Media365
He stood atop a police barricade, the Tricolour in hand, as opposition MPs poured onto the street around him. That image of Rahul Gandhi was more than a photo-op. It was the latest act of defiance in a country where something is shifting. Fear of the powerful is giving way to something more elemental. Today, there is freedom from fear.
The pushback has begun. The Opposition is back at the barricades, on the streets, among the people, reclaiming the public square. We are marching as one. We are holding firm against the massed police force of the Modi regime. We are raising our voices for every citizen forced to run from pillar to post just to secure the most precious right the Constitution promises: The right to vote.
Opposition protests against the Election Commission and the Special Intensive Revision are not new. But this one is different because it is not an isolated episodic event; it’s part of a process.
Today’s protests come on the back of an electrifying public agitation that forced out the education minister. Before this, courageous students across India took to the streets over exam irregularities. There has been an Indian Express investigation exposing unilateral decision-making at the top of the Election Commission.
Resistance rarely arrives as a single thunderclap. It accumulates. A report from a newspaper of courage raises questions. Citizens carry them forward. A court asks what process was followed. Each act looks small beside the might of the state. But each act advances democracy’s central demand: Power must be accountable to the people.
LoP Rahul Gandhi climbs barricades during a protest in New Delhi for the removal of CEC Gyanesh Kumar on October 6. (Express photo by Abhinav Saha)
Today judges, sitting and retired, are speaking up for the fundamental right to vote. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan warned that any process leading to wholesale disenfranchisement violates the Constitution. Former Supreme Court judge Rohinton Nariman, citing the Express investigation, said the right to vote was in great peril.
Civil-society leaders and former officials have served what they call a “people’s impeachment” notice on the Chief Election Commissioner, setting out charges and seeking Gyanesh Kumar’s removal. The Election Commission, after all, is not a department of government. Its authority rests entirely on public trust. Questioning how voter rolls are revised is not an attack on the institution. It is a defence of the people.
Today, youthful Instagrammers are going where the mainstream media does not dare — mocking the mighty, one post at a time. In Mumbai, hundreds turned out at a Cockroach Janta Party rally to demand Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. In Delhi, a civil-society protest met barricades and police lathis; nearly 500 people were detained trying to reach Jantar Mantar.
On its own, each of these might be dismissed. Together, they reveal something unmistakable: Indian democracy is getting its voice back. Fear is gone. It’s the end of fear.
The Narendra Modi regime has ruled by fear for the past 12 years. Central agencies have been weaponised, and ED cases used as a tool to break opponents. Critics have been vilified by name. News channels have fallen to hostile takeovers by billionaire friends of the government. The judiciary, with honourable exceptions, has largely fallen in line. Parliament has been reduced to a notice board, with laws rammed through without debate. What was the result of all this? The result was a climate of fear: Calculated, pervasive, paralysing fear.
But that fear is now lifting. Slowly, unevenly, but unmistakably, the public square is coming back to life.
The battle is far from won. Institutions have been so badly compromised that restoring them will take years. Large sections of the media remain megaphones for the government and will keep denying the Opposition its due space. Judges remain reluctant to strike down constitutional illegalities. Consider how the CEC and Election Commissioners have been shielded from legal action for their decisions in office, a protection that outlasts their tenure. The police are still being dreadfully misused in states like Bengal and Assam to persecute the Opposition, and boundless money power is being used to engineer defections. Religious identity politics and the cult of the strongman still exert their own power to captivate.
But despite the challenges, we are almost at that moment that Ramdhari Singh Dinkar once summoned: “Singhasan khali karo ki janta aati hai.” The throne may just be trembling. Above all, there is hope. And when hope meets freedom from fear, democracy begins to stir and to whisper: Hum zinda hain. We are still alive, and we are not afraid.
The writer is MP, Rajya Sabha, All India Trinamool Congress
