By Antriksh Kar Singh
India witnessed history on the morning of 20 July, when thousands of youngsters took to the streets to march towards Parliament — a spectacle no fellow Indian wanted to miss, whether they were present in the capital city or not. The march from Jantar Mantar to the Indian Parliament was part of a three-week-long peaceful hunger strike seeking accountability from union government over the NEET examination paper leak. The peaceful march, however, turned aggressive and violent as Delhi police tried to block their path towards Parliament using several preventive measures, including barricades, water cannons, and tear gas, ultimately resulting in police resorting to a lathi charge on protestors. The young protestors didn’t leave their ground, however, and continued their march, putting security forces on their toes and forcing them to temporarily lock down the Parliament campus by afternoon.
The protest was a kind of “nightmare” for the current dispensation, pressurising to a level that by evening a senior minister meet Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) members leading the protest. However, the march, following the three-week hunger strike, also brought back India’s socio-political fault lines into social media reflections. Opinions, perspectives, and voices were sharply divided over the protest and the march that followed.
On one side, supporters of the current dispensation amplified and propagated narratives suggesting foreign linkage to the protest in an attempt to label it anti-Indian, circulated a clip of comedian Kunal Kamra making a political satire to paint the movement as anti-Hindu, and also alleged that it was an opposition-sponsored protest. This playbook is not new to the Indian political sphere, which has seen similar attempts to label protestors and those demanding accountability from the government as anti-Indian, anti-Hindu, playing politics, or being opposition-sponsored. The most recent application of this playbook was witnessed during the farm law protests. What is more concerning, though, is that some mainstream television journalists appeared to side with the government, posting near-identical messages that absolved the government and its agencies, including the Delhi Police, of any accountability during the protest and also on the day of march.
The other side comprises Indians concerned about the exam paper leak and the subsequent deaths of students reportedly linked to it, who are seeking accountability and reform of the system. These citizens have consistently shown solidarity, either by joining the protest in Delhi physically or by amplifying its message on social media. Students and young people across India organised gatherings in support of those marching towards Parliament, protesting the dysfunction of the examination system and other problems plaguing Indian education. These supporters hailed the protestors for reigniting belief in a fearless Indian democracy, where citizens are willing to hold the government accountable through peaceful protest, hunger strikes, and other democratic means.
The other side’s defenders, meanwhile, have their own logic for supporting the current regime and opposing the protest: that previous governments oversaw more exam leaks and corruption than the current one, and that despite its flaws, the present regime is a “nationalist” one. That reasoning is questionable as nationalism is not a metric that lends itself to being measured, let alone be used for excusing policy failures; yet supporters remain supporters, however tenuous the logic. The protest also provided glimpse into political faultlines marred with debate surrounding a weak opposition. Even though the CJP-led student protest drew support from renowned climate activist and educationist Sonam Wangchuk, who sat on an indefinite hunger strike, opposition leaders largely stayed on the sidelines until last week. Only after the protest gathered online momentum, which was spurred through widely circulated images of a visibly weakened Wangchuk, a few opposition leaders begin visiting the protest site. Many announced their support, but the Monday morning march was largely faceless, with no political leader taking charge in the absence of Wangchuk, who had reportedly been removed from the site and admitted to hospital by the Delhi Police on 18 July.
A few smaller parties including the Samajwadi Party, the Aam Aadmi Party, the Azad Party, the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party along with several activists, supported the march, but the principal opposition party maintained an unusual silence. Several Congress leaders, including party president Mallikarjun Kharge, Priyanka Gandhi, and Pawan Khera, did raise questions over police action on marching students that reportedly injured several of them, but the party did not endorse the protest outright. This may be done owing to some political calculations, or suspicion over the intentions of CJP’s core members given their past affiliations with the AAP, which is an arch rival of the Congress in several states.
Whatever the reason, as the Congress is already raising the NEET issue through its own “Chhatra Gunj” programme; open support for the CJP march would likely have amplified the message and increased pressure on the government to act. Congress appears to have missed that opportunity, further exposing the fault lines of trust within the opposition.
The government, too, missed a chance to resolve the protest peacefully through talks and negotiation. The protestors were demanding the resignation of the Union Education Minister and reform of the exam system; when the government failed to respond, they called for the march on Parliament to increase pressure. Instead, the government relied on the Delhi Police to remove Wangchuk from the protest site and admit him to hospital, reportedly citing a Delhi High Court order that did not, in fact, support that action, a move that only reignited a protest that had begun to lose momentum. The government instead could have engaged with the protestors and committed itself for exam-system reforms, which might have de-escalated the situation. The engagement though did not materialise before the march highlighting the shrinking space for peaceful protest in Indian democracy.
There were other issues which came to limelight through the handling of march. On 20 July, as digital platforms circulated footage showing Delhi Police personnel resorting to a lathi charge, the force dismissed the clips as “rumours” through its official social media channels. Several protestors and journalists were reportedly detained that day, which police denied. This conduct by a security agency operating under the Union government is difficult to reconcile with the standards expected of an ethical democracy. In the past three to four months alone, numerous corruption issues have surfaced across the country without the government fixing accountability, a basic requirement for democracy to function smoothly.
India appears to be moving through a distinct phase of democratic strain, in which nearly every issue gets filtered through the same lens- Hindu-Muslim framing, foreign interference, anti-national conspiracy, opposition backing, or “unnecessary politics.” Those in power, and their supporters, seem to have forgotten that a protest site is inherently a space of political contestation, and that room for contesting ideas is a healthy feature of a diverse and plural democracy. Even within the CJP-led protest, there may well be politically motivated individuals, groups, and organisations involved, but the movement’s growth in scale is followed by the government’s failure to respond properly, promptly, and appropriately.
(The author is a third-year PhD research scholar working in the department of journalism and mass communication, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong)
