India’s ‘million mutinies’ are puncturing Modi’s aura of invincibility

This October, India is a country where a million mutinies are gathering force.

India’s “cockroaches” — supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) — are back on the streets, marking Mahatma Gandhi’s 157th birth anniversary with non-violent disobedience. Once again, the atmosphere was carnival-like: plenty of students; a phalanx of marching, fist-waving women, arm-in-arm with young men, punching the air and shouting: “Gyanu, it’s done, bro”.

Surreally enough, they already talk of “Gyanu” — India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar — in the past tense. What will follow — what system or person — is a question that has been put on hold. That’s for later. For now, the protestors are unified with a single, concentrated message: they want Kumar, accused of manipulating voter rolls in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, to resign.

Young women and queer students have taken to the streets over women’s safety in Delhi after a 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped in Aastha Kunj Park in southeast Delhi by three men who posed as police officers. Concurrently in Mumbai, the parents of Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student at IIT Bombay, have launched an indefinite hunger strike after he died by suicide earlier this month. They are demanding the arrest of his teachers and alleging severe caste-based harassment. In Pune, Maharashtra Public Service Commission aspirants are on the streets demanding the chairman’s resignation over a range of concerns about alleged examination irregularities, transparency issues and uncertainty surrounding examination results.

The rest of India — those not out on the streets — is umbilically tethered to a computer or phone screen, riding alternating currents of buoyancy, pessimism, doubt and rage.

The sudden convergence of these volatile protests has effectively caught the Modi government in a pincer movement of domestic unrest. The overlapping waves of unrest represent a dangerous shift in the national mood, effectively uniting a fragmented Gen Z demographic against the Centre, re-energising and bringing together the opposition as a national force, and transforming disparate grievances into a cohesive, highly visible movement that the government can no longer contain.

Besides, central Delhi and parts of Mumbai are locked down under heavy security — on Gandhi Jayanti, no less — compounding the crisis of optics. Modi no longer provides stable governance. At this point, he rules not by legitimacy but by brute force and fear — of losing power and the legal reckoning that might follow once power is lost. For much of Modi’s political history, hierarchy has carried its own justification. His foundational axiom is that voters work for him and not the other way around. When he was popular, it worked. He could get us to queue in front of ATMs; lock us down without food, money, or scientific justification; abrogate Kashmir’s special constitutional status and beat up farmers and students.

When he was no longer popular, with the Election Commissioner — protected by lifelong immunity — tilting the system in his favour, he could dispense with popularity as well as a popular mandate altogether. But he no longer has the luxury of power without consequence. For three terms he wielded the combined power of popular legitimacy and institutional control. That era has ended. He no longer has a mandate like the one he had in 2014, and no institution — media, parliament, election commission or judiciary — is left to absorb the shock on his behalf.

The protests are disparate, but their underlying demand is strikingly similar: power comes with responsibility. The Chief Election Commissioner, the upper-caste teachers at IIT Bombay and the gang rapists who posed as cops are all being pulled into the same reckoning.

After the CJP’s first victory in July — which culminated in the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan — Modi retreated into his office, with some of his old swagger missing. Pierced by the relentless ridicule of Instagram reels and memes, the giant balloon that is Modi’s self-esteem is leaking from a thousand cuts. History will note that the first cracks in his powerful regime appeared not with an electoral defeat but when ordinary students stopped believing that nothing can be done.

This new wave of protests, the second in three months, challenges the inevitability of Modi.

The nationwide protests will continue all through October. Besides the “cockroaches”, India’s opposition parties will organise five big rallies around the nation. Besides the demand for Kumar’s resignation, the parties want a return to ballot papers, rather than Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), arguing that electronic voting has made the recording and counting of votes vulnerable to manipulation. Leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, has accused Kumar of high treason and warned of consequences once he is removed from the post.

Modi, meanwhile, has no plans to yield any of his authority.

He began the day at Gandhi’s samadhi, laying flowers before the apostle of non-violence while deploying paramilitary cordons and anti-riot vehicles across Delhi and Mumbai to stop protestors from gathering. Roads leading to Jantar Mantar in New Delhi — the designated protest site — are barricaded. The few who get past the blockades are being detained by police. The irony is almost too neat to be accidental. There were mass detentions on Friday. Fresh detentions on Saturday. Despite repeated detentions, protestors keep returning to the sites, pressing their demands.

Modi has, in fact, revived some of the very instruments of repression that Gandhi spent his political life resisting: restrictions on public assembly, curfews, preventive detention and the policing of dissent. The more precarious his hold on power, the more nakedly he reaches for brute force.

If there’s anything Gandhi taught, it was the limits of power and force.

Over the coming days, Modi may well succeed in emptying the streets, imprisoning protesters, confiscating placards and silencing dissent. What he will not be able to do, at least not indefinitely, is compel Indian voters to believe that power is legitimate simply because it is powerful.

In an exhausted democracy like India’s — with its institutions crumbling under the weight of unchecked power — the sight of Indians rising in a million mutinies is one of the more beautiful things I have seen in my life. The month of agitations is going to be messy, irreverent and noisy. The spectacle will also invite romanticism. There will be a temptation, when looking at this young movement with such extraordinary visual energy, to dwell on its purity, youthful exuberance, or incandescent rage.

It would be a mistake.

India’s new protest culture should neither be romanticised nor categorised in some tight box. It is something more, something rare: it is unfinished.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.