Her mother worried she’d be beaten up by the police. Her father was certain to stop her, so she left without telling him. Her newly married sister surprised her by insisting on coming along.
So there they were: Rachna, aged 21 and dressed in the modest black pantsuit she wore to tutor students, and Mamta, 23, sari-clad and still wearing her bridal bangles. Just two daughters of a daily wage labourer and a homemaker, camped out amongst tens of thousands of young people just like them, at 2am on a Saturday at Jantar Mantar, the 18th-century sundial and observatory that has long served as the focal point and spiritual home of democratic protest in India.
The sisters knew no one else at the protest; they had never been to Delhi, India’s most unsafe city for women, before. They were exhausted by the journey, overwhelmed by the crowds around them, but exultant at having taken the train from their home not far from the Taj Mahal in Agra to India’s national capital to attend the biggest protest of their young lifetimes.
“We are going to stay here for as long as it takes,” Rachna said, nervously knotting her long ponytail into a tight bun. “I told my didi, we’ll just sleep here on the streets until the education minister resigns.”
Two months ago, India’s Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) was an internet joke spawned by a thoughtless remark by the chief justice of India, who likened a section of India’s unemployed youth to cockroaches. Last week, the CJP claimed the country’s biggest political scalp of the past 12 years: forcing the influential education minister to resign after a massive wave of protests, including a weeks-long sit-in, over repeated leaks of exam papers.
In May, over two million students sat for the annual National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for a chance to study at a prestigious medical college. The exam was administered in 13 different languages across over 5,000 exam centres under tight security, only for it to emerge days later that the paper had been leaked in advance and sold for hundreds of thousands of rupees to students looking to cheat. The exam was cancelled and rescheduled for the following month.
Separately, across three days in June, almost three million candidates, including Rachna and Mamta, sat for an exam to select 32,679 police constables for the state of Uttar Pradesh – an acceptance rate of 1%. Days later, a viral social media post claimed that this paper had also been leaked. This time the authorities denied the rumours and arrested a young man responsible for the post, but for the 99% of exam-takers who didn’t land a job, the rumour was now fact.
“I took the examination to become a police constable,” said Rachna, “I did as well,” added Mamta. “But the paper was leaked. They always are,” they chorused. “The education minister must go.”
Twelve hours later, they got their wish: Dharmendra Pradhan was gone. The crowds dispersed soon after, leaving behind a trail of questions in their wake. Who were these young people? Why did their protests succeed, where countless others had failed to garner any concessions from prime minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian regime? Would the energy from these protests translate into electoral gains for the opposition, or result in “meaningful change” – whatever that means?
It is now accepted wisdom that the reason for the success of this particular protest was the Modi government’s perceived betrayal of the logic of Indian aspiration: Work hard, ace the test, land the job, join the middle class. By declining to connect this rebellion with those that had come before, particularly those concerning the rights of Muslim citizens, the protests did not fundamentally undermine the regime.
Yet conversations with those who camped out at Jantar Mantar suggest that the damage done to the Modi regime goes well beyond the loss of one minister. The Cockroach protests in Delhi and in towns and cities across the country have produced a new and unexpected solidarity that has defanged the Modi regime’s primary tools of governance: fear, alienation and division.
Modi’s Faustian compact
When Narendra Modi swept to power in 2014, his regime offered India’s industrialists, intelligentsia, urban Hindu middle class, and restless rural electorate a Faustian compact: look the other way, and in return we will do whatever it takes to transform India into a modern, capitalist economy suited to the growing aspirations of its youthful population.
‘Whatever it takes’, it transpired, meant sacrificing everything and everyone – democratic institutions, religious minorities, voting rights and citizenship, farmland and farmers, forests and forest-dwellers, rivers and those who hold them sacred – at the altar of slashing corporate taxes, ripping up labour laws and environmental codes, handing out sops to Indian Inc, and trying to turn India into a theocratic Hindu state.
But until recently, even as India’s economy faltered and flatlined and the ranks of the unemployed swelled, the compact proved astonishingly durable.
Indian society was unprepared for the hyper-violence unleashed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, its party workers, its vigilantes and the might of India’s militarised security forces. For close to a decade, it retreated into a state of shock as Hindu-supremecist vigilantes openly hunted down and lynched Muslims, police stormed universities and brutalised students, the judiciary denied bail to critics of the regime imprisoned on the flimsiest of charges, the election commission disenfranchised millions of Indians, and paramilitary soldiers apprehended thousands of Muslims, accused them of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and in some cases, blindfolded them, strapped them into flimsy lifejackets and flung them into the seas along the coastline shared by the two countries.
