This past weekend, in a shocking show of force by the Indian government, thousands of anti-government protesters were arrested in New Delhi. Authorities have not said how many thousands were taken into custody, but they released the leaders of the protest movement, known as the Cockroach Janta Party, on Sunday. For the past several months, the government of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) have faced widespread unrest, with enormous demonstrations of young Indians demanding reforms to the country’s education system, leading to the resignation of the Minister of Education, in July.
More recently, however, the C.J.P.’s protests have centered on the government’s astonishing decision to remove more than a hundred million people from voter rolls. The government has claimed that this is intended to eliminate discrepancies and duplicates from the rolls, but it has left the process in the hands of the election commission, whose head was effectively chosen by Modi. I recently spoke by phone with Yogendra Yadav, an activist and political scientist, and the national convener of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan, a civil-society group that was established to protect Indian democracy. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether the Modi government should fear the protests, the uncertain future of Indian democracy, and the circumstances of Yadav’s own arrest at this weekend’s protests.
What has made the past several days of protests different from previous protests against the Modi government?
What is different above all is the participation of youth unaffiliated with any organization or any ideology. The sporadic protests in the past were primarily sectoral. Minority groups protested against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2020. Farmers protested in 2021. You had lower-caste and Indigenous people protesting. But all these were sectoral protests, led by organizations that were section-specific. All of them had energy. Some of them had huge mobilization, like the farmers. But none of them were cross-sectional.
This one is cross-sectional, in that it cuts across geographies. It cuts across social boundaries. And it specifically attracts the youth. It also, in many ways, cuts across political boundaries, in that the protesters are not necessarily from anti-B.J.P. backgrounds. In fact, what worries the B.J.P. most is that a very significant proportion of the protesters come from families that have supported Mr. Modi for quite some time. These are middle-class, upper-caste youths, who have been bastions for the B.J.P. This development is what worries the B.J.P. most, and this is what makes this moment so very different.
You mentioned the middle-class and upper-caste identity of many of the protesters. Is there a concern that the protests are too focussed on the concerns of people with these identities?
No. I should clarify what I said. What I said was that the protests include middle-class and upper-caste youth, who were almost entirely absent in the past. It does not mean that it’s dominated by the so-called middle-class and upper-caste protesters. In fact, it so happens that one of the key leaders of the youth protest from the Cockroach Janta Party, whose name is Abhijeet Dipke, is a Dalit, which is to say ex-Untouchable. And his being a Dalit has actually insured significant participation from the Dalit community. If you look at the participation of the youth on the streets, it includes people from the middle to the lowest rung of the lower middle class.
The reason you don’t have substantial participation from the bottom one-third of Indian society is that most of them can’t manage to come to urban areas to participate in the protests. But, because this middle-class section has been the bastion of the B.J.P., the fact that there is significant participation from this section is of enormous worry to the B.J.P. This is not to say that the other sections that have been anti-B.J.P. for quite some time are missing, they are just not the only sections now, and that makes all the difference.
The protests several months ago, many of which were focussed on reforms to the education system, seem to have melded somewhat seamlessly with these more recent protests, which are more focussed on the gigantic number of Indians who have been removed from voter rolls. Can you talk about the voter-roll issue and how it is motivating people?
One clarification, to begin with. Yes, the trigger for the protests in July was education, but, as most observers noticed, the education question was the operating concern for only a minority of the protesters. The demonstrations became a more widespread manifestation of anger and anxiety about education, employment, and general livelihood issues. So the driving force was much deeper.
Similarly, in the case of the current protests, the behavior of the chief election commissioner, the functioning of the election commission, and the disenfranchisement exercise called the special intensive revision (S.I.R.) are again acting as triggers for much wider anxiety, anger, and dissatisfaction with the regime.
I don’t imagine that everyone who’s joining it actually understands what the S.I.R. is. There is a generalized sense that elections are unfair. So it’s a broad movement about electoral integrity, of which S.I.R. happens to be a focal point.
Now, specifically on the S.I.R.: By sheer numbers, this is one of the largest-ever exercises of disenfranchisement in the history of the world. If you look at major exercises of disenfranchisement, the one example that comes to mind is the nineteenth century in the U.S., after the Civil War. But the numbers involved then were tiny compared to what’s happening in India right now.
Can you explain specifically what has been done?
This exercise, which is called S.I.R., pretends to be a routine revision of electoral rules. But, under the guise of this routine procedure, an extraordinary mechanism has been launched, which has completely inverted the structure of voter registration in India, and disenfranchised millions of voters. In recent history, India has been a country where voter registration is state-initiated. The burden is not on the individual. So, someone comes to your house, puts you on the voters list, does physical verification, and you’re on the voters list. This version of the S.I.R. shifted the onus. For the first time in the history of India, you were required to fill out a form and submit it by a certain date, within a month. If you did not, you were automatically off the voters list. This has never happened in India before. In India, if you were already on the voters list, then you continue to be on the voters list unless you are removed or unless you are dead. Now, even if you had been on the voters-list board for the last fifty years, it carried no weight. You had to register yourself afresh.
