How Modi faces his first broad-based protest ever — not one by specific interest groups

And the profile of the protesters is mixed and diverse – anglicised youngsters, lower middle class young people, those from Delhi and those from outside, and also parents of students who are in the age group where competitive exams become a concern for families.

The gathering has left activists, but their relative numbers are now lower once the gathering has swelled in the last two-three days. The gathering is largely young, and overwhelmingly Hindu. It abounds in protesters from the north of the Vindhyas, though there are also people from south India.

“I have a daughter in grade 9 and a son in grade 7. Exams are very important for us,” says Seema Sharma (first name changed), who hails from Haryana but has been living in Delhi for years. She pointed to a swelling just above her left wrist and added that she was hit by a baton of a policeman on Monday. She isn’t alone – there were multiple people, particularly younger ones, who had bandaged arms and wrists.

Abhijit Kumar (first name changed) hails from Bihar but is a student in Punjab right now. He told The Indian Express that he decided to come to Delhi when he saw the visuals of the Monday Parliament march. A group of youngsters, all conversing in English, refused to identify themselves but told this writer that they had all come from Mumbai after seeing Monday’s visuals.

“To weaken the CJP’s dharna, Modi ji has allowed Rahul Gandhi to protest outside his residence,” alleged AAP MP Sanjay Singh. (Photo: Congress)

The central glue of the protest – resignation of Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan and examination reforms – is one that seems to have struck a chord with a diverse section of people, particularly youngsters. The Cockroach Janata Party is no longer a necessary fulcrum, as crowds have been thronging the venue beyond their mobilisational ability.

Sonam Wangchuk — much like Anna Hazare 15 years ago — remains a distant figure that has evoked a vague sense of apolitical austerity. That has been an additional pull factor for the largely leaderless mobilisation – but it goes beyond him too.

While a union minister privately expressed surprise at the numbers that gathered in Lutyens’ Delhi on Monday, two sources in the BJP told The Indian Express that this gathering is not representative of the youth in general, and that the mobilisation through Instagram reels will die down very soon.

However, there are murmurs in the party that some damage may have been done, particularly because competitive exam aspirants and their families north of the Vindhyas have a high presence of the BJP’s core voters.

Significantly, even the Congress is not enthused, with some in the party expressing scepticism over Wangchuk’s ideological leanings, and adding that it was more a diversion from Rahul Gandhi’s programmes to raise the issue of paper leaks. However, after Sonia Gandhi’s advice days ago, the Congress has formally sympathised with Wangchuk and has now openly condemned the violence on Monday.

Rahul Gandhi distributes zip ties among Congress leaders outside PM’s residence on Tuesday.

Break with the past

PM Modi is a stranger till now to such protests. The Congress faced such protests far more often – be it at the time of the JP Movement of 1974 when JP too exuded apolitical austerity for young people as a freedom fighter who renounced active politics or at the time of the more recent Anna Hazare protests for a Lokpal, or the protests against the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder.

Modi has seen many protests, but all from specific interest groups. In 2007, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he faced a small protest by Narmada Bachao Andolan activists led by Medha Patkar against the move to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to 122 metres. However, neither was this broad-based nor impactful on the ground. The campaign against Modi at the time of the Gujarat riots did not spill over to the streets, and was more a matter of statements by civil rights activists.

After becoming PM, Modi faced some high-profile protests, but these were not broad-based.

In 2015, when Modi was already PM, the Patidars in Gujarat launched an agitation for OBC status. This, too, remained a one-caste protest, and did not make any larger impact. In June 2020, the face of the agitation, Hardik Patel, joined the Congress, with the grand old party trying to revive itself by getting Patidar votes. However, in 2022, he switched over to the BJP and won the Gujarat assembly election from Viramgam.

A Congress leader being removed from the protest site outside PM Narendra Modi’s house, in Delhi, on Tuesday. (Photo: Congress)

In 2019-20, the Modi government faced the anti-CAA and NRC agitation when the CAA, a law that expedited citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, was passed. Shaheen Bagh in Delhi became the hub of this protest. But this protest, too, was identified as a “Muslim protest” with support from left groups. It did not move diverse sections of society.

In 2020-21, the Modi government faced a yearlong agitation against three farm laws it had passed in Parliament. For about a year, Delhi’s borders were blocked, and the agitation ended only when Modi announced the repeal of the farm laws. However, even this was seen as largely an agitation of Sikh farmers from Punjab and Jat farmers from Haryana and parts of west UP. Many middle-class people in Delhi-NCR in fact felt that the protests had led to traffic snarls – which made many critical of them.

All the above agitations were different from the latest one in a major way – it appeals to a wide cross-section of society rather than specific interest groups. However, the latest agitation is still just days old, and it remains to be seen whether it gathers steam and whether the government works out ways to resolve the impasse.