State violence was amplified, justified and celebrated by the regime’s supporters, including in much of the media, while protests were dismissed as the work of terrorists, traitors and anti-nationals, and dispersed by policemen and paramilitaries wielding batons, teargas, and pellet-guns. Leftists were called Maoists, academics and writers were called seditionists, farmers were called Khalistani terrorists, Muslims were painted as agents of Pakistan.
“People have been trained to be cowards by this regime. Because when there's nothing else at stake, it's your life. It's simply your life. Nothing less than that is at stake,” said Neha Bora, student leader with the leftist All India Students Association, who undertook a 23-day hunger strike as part of the uprising.
“They're training us that when they commit mass murder in this country, everybody is so afraid that nobody can speak for the other. But what has been trained can be untrained. It can be unlearned. And every moment that we get, every chance and every opportunity that we get, we must unlearn this.”
Unlearning Fear
As the monsoon rolled over Delhi, signs of unlearning were everywhere. In buses, taxis and rickshaws, at tea-shops, cigarette stalls, and in the capital’s few open green spaces, every conversation was about the extraordinary protests unfolding at Jantar Mantar. These were the sorts of complex, layered, and occasionally frustrating conversations that have long characterised street politics, but had fallen silent over the past 12 years.
“I voted for Modi and now I’m ashamed,” said Subhash Yadav, a taxi driver from Bihar, a state in East India, who has lived in Delhi for several years. “There is so much unemployment, papers are being leaked, and if anyone opens his mouth, he is immediately locked up.”
For years, Yadav said, he counted himself as an “andh-bhakt”, or a blind follower. His devotion for Modi increased when the BJP fulfilled a long-standing promise to build a gargantuan Hindu temple in the city of Ayodhya on the site of a 13th-century Muslim mosque that was torn down by the BJP’s foot-soldiers in the 1990s.
“See, the people hanker for what they do not have,” Yadav said. “In [Modi’s predecessor] Manmohan Singh’s time, we had jobs, so we wanted the temple. Now we have the temple, but no jobs. Now we need jobs.”
Closer to the protest, the streets were plastered with anti-regime posters and graffiti. By evening, Tolstoy Marg – the primary access road to the site – thronged with young women and men carrying the battered, low-slung backpacks that mark out those who devote years of their youth to preparing for India’s competitive exams.
At the protest site itself, a network of volunteers directed the crowds as best they could around a large stage manned by volunteers and Abhijeet Dipke, the young man who started the Cockroach Janata Party’s Instagram handle as a dark joke, only to be followed by tens of millions of Indians convinced that the crisis of Indian democracy went far deeper than leaked exam papers.
“The government doesn’t understand what is going on here. They think this protest is a small thing,” said Saveen Gulia, who has been living at Jantar for ten days, having left his work laying fibre-optic internet cables in rural Haryana and jumped on a train with one sheet and three T-shirts, to participate in the protest. Gulia said he didn’t know a soul when he first arrived at the protest site, but very quickly found himself in a world he didn’t think was possible.
“Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, all living together as a family,” he said, still sounding a bit incredulous at this experience of peaceful coexistence. “I would see media people saying, ‘Muslims are like this, Muslims are like that’. But when I came here, I found that if you treat people well, they treat you well. Better than well, we all treated each other as family.”
Gulia blamed social media and online echo chambers – whose rise has coincided with the BJP’s 12 years in power – for “ruining this brotherhood”. The regime has created a professionalised cadre of online trolls who have relentlessly chipped away at the idea that propaganda claiming Hindus and Muslims cannot peacefully coexist in a society as complex as India, let alone be friends.
These trolls trigger waves of outrage about seemingly inconsequential things, such as a detergent advert that showed a Muslim boy and Hindu girl playing Holi together. Their delegitimisation of something as intimate and profound as friendship has led a generation of young people such as Gulia to go most of their lives without ever really encountering someone from another religion.
In conversation after conversation at Jantar Mantar, young people camped out under makeshift tents expressed surprise, joy and excitement at encounters with strangers they would never have thought to speak to, befriend, or – as the crackdowns intensified – protect from police officers wielding batons allegedly embedded with nails.