Another thing is that India is a country with very poor documentation of citizenship. The government of India has never issued anything like a citizenship certificate to any citizen, ever. Historically, electoral-roll registration was based on a presumption of citizenship. If you lived in India, you were presumed to be a citizen unless someone could give evidence that you were not.
The S.I.R. exercise completely overturned that assumption. Now the presumption is that you are not an Indian, unless you certify that you are an Indian. This is almost an invitation to disenfranchisement, especially for the poor and the undocumented.
What do we know about the people who have been kicked off the voter rolls, and why the government may have wanted them kicked off? The number of people removed has been reported at a hundred and thirty million.
That number is the current estimate, which is likely to change. It is because we know that this is the draft stage, and in each state after the draft stage, the figures go down. So, my suspicion is that it’ll come down to something like a hundred and fifteen million. Now, this is a hundred and fifteen million people who were already on the voter rolls, and whose names have been deleted. The simple figure we should look at is the number of missing voters. For the adult population of India, the government’s official estimate of the adult population is 1.03 billion. When the S.I.R. started, the number of voters was said to be 995 million. It will now be down to something like 880 million. So that is about a 150-million deficit. In 2024, for example, the deficit between those two numbers was less than ten million. So now you see it is more than ten times that, and that is the real scandal.
Now, to your question about what we know about their characteristics: Is it that all the hundred and fifty million were deliberately chosen on the basis of their politics? No, that’s not the case. We are dealing with two types of exclusions.
One is structural, and the other is political and targeted. The structural exclusions are that the moment you shift the onus for voter registration onto the people, and say that, unless you submit documents, your name is out. We know from all over the world that this will always disenfranchise the poor, the less educated, and, especially in India, migrants. These are the people who are likely to suffer the most. This does not necessarily mean that all of them are non-B.J.P. voters, but we do know that, given the over-all pattern of voting in India, the B.J.P. tends to do a little worse among the less privileged sections of society. So, if their votes are disproportionately cut out, then, on balance, it’ll work slightly to the B.J.P.’s advantage.
We also know that women are deleted more often for this structural reason. India has had a problem of low gender ratio in population, and our gender ratio for voter lists has been even lower than that. And the Election Commission has made efforts to improve it. However, the S.I.R. has reversed that process, and we know that in almost every single state where the S.I.R. has happened, the gender ratio in the electoral rolls has dropped substantially.
The second thing is targeted voter deletion. When we look at targeted deletions, which have not happened in all states, but which have happened in a few places, the deletions are excessively targeted at Muslims. Those are clearly the target of the B.J.P., as the B.J.P. does not expect to get votes from them. And so the whole point is to reduce the proportion of Muslim voters as much as you can.
Yes, and you mentioned the Citizenship Amendment Act earlier, which was an attempt by the Modi government, in a previous Modi term, to do something similar.
Yes, the intent has always been there. The C.A.A. was not actually about removing Muslims from the voters list. It was about preventing foreigners who are Muslims from coming into India.
The latest attempt by the Modi government is clearly targeting those who are in India and are on the voters list. The sharpest example of that comes from West Bengal, which recently had an assembly election that the B.J.P. was very desperate to win. Bengal is twenty-seven per cent Muslim—
We should also say that West Bengal is a state that, for a long time, has been pretty hostile to the B.J.P., right?
Yeah. So, the B.J.P. was quite desperate to get in there. And the only way it could do so was to reduce the share of the Muslim population, which, of course, it can’t. So what about throwing them off the voters list? This is what the S.I.R. was used for in Bengal, and the B.J.P. won. All kinds of deletions took place, but the most controversial was a deletion of 2.7 million voters. We know the number of Muslim voters deleted was extremely disproportionate. So clearly the point was to reduce the Muslim population, and thus the political power of Muslims in Bengal’s voters list, and the B.J.P. has succeeded at that.
Can you talk about your role in past anti-corruption protests in India?
I was an academic until 2012, working in a social-science research institute. And, in 2011 and 2012, when India had the anti-corruption movement, which in India was called the Anna Andolan movement, I supported that movement. That movement led to the creation of a political party called Aam Aadmi Party, which I joined. The Party had unusual electoral success in the city-state of Delhi. But very soon the Party, which called for the transformation of politics, started adopting the ways of existing political parties. And then some of us protested and, in a classic Stalin-style purge, we were thrown out.
Many commentators think that movement facilitated Mr. Modi’s arrival, but that is probably not historically accurate.
