The internet loves a good heartwarming story, but the receipts often tell a much larger story.
Videos of a man named Mohammad Junaid distributing free food and water to protesting students went viral on social media during the ongoing Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest in Delhi. But that gesture soon snowballed into something much bigger. People from across the country, many of whom had never met the students on the streets of Delhi, started ordering meals, bottles of water, medicines and other essentials straight to the protest site via delivery apps.
Using their social media platforms, independent journalists and creators such as Varnika Dhawan, Faizan Siddiqui, and Naksi T documented not just the protests but also volunteers packing supplies and the steady stream of deliveries arriving at the site.
Solidarity Delivered from Door to Protest Site
Every protest comes with familiar images. Speeches on impromptu stages, demonstrators with placards, barricades, police lines and the air full of slogans. Television cameras capture moments of confrontation and social media disseminates speeches and viral clips.
But there is another picture, one rarely the face of a movement. That of the delivery partner making their way through the traffic of Delhi with an insulated bag full of fifty burgers, dozens of water bottles, medicines or snacks, not to a house or office but to a protest site. Their work is nothing special because, in the end, this is their job: delivering orders.
Sociology, however, tells us that society is often best understood through the everyday. Émile Durkheim argued that modern societies are cohesive through organic solidarity. Here, people play specialised roles and depend on each other through the division of labour. Everyone does not do the same work, but all work is interconnected. This interdependence was witnessed in real time during the CJP protest.
What was unusual about this protest was that solidarity was no longer confined to those who were physically standing at the barricades. People from hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away, joined those in Jantar Mantar through digital platforms and making physical contributions.
Students entered the public sphere and articulated demands. Volunteers helped to coordinate logistics. Restaurants cooked. Families and strangers across India placed online orders for support. Delivery partners were the key last mile where digital solidarity became real.
This protest was distinguished by the fact that it was no longer a question of simply being there. Supporters in Aligarh, Lucknow, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Guwahati or Kochi could make a real difference without ever going to New Delhi. Digital platforms broadened the geography of solidarity in unprecedented ways.
The delivery app was doing something bigger than enabling commerce. It brought together strangers in acts of caring. But this solidarity did not travel alone. It went through gig workers. The delivery partner was the bridge between a citizen wanting to support a protest but unable to be physically present, and a student sitting under the summer sun, demanding accountability.
Visible Protest, Invisible Collaborators
While those with privilege placed the orders, the delivery partners ensured that bulk orders from eateries across town were delivered to hungry students gathered at Jantar Mantar and nearabouts, even in the late hours, not minding the rain or the oppressive heat.
These partners checked food packets before leaving restaurants, tallied large orders, navigated traffic, found crowded protest sites and ensured medicines and essentials reached the people they were meant for. They even navigated a strict security cordon with hostile police personnel.
Each task might seem mundane on its own. But together, they constituted the invisible infrastructure requiste to sustain any public movement. This invisible logistical network, in fact, is rarely so visible in a public protest.
While some may ascribe this visibility to the CJP, which has from its inception managed to grab eyeballs for all the right and sometimes wrong reasons, and the video-savvy Gen-Z protesters and citizen journalists capturing every act of kindness, cruelty, novelty or banality for social media, such visible achievement is never the work of one individual alone, as sociologist Howard S Becker in Art Worlds.
The work of all great artists depends on an invisible network of collaborators whose contribution makes creative work possible. The same is true of public movements.
We remember protest leaders, speeches, and slogans, but these moments are built on the backs of countless workers, whose contributions are often overlooked.
The delivery partner is one such unsung contributor. This does not mean that all delivery executives become political actors or that they themselves pick up a cause. Rather, it recognises that democratic life is maintained not merely by visible acts of protest but also by the invisible labour that enables people to remain in public space.
When we think of people who support social movements, we think of organisers, volunteers, lawyers, journalists, medical teams etc. It requires more than just imagination to include those whose labour quietly sustains these movements.
The next time we see pictures of students eating food sent to them by strangers from across India, instead of asking questions about "foreign funding", maybe we (read the mainstream media) should ask a different set of questions:
Who delivered those meals around the city?
Who ensured that each packet was in the right hands?
Who turned thousands of separate acts of generosity into a working network of solidarity?
It’s the delivery partners, whose contribution is forgotten the moment an order is marked ‘Delivered’. And it's not just them.
Videos showed auto drivers offering free rides to students and protesters, shopkeepers offering refuge to protesters running from police lathis and tear gas, security guards in the vicinity allowing protesters shelter and space to charge their phones.
These people may never become the face of the protest. But their defiance and solidarity is real. And it is their invisible labour that enables and sustains democratic participation and makes a protest visible. All in a day's work.
(Nimra Ahmad is a PhD scholar in Sociology at Aligarh Muslim University, researcher, author and columnist. Her work explores intersections of technology, media, labour and society. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)