Can India’s ‘cockroach’ movement oust Modi’s election chief?

New Delhi, India – Central parts of the Indian capital turned into a ghost town on Friday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s police detained hundreds of protesters, as the ‘cockroach’ movement that ousted the country’s education minister this past summer joined opposition parties in demanding the resignation of India’s elections chief.

The government shut down metro stations leading to central Delhi and suspended internet services. Heavily deployed government forces blocked all entries to Parliament Street and the Jantar Mantar protest strip – the stage of the youth movement that forced out Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan just two months ago.

Saurav Yadav, a 24-year-old musician from Gwalior, a city in central India nearly 335km (210 miles) from New Delhi, took an overnight bus to join the protest, called by the cockroach movement and joined by a spectrum of opposition parties and unions.

But as Yadav approached the site – his first time in the Indian capital – he was dragged away by two policemen, even as he held the tricolour national flag in his hands. “This government is managing the elections. Just imagine, the only thing that gives them power is managed!” Yadav told Al Jazeera, sitting startled in the back of a police van.

“We are just cosplaying democracy,” he said, sweating profusely. “We cannot keep pretending this.”

The cockroach movement is taking the street protests to several Indian cities in the coming days, including in the country’s financial capital, Mumbai, later on Friday. But youth protest leaders, emboldened by their success against the education minister, face a new set of challenges as they set their sights on the Modi government’s most politically prized bureaucrat.

‘Gyanesh Kumar needs to go’

Last week, India was shaken by new revelations showing divisions within the supposedly autonomous body that is in charge of conducting its elections over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people.

India’s Election Commission chief, Gyanesh Kumar, frequently overruled concerns raised by the two other election commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database, an investigation by the Indian Express reported.

The commission has not refuted the investigation, but indicated, since the revelations, that it was acting to address concerns raised by the other two election commissioners.

The revelations came after a months-long struggle by India’s opposition parties to bring what they have described as the “sabotaging” conduct of the election commission to the fore, which they say is dictated by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its electoral benefit.

Since June last year, the commission has been revising and updating the voters list statewide. It has struck off more than 130 million names during the exercise since then, which the critics say targeted economically weaker sections, minorities and other vulnerable groups in Indian society disproportionately.

The cockroach movement leaders moved fast to tap into the growing calls for Kumar’s resignation, terming it the “last call to save democracy”.

The leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, has called for the election chief to be tried for treason against India.

N Sai Balaji, a senior leader of All India Students’ Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation that was at the centre of youth protests earlier this year, said that “people have been suspecting the election commission for a long time – and different people have been flagging a range of issues”.

“We do not need to build a movement this time. We just need to come out on the streets, and there will be no opposition to the central demand: Gyanesh Kumar needs to go,” Balaji told Al Jazeera.

The success of the youth protests that ousted the education minister was credited to the unifying platform of education in India’s otherwise deeply divided society. “Then this is perhaps the most secular issue in India,” said Balaji. “Who is a bureaucrat to decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t?”

Balaji said that there is “a unanimous understanding across the opposition’s spectrum that the elections are managed and staged.” If Kumar stays as the chief, he said, “no one will trust any electoral outcome in the so-called world’s largest democracy.”

‘Bigger blow: Bureaucrat of choice’

Kumar, India’s 62-year-old election chief, is a trusted lieutenant of PM Modi, and his career has intersected with several of the government’s most consequential and controversial decisions.

Currently, Kumar is spearheading the highly contested revision of the voters’ list.

In 2016, he was tapped as a joint secretary in the Home Ministry’s Kashmir division, which oversees the Indian-administered Kashmir. Three years later, Kumar was entrusted with drafting the legislation that sliced the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two federally controlled territories, stripping the contested region of special rights in August 2019, as the Modi government clamped down on the region with a months-long curfew and a communication blackout.

Within a few months, Kumar was moved to the Modi government’s next flagship project: the construction of a controversial Ram Temple.

On December 6, 1992, a far-right Hindu mob tore down the 16th-century Babri Mosque, triggering religious riots across the country that killed over 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. After years of legal battles, the top court awarded the site to Hindus. Kumar led the team overseeing implementation of the Supreme Court’s verdict, including the formation of a trust tasked with managing the new temple that has now come up at the site.

“Gyanesh Kumar has been the bureaucrat of choice to get these things done for the ruling government. If he is forced out, it is going to be a much bigger blow for the Modi government,” said Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi.

“The cost of losing Kumar would be higher: it would be a much bigger signal to the larger ecosystem if you can’t protect a man like that,” Sircar added.

Asim Ali, a political analyst in New Delhi, said he doesn’t expect the government to cave in. “Kumar’s resignation would be seen as a fatal admission of guilt, and it would undermine the legitimacy of elections, and hence their power,” he told Al Jazeera.

Taking a jibe at Kumar, India’s opposition leader Gandhi called on him to become a state witness, saying PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah would eventually face prosecution for “treason”.

‘Experienced protest leaders’

The swift crackdown on protesters on Friday suggests the Modi government will not let the protest movement take charge of Jantar Mantar this time around, say analysts.

“Lessons that the government learned from earlier youth protests are in terms of strategy,” said Sircar, adding that the Modi government would want to avoid a confrontation with protesters. “They do not want any visuals like the last time. The goal will be to prevent any kind of assembly from an earlier stage.”

On July 20, the cockroach movement staged a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, then called on thousands of protesters to march peacefully towards Parliament. They were met with police brutality, leaving more than 100 students injured.

The visuals then galvanised a wider Gen Z uprising in the national capital, with protesters choking key streets in central Delhi, and eventually forcing the removal of the education minister.

But Ali, the political analyst warned that the protest leaders are more experienced now. The cockroach movement, which grew into the Gen Z uprising, was born out of a casual joke on X after the chief justice of India equated unemployed youth to “cockroaches”.

None of the central leaders had experience of organising a mass movement at the time. Now, they are returning to the streets “as experienced protest leaders, who have developed a following.”

“There are no assured brakes,” Ali said. “And that makes this situation more explosive.”