, where campaigns challenged patriarchal norms and demanded institutional accountability. However, online activism also faced algorithmic suppression and targeted harassment, highlighting the dual nature of digital platforms as tools of empowerment and control.

Globally, 2025 was a year of social unrest shaped by war, climate, and inequality. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations continued across Europe and North America, testing governments’ commitments to free expression. Climate movements regained momentum, particularly among youth, as extreme weather events underscored the urgency of environmental action. In many countries, indigenous groups and marginalised communities mobilised against land dispossession, extractive industries, and state violence.

What distinguished social movements in 2025 was their resilience rather than their scale. Unlike earlier decades of mass mobilisation, contemporary movements often operated under constant surveillance and legal constraint. As a result, activism became decentralised—smaller gatherings, symbolic protests, legal challenges, and cultural resistance replacing massive street occupations.

Yet, despite limitations, these movements served an essential democratic function. They kept uncomfortable questions alive—about justice, equality, freedom, and accountability—when formal politics often avoided them. Social movements in 2025 reminded societies that democracy is not sustained by elections alone, but by continuous public engagement.

As the year ends, the message from the streets and screens is clear: even in constrained environments, the human impulse to resist injustice endures. The challenge ahead lies not in silencing these voices, but in listening to them before frustration turns into rupture.

The Uttar Pradesh government’s recent decision to mandate daily newspaper reading in schools, presented as a measure to improve literacy and critical thinking, appears progressive on the surface. Reading newspapers can indeed help students expand vocabulary, understand current affairs, and develop analytical skills. However, in the present political climate, the policy raises a serious and uncomfortable question: whose ideas will children be taught to read, absorb, and internalise?

Newspapers are not neutral instruments of learning. They are shaped by ownership patterns, political affiliations, editorial biases, and state influence. When a government actively promotes or supplies specific newspapers to schools, the line between education and ideological conditioning becomes dangerously thin. In the garb of improving literacy, the classroom risks becoming a soft extension of the state’s narrative machinery.

The concern is not with reading newspapers per se, but with lack of plurality and choice. If students are exposed only to state-favoured publications—especially those dependent on government advertisements and patronage—critical thinking may be replaced by passive consumption of a single worldview. Literacy, in such a scenario, becomes the ability to read words without questioning the power behind them.

Education is meant to cultivate inquiry, dissent, and independent reasoning. A policy that introduces news consumption without simultaneously teaching media literacy—how to identify bias, distinguish fact from opinion, and compare multiple perspectives—undermines its own stated objectives. Students may learn headlines, but not the habits of questioning them.

There is also a constitutional dimension. India’s democratic framework rests on freedom of thought and expression. Introducing politically aligned content into classrooms, especially in a centralised and mandatory manner, risks infringing upon this spirit. Schools should not become spaces where children unknowingly absorb ideological preferences under the authority of the state.

If the government genuinely intends to enhance literacy and critical thinking, the policy must be reimagined. Classrooms should provide multiple newspapers representing diverse viewpoints, regional and national voices, and opposing ideologies. Teachers must be trained to guide discussion, not deliver conclusions. Most importantly, students should be encouraged to question what they read, not merely repeat it.

True critical thinking is not taught by exposure alone; it is taught by contrast, debate, and freedom. Without these safeguards, the newspaper mandate risks becoming less an educational reform and more a subtle exercise in narrative control.

Literacy empowers. Ideology, when imposed silently, conditions. The difference between the two lies not in the newspaper itself, but in how—and why—it is placed in the hands of a child.

• SAS Kirmani