It is said that if you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices. That is how some people deceive themselves into believing that small wrongs will never catch up with them. The trouble with this method is that, one fine day, the truth stands bare, impossible to ignore.
This October, Indian democracy resembles a plucked chicken, stripped of its plumage, as protesters who ironically call themselves “cockroaches” swarm our streets. A lot of feather-plucking went on for 12 years before Prime Minister Narendra Modi found himself cornered, retreating behind barricades, facing the wrath of students for whom the slow erosion of democracy has left little to lose and even less to fear. Confronted with a major protest on October 10 demanding the reversal of a purge of the voter rolls, he went on a self-incrimination spree.
His government imposed measures reminiscent of the emergency era: no trains to New Delhi, paramilitary forces deployed at protest sites, the internet disrupted. Ahead of the demonstration, leading figures linked to the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protest movement – Ratna Singh, Abhijeet Dipke, Dhruv Rathee – were detained. Many other known activists, including Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson Tushar Gandhi, were also detained.
Regardless, demonstrators poured into the streets of New Delhi, trying to reach designated protest sites, in a scene that repeated in city after city across India. Through the day, the police played an endless game of whack-a-mole with the protesters, who kept resurfacing across the capital city, reassembling in one corner after another, driven from the designated protest sites but unwilling to disappear. By the evening, at least 2,500 protesters and 15 journalists were detained across the city and taken to detention centres set up in various locations.
Many have since been released. These acts further erode the tenuous position Modi is in, prompting more rebuke from critics who now question his fitness to occupy the office of the prime minister. On Friday, the opposition parties, led by Rahul Gandhi, met President Draupadi Murmu and submitted to her that the government had subverted India’s democratic framework.
Under Modi’s watch, problems have accumulated like barnacles on the side of the ship. Every time he has been challenged, he has gone farther away from the democratic principles on which this nation was founded. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls – the last feather he plucked – was an exercise in bureaucratic fascism.
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