Modi is in trouble

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. There is simply no other way to frame an event that strips 130 million Indians of their right to vote.

The fact that this process helped sway elections is no longer up for debate. That the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, who oversaw SIR, is not resigning – out of shame – is astonishing. Even more so now that a corruption case from 2006 against him has resurfaced.

The chaotic, angry, defiant tableaux in the streets of New Delhi and beyond represent a reckoning that has been long in the making. The young, diverse protesters are a stark contrast to Modi and his cabinet – old, humourless men, who have bet on a strategy of demonisation and exclusion to succeed. His cabinet is filled with men full of self-importance, who had, mistakenly, wagered that crimes of elected officials should be tolerated and that a country can be governed indefinitely by creating fissures and manufacturing enemies.

We have now seen what happens when breakers of the law become makers of law. Criminal behaviour has been the organising principle of the party, and together, the values of these people have defined the years that Modi has ruled India. In the process, he has presided over the shredding of the Constitution of India.

Now that all this has come back to haunt him – in the form of “cockroaches” he is unable to exterminate – Modi has turned New Delhi into a fortress and unleashed all the power he has at his disposal on unarmed protesters. This is consistent with his policy of pretending to aspire to peace but unerringly generating conflict throughout his tenure: with neighbouring nations as well as among neighbours within cities.

October 10 is just an opening salvo. Over the next few weeks, Modi’s troubles will likely deepen. The CJP has announced protests will continue. Opposition parties have said they will protest on Monday.

The “cockroaches” seem to have resolved any remaining questions regarding Modi’s utter ineptitude as prime minister. They have laid bare the hollowed-out democracy that India holds up to the world as exemplary.

As his rule draws to a close — for now, the writing is on the wall — it can be safely said that history books will cast Modi in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Indians to lose all respect for the government, the army, the Delhi Police, as well as the whole structure of governance.

New Delhi is temporarily suspended in a transition between a suffocating present and a promising future. This particular scrap of time, no matter how hard, will pass.

When that dust settles, what will become of all the institutions destroyed by regulatory capture and right-wing ideology – only those on the streets today will answer. This understanding is implicit in everything the “cockroaches” do. Because the whole point of it is power to the people.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.