Jantar Mantar 2.0 Sets Modi Govt Back Further

The Delhi Police, which comes under the Union home ministry and, therefore, under Union Home minister Amit Shah, had prepared better for October 10, having learnt from its experience on July 20. The clampdown came beforehand. Metro stations across the national capital were closed, Internet in a 4-km radius was cut off. And protesters were prevented from reaching the protest site at Jantar Mantar. Around 25,000 police personnel from the Delhi police and the Central Reserve Police Force were deployed. By the end of the day, over 3,000 protesters were detained and then released, while Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) leaders, including Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, were arrested from the plane they travelled in from Mumbai. They were released on Sunday. Dhruv Rathee, the Berlin-based podcaster and the bête noire of the Narendra Modi government, was arrested in Gurugram near Delhi. Rathee has also been released. The government can pat itself on the back for having managed to push back the protesters, and that they avoided the protesters’ tsunami of July 20.

This would be a deadly wrong reading of the barometer as it were. The protest site expanded across Delhi, to Dilli Haat where Neha Bora and other protesters were detained, outside the Supreme Court of India, where protesting lawyers were held. The 3,000-plus arrests hide the much larger number of protesters who were prevented from coming out. Like a river in spate, the number of protesters is swelling even though they are prevented from getting out of their homes and joining the protests. The government faces the prospect of a larger number of protesters and dissenters. And these protesters do not all belong to political parties and their student wings. These are college students, some of them in their twenties. They are not chanting slogans of the political opposition. They are speaking of their democratic right to protest, and how speaking their mind is so necessary for Indian democracy. We are not reading their minds. Their testimony is recorded by the newshounds who have been going around talking to them. They are speaking in plain Hindi and English. They have not been schooled and they have not been brainwashed. They are flag-waving liberals. That is why they pose a stronger challenge to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), perched as it is in the hollows of power. They are making their point on record. And without saying it, they are portraying the Modi government which is barricading them from exercising their democratic right, as being in the wrong and without uttering the word, they are proclaiming the government to be anti-democratic. Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad’s argument that democracy functions in Parliament and not on the streets, and trying to defend democracy of the government against the anarchy of the protesters, seemed both sheepish and hollow.

In July, Union defence minister and senior BJP leader Rajnath Singh ruled out the resignation of then education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. On Saturday (October 10), Mr Prasad ruled out the resignation of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, who is at the centre of the storm over the special intensified revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. Mr Pradhan was a political appointee, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have asked him to step down in response to the political protests led by the CJP. The government, legally speaking, cannot ask Mr Kumar to resign. They cannot force the CEC to resign.

Mr Kumar has to step down voluntarily. Of course, Mr Kumar would oblige Mr Modi if he were asked to resign. The Prime Minister and the government are unlikely to blink any time soon.

The CJP has said that it would keep up the protests. The longer the protests continue despite police curbs and detentions, the wider and deeper the opposition to the government will grow. It would gather momentum, which is going to undermine the position of the BJP among the people. Political parties in power, even when they are losing ground, do not give in gracefully. They hold on to their entrenched positions in Parliament and in government till the last. And the BJP is not behaving unnaturally. The interesting development is that the BJP is losing ground, and it is losing ground among the apolitical younger generation. The young have an uncanny sense of right and wrong, however ignorant they may be of political ideologies. The rising dissatisfaction of the youth with the Modi government is based on simple rules of the game. They want to express their opinion in the open, and the government is stopping them in the name of law and order. If the government chooses to choke democratic spaces of protest, then it is not defusing or removing the causes of discontent. It is intensifying discontent by suppressing protest. But governments are like that only. They refuse to read the writing on the wall.

Even as Mr Modi’s admirers celebrate his 25 years as the head of government, 13 years as chief minister of Gujarat and 12 years as Prime Minister, the ground beneath is giving way. The certainty that he was the most popular political leader in the country is being overshadowed by the omissions and commissions of his government. The ardent Modi fans will argue that even if the government is losing ground, the Prime Minister’s standing remains unassailable. The combination of an unpopular government and a popular leader is a fragile one, and if one falls the other has to fall too. BJP leaders and apparatchiks hope that Mr Modi’s popularity will save them from the falling popularity ratings of the government. It is, however, an unsustainable hope. Mr Modi has to pay for the failures of the government. The question of whether Mr Modi can stand tall if the BJP falls has an unambiguous answer. If the BJP falls, the fall of Mr Modi is imminent. Ironically, and perhaps not so ironically, the personal acme of Mr Modi is turning out to be the proverbial hubris for the BJP. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has rightly predicted in Chennai that Mr Modi cannot last beyond 15 years. That is, the Prime Minister will complete his third term, but neither he nor his party can win the 2029 Lok Sabha election. And that is a plausible prediction. The countdown for the end of the Modi-BJP reign in 2029 has begun.

The writer is a Delhi-based commentator and analyst