The far-right government in India led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been increasingly repressive and anti-democratic over recent months. Commentators are asking if the country is in the grip of an ‘undeclared Emergency’, a reference to the 1975-77 period of ‘Emergency rule’ by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in which activists and trade unionists were simply rounded up and jailed.
The current repression is a response to the student and youth protests that erupted in the capital, New Delhi, in late July. They were sparked by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a satirical movement that began on social media a couple of months earlier. The scale and intensity of the protests surprised the regime, as did the mocking anti-Modi tenor of popular chants. While the protest demand was for the resignation of the education minister over exam leaks, the protesters were motivated by visceral opposition to Modi, who has ruled since 2014. The police lashed out using the sort of force that they typically use in repressed regions like Kashmir. Police fired pellet guns, used nail-studded batons and sexually assaulted women protesters.
Despite the repression, tens of thousands mobilised daily for five days—high school and university students, middle-class and working-class youth. Not only in Delhi, but in dozens of cities around the country. Alongside clips of police brutality circulating on social media, there are clips of youth chasing police off the streets with their sheer numbers and bravado. There are clips of cheeky middle-class youth approaching police who are away from the heat of the action to ask mocking questions like “Dear Mr. Officer, are you planning to tear gas protesters today?” The government is tracking down incriminating and embarrassing recordings of those events and asking social media platforms to remove them.
Public opinion has turned strongly against Modi’s repression. Among the Hindi-speaking, middle-class, upper-caste Hindus who have been the most secure vote base of the BJP, parents now saw their own children being beaten—just for demanding a fair opportunity in college exams! Ultimately, the administration conceded the protest demand to sack the education minister, a humiliating defeat for Modi. It gave the lie to the “unstoppable strongman” image of him so carefully crafted by pro-Modi big media.
Less than three months after the July protests, a new protest movement gripped the nation. It demands the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, who has been highly partisan to Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and, according to some parties, rigged state elections in Bihar (May 2025) and West Bengal (April 2026). In West Bengal, the BJP won for the first time due in part to the chief election commissioner disqualifying millions of names from the eligible voters list. Deletions disproportionately targeted Muslims, who are an ideological enemy of Hindu nationalists, and who were also an important vote base of the party the BJP displaced—the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
Following a late September expose, which revealed that the chief election commissioner had overruled the protestations of even his fellow election commissioners, the CJP and left student groups took up vote-rigging as a national campaign to channel the energy from the July student movement. Demands for the chief election commissioner to resign have been taken up by all opponents of the BJP.
When a large protest was called for 10 October, the state responded by locking down New Delhi. Around 40,000 paramilitary and police laid siege to a sizeable area around the “designated protest site” of Jantar Mantar in the centre of the city. They blocked roads and shut down local internet mobile services (India is among the worst states for this). They closed over 40 metro train stations in Delhi and stopped over 200 inter-city trains from reaching Delhi. They threatened activists in their homes on the night before the march, this coming on top of regular arbitrary detention of prominent leaders of the protest movement (from the CJP and the left parties). Undeterred, protestors appeared in their tens of thousands and were again met with batons and tear gas, and thousands were detained.
Sizeable protests have continued sporadically since 10 October, some called by the CJP or student organizations of the left, others by major opposition parties. The cause has received expressions of support from the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (United Farmers’ Front), an umbrella organization of farmers’ unions that emerged in 2020 in opposition to Modi’s Farm Laws, as well as from trade union federations.
Many see the 10 October crackdown in Delhi as a sign that the Modi regime fears being toppled. Speculation is rife that India will have its own version of the “Gen Z” protests that ousted governments in neighbouring Nepal (2025), Bangladesh (2024) and Sri Lanka (2022). BJP politicians denounce the protests as a plot by foreign powers to destabilise Indian society and bring about regime change.
The Modi administration appears backed into a corner. To sack the election commissioner would be tantamount to accepting that several state elections over the past year have been rigged.
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What explains the rage of students and youth? Among young college graduates, unemployment is at 40 percent. The shrinking size of the public sector means there are fewer jobs for graduates. Promises of jobs in corporate management or in professional and white-collar careers in a handful of headline-grabbing sectors like IT have turned out to be a pipe dream for most, given the large pool of unemployed graduates.
