The award of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, the South African human rights lawyer and international judge, should be warmly welcomed.
Writes Jonathan Wolfe in The New York Times: “While many know Ms. Pillay for her early work against apartheid, or more recently for leading a UN commission investigating the war in Gaza, she has also worked on other important international human rights issues of the last few decades.
“Ms. Pillay, who is of Indian Tamil origin, was born in 1941 in Durban [South Africa]... Her father was a bus driver. She was one of seven children.
“In 1995, Ms. Pillay was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to serve as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The tribunal was established to prosecute those responsible for the 1994 killings of some 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, in a massacre now known as the Rwandan genocide.”
Will Teamwork Grow?
As debate intensifies in India over the opposition’s demand for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a significant question arises. Will the INDIA bloc, led by the Indian National Congress, and Gen Z’s recognized voice, the Cockroach Janta Party, each standing up resolutely to the BJP, work together?
On the night of Oct 12, after a strong procession called by the INDIA bloc had concluded in Delhi, its initiator, the INC’s Rahul Gandhi, said on Instagram: “Thank you all for coming out and defending the idea of India, the idea of the Constitution, the idea of our democracy... There are no parallel protests. It’s one protest, and it’s a protest where everybody is standing together. Every single person is going to stand against these killers of our Constitution, these killers of our democracy. And we’re not going to back down.”
The next day, Abhijeet Dipke, the CJP founder, voiced warm and wholehearted congratulations to the INDIA bloc on the large turnout for the bloc’s procession to the Supreme Court, adding that popular demands for Kumar’s resignation must continue.
These are encouraging utterances. Many will be rooting for mutual support to grow into teamwork.
Supreme Court on the Spot
Another significant question is this: has India’s new frankness entered the higher judiciary? The answer seems to be, “Not quite.” In a special sitting on Sunday Oct 11, two judges on India’s Supreme Court heard petitions against the closure, linked to the protest which the Cockroaches had announced, of Delhi’s metro stations, and said that all barriers should be removed unless “absolutely warranted.”
Two days earlier, on Oct 9, a three-member Supreme Court bench (Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Bagchi and Mohana) had directed the government to ensure that there was no “complete prohibition” of the movement of metro and trains coming to Delhi on Oct 10. Everything could not be brought to a halt, the court said.
Yet, the metro stations remained shut. This was contempt, said petitioner and lawyer Shailendra Mani Tripathi. On Oct 11, the bench ruled that people have a right to protest but it should be within the Police Act. “You have a right to protest, absolutely no quarrel on that, but the process in which you protest has to be within the Police Act,” Justices Bagchi and Mohana said.
Some months earlier, on April 1, Justice Bagchi had observed, while hearing a case about voting eligibility in West Bengal, that “even if a person in West Bengal is excluded today and thereby unable to vote in the upcoming assembly election, such exclusion—if later found unjustified by the tribunal headed by a former Chief Justice—can be remedied.”
Can a Supreme Court justice afford to sound half-hearted about the deprivation of the right to vote?
Intrepid YouTubers
As established TV channels and most newspapers became the Indian regime’s mouthpieces, an extraordinary crop of YouTubers emerged in India. Fearless and tireless, these YouTubers have kept much of India informed of the regime’s drive against democratic norms, and of the growing resistance to that drive.
In one of his latest videos, India’s brilliant YouTubing pioneer, Ravish Kumar, loved by millions of Indians who want frankness in the media, unstintingly congratulated Dhruv Rathee, Akash Banerjee, and Ajit Anjum, who too in their YouTube videos, along with several others, have been fearlessly reporting and analyzing India’s daily contest between domination and resistance.
The immediate reason for Ravish’s praise, in which he was joined by his associate Vrinda Sharma, was the rough arrest and subsequent release of Dhruv Rathee, whose forthright and carefully researched YouTube videos have gained a reach that probably exceeds that of large, regime-friendly TV channels.
On Oct 12, Rathee spoke to a press conference in Delhi of how on the morning of Sat Oct 10, before he had gotten up, around 20 men in plain clothes entered his bedroom in his family’s home in Gurgaon’s Sector 56, which lies on Delhi’s border, grabbed him and took him away. He was “kidnapped,” not arrested or detained, Rathee said.
His mother had opened the door of their house at 7 a.m., only to be confronted by a band of toughs. As she screamed, about 20 of them pushed their way inside, restrained her husband, entered Dhruv’s bedroom, and seized him. Before Dhruv could put on his slippers, he was dragged against furniture and down stairs and forced into a vehicle.
“If the police had come, shown me their identity cards and explained the sections of the law under which I was being taken to a police station, I would have gone willingly,” Rathee said. “But none of that happened. They sent goons to kidnap me while I was sleeping in my own home.”
Rathee was taken to multiple police stations and prevented from contacting his lawyer. His phone and that of his parents had been taken away. After some time, his captors’ attitude to him changed. They had only been obeying “orders from above,” Dhruv was told before being released.
At the press conference, Rathee displayed his passport to contradict rumors circulated about his citizenship. “I want to make one thing clear,” he said. “This is my passport. I am an Indian citizen, I was one, and will remain one.”
