A government with a nationalist halo, a sycophantic media, a tight security network, weakened institutions and limitless funds seems almost impossible to shake, let alone remove. India’s Modi-led government is of this kind. However, Gen Z’s reaction to examination scams in a land where one exam may decide a whole family’s future seems to have landed a sharp and unexpected blow.
Seasoned observers were surprised at the great mass of young Indians that converged onto the streets of New Delhi on July 20 at the call of the young leaders of the very new “Cockroach” Janata Party, demanding the resignation or sacking of the education minister and an overhaul of examination systems in a nation where exam related suicides have become common. These protesters have injected fresh life into India’s democracy movement.
Before word emerged that the Indian government’s police had forcibly taken over the tiny Jantar Mantar space, a mile-and-a-half from New Delhi’s Parliament House, where protesters have so far been allowed to raise their voices, and before painful videos showed attacks on protesters by policemen who swung lathis on individual heads and fired teargas shells at groups, I had typed the following lines:
“O how blessed a space of freedom, be it ever so tiny! Where human beings can speak freely, paint their slogans, sing their songs. Where their words can be captured by onlookers and sent in an instant to a thousand destinations. And how sorrowful those places without any oasis for free speech! Our world has many such, and sadly India too has some.
“And how priceless the weapons of truth and nonviolence before which all plans to defame a struggle flee like a brief bad smell! And how brave, wise and strong the young student leaders of the CJP and their gallant comrades in Delhi who refused, despite every provocation, to surrender the noble sword of peaceful struggle.”
Aiming at Their Heads
The Indian Express reports, quoting hospital sources, that by 5:30 p.m. on July 20 emergency teams at RML Hospital (close to the demos) had “attended to around 100 people injured in the protest, 90 protesters and 10 policemen.” Four protesters were in the ICU. Its emergency areas overwhelmed, RML stopped taking patients. Many injured were then taken to Lady Hardinge Hospital.
RML officers said most patients required stitches on their head, tetanus injections and wound-dressing. “They have been hit in the head or in their limbs.... Most of the patients are young.”
Thirty-year-old Abhijeet Dipke, the CJP’s founder, has alleged that the police smashed a 12-year-old girl’s head and that another female protester was trampled on the chest while she lay on the ground.
On Tuesday July 21, leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party and other adversaries of the Modi government, including Rahul’s sister, Priyanka Vadra, who too is an elected MP, and Akhilesh Yadav, who leads the influential Samajwadi Party, protested near Modi’s official residence in solidarity with the students. After a few hours of sitting-in, these prominent protesters were forcibly removed.
It appears, however, that Dipke and his CJP associates are back at Jantar Mantar, which had earlier been taken over by the police. The makeshift platform put up by the CJP Janata Party had been removed and the space had become empty and silent.
Between the night of Sunday July 19 and midday on July 20, tens of thousands of Gen Z Indians (some estimates put the figure at 75,000 or more) filled first the small Jantar Mantar space and then all the streets close to it. They were responding to the CJP’s call for a nonviolent march to Parliament House.
Huge Turnout
No one, perhaps not even the CJP, expected the huge turnout. To curb numbers, the authorities had closed exits from busy metro stations, but protesters walked towards parliament from wherever they could. For most protesters, it was the first time to take to the streets. Some were even joined by parents.
A large police force plus the government’s Rapid Action Force put up barricades, hurled tear gas canisters, and swung lathis to stop and disperse the protesters. Though prevented from reaching Parliament House, the protesters could not be stopped from letting all of India and the world know of their grievances, even though their internet access was blocked from time to time.
Leaks of examination questions, and suicides related to the leaks, had provoked the protests, and overall unhappiness with the Modi government was frankly expressed in conversations captured on YouTube videos. Also striking was the evident fact that repeated calls earlier made by Sonam Wangchuk and the CJP for keeping the protest peaceful were heeded by the vast majority of participants. The government has alleged that many policemen were injured.
The image of a protester who asserted, with one knee on the ground, his right to object, while simultaneously joining his hands in goodwill for those trying to silence him will embarrass the authorities for a long time.
This YouTube video by the incredibly painstaking and fearless journalist Ravish Kumar is in Hindi, but no one can miss what its cameras show: New Delhi’s streets packed tight with tens of thousands of protesting youngsters.
Fears Conquered
Ravish (pronounced ruh-veesh) suggests that apart from protesting against the government, the students were also protesting against themselves and their earlier hesitancy. They had conquered their fears.
This video by Akash Banerjee, also in Hindi, shows hour-to-hour developments on July 20 as crowds swelled and continued to swell.
A minister in the Modi government, J. P. Nadda, who formally headed the BJP until January 2025, conveyed willingness to meet CJP representatives, but Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka had to wait for a couple of hours in Nadda’s residence before they had a 10-minute conversation with the minister, who asked for a written note on the CJP’s demands, which Das and Ranka supplied.
The demands are three. One, the fasting Sonam Wangchuk, the educator and environmentalist who has been the protest’s central figure and who was forcibly taken from Jantar Mantar’s platform to a hospital, should be set free. Two, education minister Dharmendra Pradhan should go. Three, families of students who had committed suicide because leaked exams were repeated should be compensated.
