New Delhi, India – Blood spots on the walls, overturned barricades, shattered mirrors and sandals strewn across the road. A scarf here, broken glasses and a torn shirt there lie as remnants of the chaos that took over the Indian capital.
The heart of New Delhi – Parliament Street and Connaught Place, a colonial-era square – bears the imprint of Monday’s police crackdown on thousands of protesters, most of them students, who had shut down the capital, demanding that Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign.
A swarm of protesters reached parliament’s doorstep before retreating as the police tear-gassed them. More than 100 students were injured.
“I still cannot believe my eyes that I’m in Delhi,” said Anshul Dev, an 18-year-old who grew up in the capital. “Part of it is because tear gas still stings,” he added, bursting into laughter with his group of friends. One of them had both legs bandaged.
“This government, whom our elders voted to power, is treating us like terrorists and criminals,” Dev said. “This is our country, and we are reclaiming it from their hateful politics. We are here to break the spell.”
Anger among India’s youth, the world’s largest Gen Z cohort, has been simmering for the past two months over a string of compromised entrance exams that affected millions of students. In some cases, exam papers were leaked; in others, students who sought copies of their answer scripts found that they had been wrongly graded. More than 20 students died by suicide, many citing the paper leaks.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not addressed the protests, even as he appeared smiling on Monday in parliament, barely metres away from demonstrators at one point.
Analysts said the student protests face formidable obstacles before they can extract concessions from Modi’s government. Yet the protests, the government’s refusal to hold any of its own accountable and the crackdown have also embellished a charge that the prime minister has long faced from critics and opposition parties – that although he is elected democratically, he behaves like an autocrat.
‘Protests will continue’
In the dark on Monday night, Abhijeet Dipke – the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a political pressure group that called the march – returned to a torn-down stage at the CJP’s main protest site near Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory that is now an important location for protests.
“This barbaric Delhi police has beaten up our students and comrades. We are heartbroken,” he said, addressing about 2,000 protesters who stayed back after the crackdown. “We will continue to resist and demand accountability from the government. We will not back down until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.”
Dipke told the protesters that the Delhi police “brutally cracked down to crush our hopes” that Pradhan would resign. “It was only our first call to march,” he said. “There will be more. Do not lose hope.”
Volunteers began to pick up rubbish, tie a tent together and sweep the road at the Jantar Mantar site. This is where more than 100 protesters from student unions have been sleeping for nearly a month to join Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent activist, on a hunger strike to seek the minister’s resignation.
The police also rampaged through these student unions’ tarpaulin tents and belongings on Monday.
The movement gained momentum last week after the police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site and restricted him to a government-run hospital, where he remains. His family and the CJP have called it “illegal detention”, but the Delhi High Court has refused immediate relief.
Wangchuk, 59, broke his hunger strike before the march on Monday; however, later he said he would be at it again after “seeing the brutality” against “peacefully protesting students”.
The Delhi police have filed at least five criminal cases against protesters related to violence, stone-throwing and vandalism during the march.
Meeting with government a ‘waste of time’
Before the march, CJP leaders said the government reached out for talks.
As thousands of demonstrators assembled in New Delhi, two CJP spokespeople met JP Nadda, India’s health minister, to convey the movement’s three demands: Pradhan’s immediate resignation, Wangchuk’s discharge from hospital and compensation of nearly $105,000 for the families of those students who died by suicide.
However, they were disillusioned by sunset. “It was a waste of our time,” said Ashutosh Ranka, a CJP spokesperson. “We were made to wait for four hours, and the minister met us for 10 minutes.”
Nadda said he met with the spokespeople “in a cordial atmosphere”, adding that he “requested all the protesters to end their sit-in and assist the administration in restoring normalcy”.
Some students have been calling for the decentralisation of the protests, so they could move beyond the CJP to demand accountability from the government.
And political analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera said maintaining the credibility of the CJP’s leadership remains one of the biggest immediate hurdles for the movement in the face of an unprecedented crowd turnout for the march.
Confronting a ‘strong man’
Since the police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site, the movement and demonstrators have called on Modi to resign. Slogans targeting the prime minister reverberated through central New Delhi on Monday.
The large number of protesters “is itself a big challenge to the prime minister”, said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an author and Modi biographer.
As of now, he told Al Jazeera, “Modi has decided to continue with his instinctive response of not giving any concessions to protesters and continuing to project himself as a strong man with completely unshakeable will.”
The biographer added that the prime minister, who has been in power since 2014, “does not care before crushing a protest or using brute force until it cuts through his voting constituencies”.
“They will go by their gut response of a crackdown. Modi would not want to emerge from this with a bloody nose,” he added, “despite a lot of anger among youth, which shows the undercurrent of anti-incumbency.”
The simmering anger found a vent as Gen Z rallied behind a joke, the Cockroach Janta Party, after India’s chief justice equated government critics and unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites”.
Memes, online rants and students taking photos in front of police have flooded the internet in India, where they expressed anguish and took digs at the police crackdown.
Meghnad S, a YouTuber, was among the thousand-strong crowd in front of the Indian Parliament on Monday.
“It was insanity, and the crowd was really riled up due to police actions. It was cruel,” he told Al Jazeera from the protest site on Monday night. “But movements are always messy. This is very difficult to control. We are all cockroaches, after all. And we are still swarming here.”
By Tuesday morning, the crowd had packed the site yet again. The cockroaches had returned.
