‘Climate of fear has collapsed’: India’s protest victory signals trouble ahead for Modi | India

Even the night before Narendra Modi accepted the resignation of his education minister, India’s prime minister seemed confident that the biggest mass uprising during his 12 years in power would do little to shake his government.

Addressing his “young friends” in an Instagram selfie reel at midnight on Friday, he thanked people across the country who mobilized en masse and chanted anti-government slogans for their “thoughtful suggestions.”

Modi, who has been vigorously cultivating his dictator image for years, accepted Dharmendra less than 24 hours later. Pradhan’s resignation. Analysts say this is an extraordinary modesty of a government that has proven unwilling to bow to any public pressure and has ruled with near-impunity since 2014.

Last week, the Gen Z movement calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) mobilized an unprecedented protest movement for justice for millions of young people when a crucial exam paper was leaked, forcing 2 million students to retake the exam and more than a dozen accused of suicide.

Even as the protests morphed into a broader fight for democracy, the resignation of Pradhan, Modi’s staunch political ally, remained their first and foremost demand for accountability. However, Modi did not mention Pradhan in his Instagram address.

By Saturday morning, more people than ever were flocking to Delhi’s historic Jantar Mantar, the center of the protests, and unrest was quickly spreading to other cities, including states ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).

It wasn’t just physical space that the cockroach movement captured. Since coming to power, the BJP has proven extremely effective in capturing the online narrative; used its powerful, highly organized IT cell to mobilize and attack any perceived criticism of the government, whether from citizens, politicians or journalists.

But that was no match for the millions of Gen Z memes and reels that began flooding Instagram last week, fearlessly insulting Modi and pillorying the government, each more creative and provocative than the next. Modi’s last-ditch attempts to speak directly to young people on Instagram were met with more ridicule and side-memes.

Modi had also lost a media tool critical to the BJP’s dominance of the national narrative; It was widely accepted that mainstream TV news channels had been co-opted by the BJP government over the last 12 years and made into mouthpieces of its right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology.

Initially, the channels ignored the protests; When they did, they claimed the protesters were being financed by malevolent foreign powers and Pakistani terrorist groups. In response, protesters used social media to open channels to expose their “lies.” As the protests escalated, Modi remained conspicuously absent from the airwaves.

Pradhan’s resignation comes at a time when all other options for the government have vanished. Given the massive outcry over police brutality that hit protesters on Monday, the option of a brutal crackdown seemed untenable.

“The online space has been completely taken over by protesters, and pro-regime media have been severely delegitimized,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a professor of international studies at Brown University in Rhode Island. “The anger was so widespread that there was no option but for Pradhan to leave.”

But Varshney said this was more than the loss of a minister, it was also the first time in 12 years that the Modi government had lost control of the political narrative. “This is an oppressive government,” he said. “It demands obedience, it does not want critical debate, and it creates fear. But now the climate of fear has collapsed.”

Analysts say Pradhan’s resignation could also have implications for Modi’s power over his own cabinet. Pradhan was one of Modi’s most loyal ministers and ideological foot soldiers and had implemented policies exactly as senior party figures wanted. He also helped the BJP win the state of Odisha in the general elections for the first time, securing important seats.

“Modi knows that when you start firing your most loyal ministers, it creates incentives for other ministers to leave as well,” said political columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “If your own cabinet starts taking precautions for a future that will not be supported by your government, then you are in trouble.”

Before this week’s unrest, Modi had been riding high on a string of key state election victories, particularly his first in West Bengal, a politically important state that has long opposed the BJP’s Hindu nationalist policies.

The BJP appeared to have fully recovered from the coup in the 2024 elections, when the party failed to win an outright parliamentary majority and had to cobble together a large enough alliance to take power. At the same time, the much-beleaguered opposition continued to lose numerous state elections, and the BJP’s allegations of voting irregularities mostly fell on deaf ears.

But the emergence of cockroaches has galvanized not only India’s youth but also political opposition parties. Joining the bandwagon was the opposition Congress Party, which had its best week in years by mobilizing protests and shutting down parliament. The party’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, was dramatically dragged away by the police from outside Modi’s house in support of the students.

Analysts say dissent, systematically suppressed over the past 12 years, has now been remobilized as an effective tool to hold the government accountable.

“After a long time, the claim of political activism emerged in different segments of society,” Mehta said. “And once you see that agency on the street, it empowers a lot of other agents.”

The next big test of the CJP movement’s electoral results will come early next year, when India’s largest and most politically important state will hold state elections. Staying in power in Uttar Pradesh, the political heartland of the BJP, is considered vital for the party and will have significant impacts on the next general elections in 2029.

It is not yet known how the CJP plans to act politically after its stunning victory on Saturday. Leaders and supporters insist this is only a “beginning,” especially in education reform efforts. Their founder, Abhijeet Dipke, has past experience as a political party organizer but has not made his own ambitions known.

But analysts said one of the CJP’s most important effects was to reopen the rapidly closing democratic space and enable the emergence of a new kind of political opposition that echoes the voices heard on India’s streets this week.

CJP spokesperson Saurav Das said this encouraged people involved in the movement to enter politics. “This is one of our goals,” he said. “We need to increase the participation of young people in politics, because currently politics is controlled by uncles and aunts who are only interested in their own lifestyle and do not understand the needs of our generation. The answer must also be political.”