This October, India is a country where a million mutinies are gathering force. India’s “cockroaches” — supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) — are back on the streets, marking Mahatma Gandhi’s 157th birth anniversary with non-violent disobedience. Once again, the atmosphere was carnival-like: plenty of students; a phalanx of marching, fist-waving women, arm-in-arm with young men, punching the air and shouting: “Gyanu, it’s done, bro”.
Surreally enough, they already talk of “Gyanu” — India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar — in the past tense. What will follow — what system or person — is a question that has been put on hold. For now, the protestors are unified with a single, concentrated message: they want Kumar, accused of manipulating voter rolls in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, to resign.
Young women and queer students have taken to the streets over women’s safety in Delhi after a 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped in Aastha Kunj Park in southeast Delhi by three men who posed as police officers. Concurrently in Mumbai, the parents of Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student at IIT Bombay, have launched an indefinite hunger strike after he died by suicide earlier this month. They are demanding the arrest of his teachers and alleging severe caste-based harassment.
In Pune, Maharashtra Public Service Commission aspirants are on the streets demanding the chairman’s resignation over a range of concerns about alleged examination irregularities, transparency issues and uncertainty surrounding examination results. The rest of India — those not out on the streets — is umbilically tethered to a computer or phone screen, riding alternating currents of buoyancy, pessimism, doubt and rage. The sudden convergence of these volatile protests has effectively caught the Modi government in a pincer movement of domestic unrest.
The overlapping waves of unrest represent a dangerous shift in the national mood, effectively uniting a fragmented Gen Z demographic against the Centre, re-energising and bringing together the opposition as a national force, and transforming disparate grievances into a cohesive, highly visible movement that the government can no longer contain. Besides, central Delhi and parts of Mumbai are locked down under heavy security — on Gandhi Jayanti, no less — compounding the crisis of optics. Modi no longer provides stable governance.
At this point, he rules not by legitimacy but by brute force and fear — of losing power and the legal reckoning that might follow once power is lost. For much of Modi’s political history, hierarchy has carried its own justification. His foundational axiom is that voters work for him and not the other way around.
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