In the end, it was not the arrests and police repression that damaged the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest last week; it was the call for regime change. First, it came in murmurings from sundry activists who said that the real goal of the protests was to topple the Modi government. Then it came from Rahul Gandhi, who, as he often does, ended up helping the government instead of harming it. Exultant at the huge crowds that marched with him to the Supreme Court, he admitted loftily from his high perch on an open truck that after Gyanesh Kumar was forced out of office, it would be the turn for Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. He did not exactly say regime change, but what else is it?
Soon after, Neha Bora, the heroine of last week’s protests, confirmed that it was from Bangladesh that she was inspired to use mobocracy to bring about regime change. Her political ideology is Marxist, which is not an ideology that fits well with electoral democracy, but she seems not to have noticed yet that India is not Bangladesh. Our democracy has its flaws, but elections have happened regularly, except during the Emergency. Governments can only be changed after general elections are won or lost. If people like Ms Bora were paid to sabotage the Cockroach Janta Party, they could not have done a better job. It is time for the cockroach leaders to take back control of the movement’s levers, or it will go steadily off the rails.
As someone who said early on that the Cockroach Janta Party represented something new and interesting, I admit this week to being troubled by the directionless path it is taking. After that first outing in Jantar Mantar that forced the education minister’s resignation, they continued with their crusade to improve our education system. They wandered about rural India making reels of schools without classrooms and sometimes classrooms without roofs. They showed the horrendous condition of school toilets in their reels, and when they posted them on social media, I was among those who applauded.
Then came this newspaper’s expose of the Chief Election Commissioner’s dictatorial ways, and the cockroaches decided that this would be their new cause. So far so good. There was a rally in Mumbai filled with songs and speeches, and thousands of people came. They were mostly young people with a sprinkling of oldies like me. All was well that ended well. Then came the decision to come back to Jantar Mantar to demand that the man they irreverently call ‘Gyanu’ be asked to resign. This is unlikely now, and it may be time for the cockroaches to think seriously about what they are doing and plan more carefully what happens next.
Meanwhile, when the cockroaches go home to celebrate Dussehra and Diwali, we must hope that the Prime Minister finds time to introspect about why he has failed so spectacularly to get his message through to young Indians. He has made a big show of switching to Instagram to post his own reels, but instead of talking to the young people who are defying him, he lectures them on good manners and Indian culture. Why is it so hard for him to invite a delegation of cockroaches for a serious discussion about their problems?
If he is listening to the statements of his party spokesmen about anarchists and the ‘foreign hand’, he could easily be fooled into believing the false narrative that they are trying to propagate. The young people who came out to protest about the malfunctioning of the NEET examination were not anarchists. Just angry young people fed up with the mess in the education system. It is the same young people who are now protesting about the malfunctioning of the Election Commission, as revealed in that excellent investigative story in this newspaper.
If the Prime Minister was not so bent on preserving his strongman image, he would have immediately asked the chief election commissioner to resign, pending an inquiry. But judging from his government’s response to last week’s protests, it seems clear that he wants to be a strongman. I arrived in Delhi from Mumbai on the same day that Abhijeet Dipke and his two lieutenants did and was astounded by the fortifications and the thousands of policemen and paramilitaries deployed.
It would have been wiser to let the protests go ahead at Jantar Mantar, and with a deadline for when they would have to end. It would have been wiser not to arrest the cockroach leaders in full view of an aircraft filled with ordinary passengers, but this is what his government did. It would have been wise not to send Dipke’s two lieutenants to Tihar jail for five days for the ‘crime’ of jumping a barricade and raising the Indian flag in Jantar Mantar, but this is not what happened.
Paranoid hysteria, on the part of governments, is usually seen when they feel insecure and confused. Is this what is happening? Whatever the reason, it is important for the Prime Minister to pay attention to the thousands of people who come out to join any protest organised by the Cockroach Janta Party. Last week, the Congress Party also managed to get the crowds out, in vast numbers. They come out because there is real anger rising to the surface.
Media365