College graduates are not outliers in the wider economy. Since 2014, when the Modi government took power, it has marketed India as a fast-growing economy with jobs for all and rising incomes for the masses. Yet growing numbers of youth feel that reality does not match state propaganda. Not just young people. The middle class of India has seen stagnating incomes during Modi’s rule, while the working class faces a crisis of underemployment that has built up over a quarter-century of neoliberalism.
As Indian capitalists see it, the economy needs major “restructuring”. Private investment needs a shot in the arm. There are too many inefficient’ labour-intensive small enterprises, which ought to make way for big capital-intensive enterprises. Capital resources must be moved from producing for ordinary Indian households to producing for export or building infrastructure to attract foreign investment - especially in military, strategic and high-tech sectors. Wages must be held down. Yet all these measures will further reduce the number of jobs, reduce wages and take national resources away from the goods and services that ordinary households consume.
The July and October waves of protest in India are an elemental upsurge that carries the potential to make major social changes. Even more so if the protesters can combine forces with workers, who undertook a wave of wildcat strikes earlier this year, and with farmers' unions who expect a renewed fight against Modi over recent US-India trade agreements which threaten their livelihoods.
What comes of this latent potential depends on its political leadership. There are both moderate and radical sections of the movement. For now, it appears the momentum of protest has been channelled onto a moderate path. Opposition parties, predominantly moderate, see an opportunity to “ride the tiger” of popular upsurge to dislodge the BJP from power. The largest such party is the Congress party, which anchors the “INDIA bloc” of parties that oppose the BJP and aspire to form a coalition government. This bloc of parties organised the most recent large rally, on November 1 in New Delhi, rather than the CJP or the left student groups associated with the explosive protests in July and early October.
Besides Congress, several parties with a provincial or sub-national presence are also important. They represent blocs of provincial capital that have distinct interests to the capitalists who dominate national policy. They have sizeable vote bases among castes and communities special to their province. The Samajwadi Party, for instance, is a big presence in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, currently governed by a BJP firebrand but facing elections in the early months of 2027. The TMC was entrenched in West Bengal until its loss to the BJP this year. These parties are keen to reform the election commission to ensure their own survival against the BJP. However, like the BJP, they too want to rule in favour of the capitalist class and are loath to address the deeper economic grievances fuelling the upsurge.
The protest movement has also spurred mainstream discussion of Hindu nationalist forces beyond the Modi administration. The Indian far-right is bigger than Modi and his immediate crew. It is highly organised and ideological. At its centre lies the RSS, a disciplined, cadre-based Hindu supremacist organization created in the 1920s, which explicitly drew on the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. The RSS does not contest elections but is the controlling force behind the BJP. Modi has been an RSS man since childhood. Around the RSS are various vigilante groups. Under the Modi government, RSS men have been increasingly inserted into the state bureaucracy, judiciary, the police and armed forces, university leaderships, and, of course, the election commission. In BJP-ruled states, Hindu nationalist vigilante groups have developed working relations with police. These groups routinely lynch and beat Muslims without police interference.
It would be one thing to remove from the helm of the state Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah, the Home Minister. But that would leave intact a state machinery peppered with ideologically cohered and well-connected right-wingers. They are practised in suppressing democracy and pushing Hindu supremacy in league with vigilantes.
In recent weeks, speeches by Congress leader Gandhi have targeted not only Modi and the BJP but also the RSS and its supreme leader Mohan Bhagwat. This plays well for a progressive audience, who have long been alarmed by the growing threat of the RSS. However, if the attacks on the RSS go beyond rhetoric and have the effect of encouraging efforts to clean out the state machinery of notorious RSS personnel, it is possible this will open space for more radical sections of the protesters to revive and take momentum back from the moderates.
It remains to be seen what will be gained out of the youth upsurges of July and early October. Some lessons are already apparent. The explosive power of discontented youth could place on the back foot a Modi regime that has seemed unstoppable. Indian progressives had despaired for years about the steady erosion of democracy and bemoaned the failure of the mainstream opposition parties to resist. Today, there is hope.