Learning of the police’s harshness towards protesting students, Wangchuk announced that he would continue his hunger-strike, which he had evidently been willing to end. The fast was on its 22nd day when, behind a flimsy screen of white bedsheets held by policemen in plain clothes who wished to hide what was being done, Wangchuk was removed by the police. The odious manner of his removal helped motivate the protesters.
Also on hunger-strike at Jantar Mantar, and demanding Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, were three students of the left-leaning All India Students’ Association: Neha Bora, Manish Kumar and Aameen Amitoj. On July 20 the three ended their 23-day fast, following an appeal by a visiting delegation that included opposition parliamentarians Manoj Jha, Rajaram Singh and Amra Ram, public intellectuals Yogendra Yadav and Harsh Mander, eminent advocate Prashant Bhushan, and popular movie actors Shabana Azmi and Prakash Raj.
Scheme to Discredit?
Banerjee’s YouTube video shows a truck loaded with stones that mysteriously parked itself at Jantar Mantar at 5 a.m. on July 20. “A few hours later,” according to Banerjee, a TV channel with a wide reach reported that protesters had resorted to “heavy stone-pelting” when in fact stone pelting was close to zero. One has to conclude that the regime wished to facilitate the hurling of stones in order to discredit the protesters — and that haste to discredit produced a premature report of a scenario that did not materialize.
YouTube videos also show a number of strong-looking men not in any police uniform swinging lathis at protesters alongside policemen doing the same. What was the reason for enlisting and projecting this kind of rough support? Banerjee’s quotable comment is that at times the Indian government acts like North Korea while wanting the image of Norway.
The prestige of the ballot box has fallen in the world’s largest democracy, if India can still be described in those terms. Once esteemed for its no-nonsense independence, the Election Commission of India, which conducts all voting for central and state legislatures, is now seen as a department of the Modi government.
Especially after a 2023 law empowered the prime minister to, in effect, name the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), who has enormous powers. Post-February 2025, when Gyanesh Kumar was made the CEC, trust in the fairness of India’s elections has shrunk.
This column has more than once underlined the removal from electoral rolls of hundreds of thousands of voters’ names under the so-called Special Intensive Revision or SIR. Demands for documentary proofs that your parents and grandparents were Indian citizens are impossible for most Indians to provide. More often than not, these demands are directed at the poor and helpless and at Muslims and Christians.
Time was when officers of the Indian state pursued people in remote parts of India asking, “Why aren’t you voting?” Now people are being chased and asked, “How dare you vote?” and required to prove that they are not infiltrators.
Ganesh Devy is one of India’s most respected intellectuals. His surveys of India’s languages and tribes are seen as the gold standard. This is what he says in a July 17 article in Kolkata’s Telegraph:
“For the past several months, I have travelled to many states, both ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party and those ruled by other political parties, and interacted with civil society groups, young people, media persons, university teachers, writers, artists and many others... There is today an unimaginable anxiety among the people about their status as citizens primarily fueled by the SIR exercise but also aided and abetted by other repressive policy measures.
“In one state, the officer-in-charge of prisons confided that he was tremendously worried about the implications of the changed procedures for handling suspected [illegal] migrants. Fewer of them are in holding centers as the law requires, and more are being hounded out en masse.
“Numerous individuals who were denied voting opportunity have expressed their despair at having to prove their citizenship. In anger, they ask, ‘When will this discriminatory regime end?’ And, even more desperately, ‘Will it ever?’”
Elected lawmakers crossing over from one side to another may not shock the world, but in today’s India the scene is so common that it has become boring. The consequences of defection, however, are ENORMOUS. Before long, we may be told that the BJP has obtained a two-thirds majority in both houses of India’s central parliament, even though voters had provided much less than that.
Raising a Brave Head
With a two-thirds majority in each house, the Modi government will be able to amend the constitution. In practice, clipping the freedoms of belief and speech, the right to trial, and the autonomies of India’s state and local governments has been routine for some time. Once enough legislators defect, and amendments are recorded, these exercises will become legitimate and “constitutional.” India’s political system will move closer to what exists in countries like Afghanistan, China, North Korea and Russia, to name them alphabetically.
However, even as the ballot box loses its aura, another reality has raised its courageous head in India — the reality of frank and gifted YouTubers. Proliferating in dozens, these men and women employ fact-checking, daring and satire to present facts and commentary. Already they seem to have stolen impressive chunks of viewers from the Lapdog Media.
“You Must Honor”
Quick to impede speech it doesn’t like, the Modi government is also determined to honor words it likes — and to ensure that the people of India accord those words proper honor. This column has more than once touched on the song Vande Mataram which generations of Indians have sung but parts of which venerate Hindu gods that are not divinities for India’s Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.
At independence, without objection from non-Hindus, the poem’s universal portion was named India’s national song, while Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana was chosen as the national anthem. Now the BJP government is bringing a bill to make any obstruction or insult to Vande Mataram a criminal offense.
Will unwillingness to sing the entire song be deemed an obstruction or insult? That would pose quite a dilemma for India’s religious minorities.
Tailpiece: Founded in 1963, the Delhi-based Center for the Study of Developing Societies, or “CSDS” as it is warmly known worldwide, is about to be “bulldozed.” The institution has nurtured brilliant researchers in the social sciences whose work has benefited the world for two generations. As Yogendra Yadav puts it, CSDS has been “at the center of Indian and global debates on politics, society and culture.”
Disapproving of the thinking of its scholars, the Indian government has stopped CSDS’s funding. A tall institution is about to disappear.