Indians are proud of Dhruv Rathee. And grateful for his freedom from fear, his skills, and his sustained devotion to what India’s constitution assures and prescribes: liberty, equality, fraternity, unity, dignity.
Preventing a Rally
For Sat Oct 10, the Cockroaches had announced a rally at Jantar Mantar, the Delhi arena earmarked for protests, to demand the ouster of the chief election commissioner. Thousands of students were expected to join, as also activists and politicians. Ground for a successful rally had been laid, organizers thought, by the July 25 resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, which protests spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party had extracted.
This time the Modi regime was determined not to yield. To prevent protesters from gathering, more than a hundred trains to Delhi were canceled. Within the capital, scores of metro stations were closed. Any gathering of more than four people was banned. Around 50,000 police and paramilitary personnel took control of central Delhi.
It was as if the capital stood on an international border and a powerful enemy nation was about to invade.
Even so, protesters managed to turn up in central Delhi. There they were seized wherever encountered, pushed roughly into buses, and sent to detention centers. It seems that from around 6,000 to 8,000 were thus arrested.
In the words of The Indian Express, “More than 6,000 people, including Opposition leaders, activists, and even star YouTubers stood little chance as Delhi Police, which reports to the Central government, pulled out all stops to clamp down on a rally in central Delhi demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
"Most people were picked up even before they made it anywhere near the planned protest site, Jantar Mantar, and whisked off in buses and vans to stadiums and other makeshift detention centres."
Global media has been noting the protests in India. In the U.S., “Democracy Now” quoted a leading Indian journalist: “The demonstrations ‘represent an outpouring of anger, of frustration at what many Indians feel is the fact that their democracy has been taken away,’ says Shoaib Daniyal, political editor of Scroll, who was arrested on Saturday along with 7,000 other protesters. He points out that ‘the deletions have affected Muslims far more than they have affected other Indians.’”
Three Young Leaders
Having flown together from Mumbai to Delhi for the Oct 10 demonstration they had announced, the three young CJP leaders, Abhijeet Dipke, Ashutosh Ranka, and Saurav Das, were seized before they could disembark. Boarding their plane, a posse of women police arrested the three and ordered each into a separate vehicle. They were driven to different police stations.
After about 24 hours, they were released. Was their quick release linked to the imminent arrival in India, scheduled for Oct 13, of two members of the Canadian cabinet, Anita Anand, minister for external affairs, and Maninder Sidhu, minister for international trade? The ministers (both are of Indian origin) are expected to conclude a trade pact and discuss with Indian counterparts an apparent suggestion that Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, should be the chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebrations in January 2027.
Democratic rights have been a major consideration for Canada’s people and governments, and the Modi cabinet may not have wanted Anand and Sidhu to run into something that could be called repressive. There was no way, however, of hiding the arrests of a great number of other peaceful protesters.
Be it marked that there was no evidence, not even an allegation, that any of the thousands of Oct 10’s arrested protesters had attacked, or threatened to attack, anyone, whether a member of the police or paramilitary forces or a citizen. No stone was thrown at property. Journalists covering the protest were however assaulted by the police. In fact it seemed that any citizen walking anywhere near Jantar Mantar was fair game.
“To Be Hauled Away”
Bravely taken videos captured the rough ways in which women and men protesters were thrust inside the police’s buses. Who you were didn’t matter. Sixty-year-old John Brittas is a CPM member of the Rajya Sabha, one of nine MPs representing the state of Kerala (now spelled and called Keralam) in the upper house. In a letter to India’s president, Brittas summarized his Oct 10 experience:
“While peacefully interacting with journalists in connection with the ongoing democratic protests demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Shri Gyanesh Kumar, I was forcibly dragged away, bodily lifted by police personnel, brutally assaulted inside a police vehicle and subsequently abandoned on the roadside.
“Delhi Police and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel forcibly manhandled and dragged me for approximately 50 metres, despite repeated assertions by both myself and the journalists present that I am a sitting Member of Parliament. A few police personnel lifted me bodily into the air and carried me towards a police vehicle, treating a sitting Member of Parliament as though I were an object to be hauled away.”
The response of the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, to the Oct 10 protests was to allege that “an attempt is being made to create a state of anarchy in the country... Who is doing this?” Nabin warned that the BJP and the government would respond firmly to “attempts to destabilize India in collusion with foreign forces.”
Procession in New Delhi
Monday Oct 12 saw a really large procession of opposition parties in New Delhi from Connaught Place to the Supreme Court, where party leaders presented a petition. Their appeal to the top court is for a suspension of the so-called Special Intensive Revision of India’s electoral rolls, an audit of all deletions and modifications in the rolls, a booth-wise listing of removed names, and the restoration of removed names.
Led by Rahul Gandhi, the procession was joined by the leaders of almost every opposition party and thousands of Delhi’s citizens.
The ban against gatherings was still in place, paramilitary and police forces were there still, but after viewing the size of the procession it was evidently thought prudent not to attempt to break it up. Earlier, a police officer had apparently told an Indian Express reporter that Rahul’s march would not be allowed to reach the Supreme Court.
