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Founded in 1949, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) is the largest political student organisation in the world. ABVP fights university elections, helps students navigate university bureaucracy, and conducts extra-curricular activities for students. It is one of the strongest arms of the largest and most influential coalition of Hindu nationalist organisations called the Sangh Family (<i>Sangh Parivar</i>) in promoting Hindu nationalist ideology to an extremely influential demographic: the young, university-educated, and urban populace. As a member of the largest Hindu nationalist organisation in the world, what does it mean to protest in the present political moment – with the knowledge that there is state and institutional support on your side? Ethnographic data and interviews show that gender plays a key role in how protests are organised and performed. In this article, the sites of the ABVP protest are deconstructed to illustrate two objectives: first, to lay out the preparations that go into ‘doing’ protest. Second, the strategies, micro-politics and navigations that show how protests are gendered. Gendering emerges as a strategy of assertion against women of the left and progressive groups.

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