“Every night, there are speakers from places like Jawaharlal Nehru University educating us about capitalism, about socialism, about why India is the way it is,” said Neha Dahat, a 22-year-old graduate working her first job in Delhi. Dahat had spent the past several nights at the protest, barely sleeping so she could listen to the carousel of opposition politicians, activists, and academics who address the crowds late into the night, and then waking early to head home, shower, change and head to work, only to return to the protest each evening.
“Every morning I wake up thinking, ‘Last night I heard something new, I learnt something new.’ I used to think I had read enough. But then someone at the protest will mention some writer, and I think, ‘Now I need to read this. Now I need to read more.’” Dahat’s eyes lit up as she pointed to a makeshift library that had been set up by the Students’ Federation of India, where she said she had been devouring books. It was clear that, despite attending a protest ostensibly about the sanctity of competitive examinations, this was the first time she had found herself amongst a community of readers interested in ideas beyond a syllabus.
“I’ve learnt I like to meet new people, to hear multiple perspectives, to understand how they think,” she said. “I think I need to be more open, to speak to people, people who live close to the ground, people who’ve come here from far away.”
As a seasoned student activist, Bora from the All India Students Association, said they were struck by how many of the people crammed into Jantar Mantar were first-time protesters.
“These are all people who would sit at home and call us anti-nationals,” she said. “If the television told them that those sitting here were a leftist, cabal of George Soros or whatever, they would have believed it. But it was this protest that made it possible for them to not believe such things.”
“You have to learn that every person who's been called anti-national before this, and who you accepted as anti-national, whose public trial you watched on television and believed, whose public trials you participated in, who you trolled on social media – all of those people who were called anti-national and you believed, you are that person. And if today you don't believe them because you are being called anti-national, then perhaps they are not anti-national either.”
Mocking Modi
Perhaps the most intriguing accomplishment of the BJP’s 12 years in power has been the insistence that Modi’s personal popularity remains intact.
Travel through Delhi, and the prime minister’s bearded visage is seen on billboards, at bus stops, petrol pumps, the airport, the train station. In interviews I have conducted over the years, people have bemoaned the state of the nation, the follies of individual government ministers and of bureaucracy, but have fallen silent when asked about their views on Modi – often an act of self-preservation, given how routine it has become for the police to arrest those who allegedly insult him, even in private WhatsApp groups.
Even as discontent gathered force, as ever-widening swathes of society bridled under the weight of an increasingly arrogant regime, the government and the pliant media insisted that Modi was a popular leader, that only he could fix India, that resistance was futile.
Yet, over 36 days in June and July, the tens of thousands of students gathered at Jantar Mantar broke Modi’s fearsome cult of personality. The young now see him and his lieutenants as out-of-touch old men at best, and objects of ridicule at worst. The protesters may have been demanding the resignation of the education minister, but the focus of their ire was clearly Modi himself.
“Modi jab darta hai, toh Hindu-Muslim karta hai,” was one common call at Jantar Mantar, to which the response was, “Modi jab darta hai, toh police ko aage karta hai.” [When Modi is frightened, he pits Hindus against Muslims / When Modi is frightened, he hides behind the police].
But the slogan heard most often along the streets lining the protest site, usually as a high-pitched cry that cut through the din of the protest, was a Hindi ditty that began with the truism that the leaf of the Neem tree is bitter, only for the crowd to roar back an unprintable reply aimed squarely at the prime minister.
If there was a space for contemplation amid the heady days and nights of rebellion, it was along the eastern boundary wall of the protest site.
Here, visitors were invited to scribble notes on a large white sheet printed with the faces of fresh-faced students from across the country. Some of the photographs were headshots of the sort required by India’s exam system: white background with the face taking up 80% of the image, centred so that both ears are clearly visible. Other photos offered glimpses of their lives life outside the grind of prepping for tests: a string of festive fairy lights behind a girl from Tamil Nadu dressed in a sparkly salwar kameez, a young man from Rajasthan standing before leaf-patterned curtains that perhaps his mother had chosen, the radiant smile of a girl from Madhya Pradesh; the wry but determined look of young man clearly trying to keep a straight face as a middle-aged man in the background bends over to tie his shoelaces.
These smiling young people, their family and friends said, died by suicide as a consequence of the stress of having to take the leaked medical examinations again.
“Friends, you were like us,” said one note written in Hindi. “Society, the government and circumstance sought to strip you of your humanity, you wrought a revolution that has infused this world. We will meet again.”
