India's Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) may have anticipated pushback from the government after its first round of protests in July, but the scale of barricading and detentions that greeted its leaders in a fortress-like New Delhi on October 10 was unlike anything they had anticipated. The CJP began as a satirical online movement after the chief justice of India, Surya Kant, referred to unemployed young people as "cockroaches" in an offhand remark. The name is an ironic riff on the name of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
In its latest round of agitation, they are demanding the resignation of the country's controversy-hit Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, after more than 130 million names were reportedly removed from electoral rolls nationwide. You can read more about the controversy here. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke, accompanied by co-conveners Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, was detained from the plane in which he landed in the national capital on Saturday.
Meanwhile, police were stationed outside the homes of several other faces associated with the movement, including social media personality Dhruv Rathee, who has nearly 20 million followers on Instagram. In central Delhi, buses were loaded with protesters, many of whom were taken to far-flung centers, where they were kept for hours. According to local media, at least 3,000 people were detained across the city.
The protests come as Modi marks 25 uninterrupted years leading elected governments, first in Gujarat state as chief minister and then as prime minister of India. Ironically, "this celebration has happened at the time when he's politically at his weakest," Delhi-based writer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay told DW. Mukhopadhyay is the author of Modi's 2013 biography, "Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times." He contrasted the government's current response with its approach in July, when thousands of young protesters took to the streets to demand the resignation of Modi's education minister over repeated exam paper leaks.
At the time, authorities had used batons, detentions and pellets to disperse the crowds gathered in central Delhi, after they had been on the streets for days. However, this time, authorities shifted to mass security deployments and preemptive action on a large scale. This included notices to those associated with earlier protests, transport cuts, the internet cutoff and airport arrests.
"The government has learned from its previous experience. They didn't allow people to sit at Jantar Mantar for any length of time, so it couldn't balloon," Pearl Pandya, senior analyst for Asia at global monitor ACLED, told DW. "What's worrying is whether this becomes a playbook for the future — that you are not allowed to protest in the first place," she added, referring to the government's decision to remove the 18th-century observatory Jantar Mantar in central Delhi from the list of designated protest sites.
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