But the lesson that we learned from that movement is that you need broad-based unity. Getting citizens together is critical. But a certain ideological commitment to basic norms must be there, within the Party. One parallel today is that this protest is once again emerging from outside the framework of political parties, which is what usually happens in India. But its principal energy, sooner or later, will feed into transforming the political-party structures. So, in 1974, you had the J.P. movement, which led to the rise of the Janata Party, which defeated Indira Gandhi after the Emergency. This energy created by the youth movement needs to be politicized. But care has to be taken so that it doesn’t lead to diversion or distraction or delegitimation of the political process itself.
Sure. But I can remember being in Delhi in 2013 and 2014, and, looking back, the sheer amount of focus on the corruption of the Congress Party government reminded me of the focus, in the U.S., on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails during the 2016 election.
Yes, I would agree. B.J.P. very deftly utilized that energy. But it was able to utilize it because the then government was inept, and those of us who were in charge of channelling that energy against it proved to be incompetent.
I know you’ve done some work on polling, but it’s shocking to me how few polls there are in India. Still, based on the limited polling data we do have from international groups, Modi has been consistently popular over the past twelve years. I don’t have any reason to doubt that. But do we have any idea about how these protests have affected the government’s popularity? I mean, you could point to the results of recent state elections, but it seems like the state elections can’t entirely be trusted either.
All I have are guesses and no more. As someone who did polling for twenty years, I made sure I spent time on the street, speaking to ordinary people, in addition to randomized scientific surveys. Today, we don’t have those polls, but I am still on the ground and gathering a sense of how people feel. So, based on that, I can see that this has definitely, definitely led to some very serious erosion in the B.J.P.’s popularity, as well as Mr. Modi’s personal popularity, and every action of the B.J.P. confirms that. The B.J.P. definitely has access to decent-quality survey data. They know that support is eroding. This is why they are taking the kind of steps that they are taking. Do we have some data to back it up? Unfortunately not. I mean, most of the opinion polls are focussed only on elections.
It seems like what you are saying is that you know that the B.J.P. is doing polling privately, and that some of the moves they’ve made in the last few months, like firing the education minister, signal their concern.
Yes. And then there is an official shift by the government toward social-media outreach. The Prime Minister had a cabinet meeting and asked all the cabinet ministers to please focus on social media. This was reported in the newspapers. Also, look at the government’s response to what happened yesterday in the city of Delhi. You don’t mobilize the entire paramilitary force of the country on the streets of Delhi unless you know that this particular protest is very, very popular, and unless you are really scared that hundreds of thousands of people are likely to descend. What they did yesterday was extraordinary by any stretch. So these are signs of a panic-stricken regime, which knows it is losing popularity.
You were on the ground in Delhi on Saturday. Can you just talk briefly about what happened?
There was no formal curfew, but it was a curfew-like situation. If the police spotted three young people walking, they would just grab them, put them in a police van, and drive away. I was there with this person called Neha Bora, who has emerged as a youth icon, and is from a left-wing student organization, as well as Prashant Bhushan, a leading anti-corruption activist and lawyer. We gathered suddenly, and before the police could reach us, we all managed to start walking. There was one barricade, and the students threw it off. The second barricade they dodged. And so we managed to walk about two kilometres in about forty-five minutes or maybe an hour before we were finally blocked by a massive barricade.
We sat down there, protested there, and the police very brutally picked us up one by one. I was one of them. I was in the middle of the crowd. Suddenly, four police officers started dragging me. And I asked them, Why? Obviously, they had no answer. They dragged me, pulled me, and shoved me into a bus, only to realize that they had shoved me into the wrong bus. Then they pulled me out of the bus, and they shoved me into a police van. And that’s not very different from what happened to thousands and thousands of protesters. Then, at 9 P.M., I was driven to the remotest corner of Delhi and released without any formal arrest, without any formal charge, without being told why I was released.
I want to end by asking you about your feeling that the government is responding in such a way in part because they may be scared. The more disquieting thought, I think, is that they might be responding this way—and by “they” I’m thinking of the Prime Minister, and also of Amit Shah, the Minister of Home Affairs, who would be overseeing all this— because this is who they are. And they like responding this way because they don’t like seeing opposition to them, and they like arresting people.
Well, they are authoritarian by their temperament, yes. They don’t like any dissent, yes. But the proportionality of it, or the disproportionality of it, is astonishing, even by their own standards. And, to my mind, this has to do with the fact that the protests concern an institution which is key to their continuation in power.
There is this Indian fable of a king whose heart resided in a parrot. This meant that no matter what you did to kill the king, the king would be unaffected, because his life actually resided in the parrot. That’s a fable being talked about in India again and again. The election commission happens to be that parrot. And anything that touches the parrot is touching the king. ♦