Roaches reborn win big in India

Birthed as satire and nourished by widespread frustration with recent exam scandals, India’s Cockroach Janta [sic] Party (CJP) was going through the motions a month ago. A much-hyped rally in the first week of June turned out to be a damp squib. Even as the CJP continued to hold its protest in Delhi and, occasionally, in other Indian cities, this rarely drew more than a few hundred protestors at a time. The overall impression was unmistakable. India’s roach revolt had fizzled out, as I concluded (Opens in new window) in The Interpreter at the end of June.

Not so fast, events of the past week have shown.

On 20 July, around 50,000 people (Opens in new window) gathered in Delhi in response to a CJP call for a march to the parliament. Caught completely off-guard, the police and paramilitary forces panicked, resulting in intense clashes. By the middle of the week amid searing public anger, security services were warning about potential violence (Opens in new window), as thousands continued to flock to Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, where the CJP had set camp. Worryingly, there were indications that other, extremely disruptive (Opens in new window), pressure groups were making common cause (Opens in new window) with the roaches. Even after the Modi government rushed to pacify the public (Opens in new window), there were no signs of let up.

Finally, in a sharp turnaround, on Saturday the government gave in to the CJP’s core demand: the resignation (Opens in new window) of education minister and BJP heavyweight Dharmendra Pradhan, who had, less than a month ago, described the CJP as a “B-team of terrorists (Opens in new window)”. It also made extensive additional commitments in a joint presser (Opens in new window) with two roach representatives, which broke with normal government practice.

The twists and turns over the past two months drive home two broad points. First, amorphous, organic movements can change shape rapidly as they co-evolve with public perceptions and the personalities of those involved. Second, governments can, equally quickly, dispense with their best judgements while being completely unprepared for what that could entail. Under such conditions, analytical prognosis becomes a fool’s errand.

On 28 June, the Ladakhi activist Sonam Wangchuk, who termed himself an “honorary cockroach (Opens in new window)”, went on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar. Combined with his longstanding commitment to educational reforms – something Pradhan himself had lauded (Opens in new window) in the past – this made for potent optics.

As days turned to weeks, Wangchuk’s fast did what no CJP meme could. The roaches became mainstream. In the face of a man who had not eaten for weeks laying on a simple mattress outdoors in Delhi’s punishing heat, it was hard to dismiss the CJP as a slacktivist stunt. Even as crowd sizes remained relatively modest, prominent voices started throwing their weight behind Wangchuk – and, by association – the CJP.

None of this was lost on the Modi government. After all, it was activist Anna Hazare’s hunger strikes in 2011 (Opens in new window) that had propelled a massive anti-corruption movement against the backdrop of youth protests around the world that year.

As Wangchuk’s health visibly deteriorated, the police shifted him to a government-run hospital on 18 July. The way it did so – surreptitiously (Opens in new window) and in the dead of the night – led to one of the largest mass mobilisations in Delhi’s recent history two days later.

The police were acting on the basis of a court order (Opens in new window) to ensure Wangchuk’s physical well-being. The cloak-and-dagger undoubtedly was to prevent a potentially violent clash with CJP supporters. Nevertheless, the CJP was quick to depict (Opens in new window) Wangchuk’s enforced hospitalisation as detention by other means.

It didn’t help that for a full 48 hours the Modi government struggled to get ahead of the story, as news emerged that the police and other security agencies were maintaining tight control (Opens in new window) over Wangchuk’s interaction with the outside world. As reams of (Opens in new window) reporting (Opens in new window) show, for a significant chunk of the protestors, much more than the CJP, it was Wangchuk’s fast and treatment that became the rallying cause.

The irony is unmistakable. After all, it was the same centrally-controlled Delhi police that had deftly side-stepped a potential flashpoint on 6 June when the CJP had held its first rally in Delhi by essentially facilitating it (Opens in new window), followed by marked softening (Opens in new window) of the BJP’s tone.

Even after removing Wangchuk, the government could have softly telegraphed its rationale, say, through a tweet expressing concern for Wangchuk’s health (as Modi eventually did (Opens in new window), on Friday after Wangchuk ended his fast). Instead, it manifestly misread the public mood and misjudged the extent of damage its inability to shape the narrative did.

Just why the security forces found themselves overwhelmed will be debated for some time to come. Was it because they lacked intelligence (Opens in new window) about crowd sizes ahead of the 20 July march? Or was it because they failed to adequately prepare (Opens in new window) for them? Either way, their responses led to a cascading effect that played out for days to come. It saw a paramilitary force use pellet guns (Opens in new window) for the first time outside Kashmir. Last week also witnessed the longest mobile internet shutdown (Opens in new window) in Delhi’s history.

At the end, it boiled down to either a large-scale preventive crackdown over the weekend to stave off imminent bloodshed or Pradhan’s resignation. The government sensibly chose the latter.