‘Instigators,’ ‘Hooligans,’ ‘Sex Maniacs,’ ‘Drug Addicts’‚ ‘Alcoholics…’

Abstract

In February 2016, the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi began to protest against the violation of basic democratic freedoms by Narendra Modi’s government. The protest was quickly supported by other Indian universities, and the campaigns organized by students happened in all the important academic centres in India. The purpose of this paper is to show selected examples of language expressions employed by the Indian authorities against the studentprotesters and used in the official Indian media, to describe the actions taken by protests’ participants, as well as to compare the language of the Indian authorities and media used against protesting students in the second decade of the 21st century with some official statements about student protests in Poland under the communist regime.

Keywords

• language and power
• language as the tool of politics
• media propaganda
• verbal suppression
• language as a weapon of state