The movement is aimed at stopping the democracy-usurpers in their tracks by forcing them to roll back the SIR, which has robbed 130 million Indians of their voting rights
The angry street protests against SIR, which has wantonly removed crores of legitimate voters from the electoral rolls, and the accompanying demand for the ouster of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar as the only valid measure of accountability, have gathered force, bringing together heterogeneous youths and key Opposition parties on a common wavelength.
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This is unprecedented during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure, and the regime appears to have instinctively grasped that the sea has turned rough and the tide is dangerously high. It fears it may already be at a precarious point and is therefore preparing to dive in and unleash repression and a greater degree of oppressive politics than it has done hitherto.
The regime's politics of fear
Its motto is to rule with ruthless certainty; in its worldview, anything less is a sign of weakness. In it, there is no room for reasoning, discussion, conversation or negotiations with aggrieved citizens and their representatives, even when they protest peacefully.
As Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said not so long ago: “This is not a Congress government! In a BJP government, ministers do not resign.”
From what we have seen so far, the regime seems to know in its bones that it will have to bludgeon its way through to remain in the saddle
Nevertheless, the country’s youth forced the resignation of the Union education minister three months ago. The protesters won; the RSS-BJP canon lost. Against that backdrop, the government grows more fearful and more vengeful as protests show no signs of abating.
From what we have seen so far, the regime seems to know in its bones that it will have to bludgeon its way through to remain in the saddle. On the evidence so far, the ruling establishment, which easily qualifies as India’s first prototype of fascism, has ruled out any discussion or negotiation, even though the protesters are entirely peaceful.
It demands unconditional surrender before its machinery of repression, followed by unwavering political obedience. That is the fascist way, not seen in the country before.
A government rattled by dissent
At the peak of the agitation, police and paramilitary deployment in a small area of New Delhi was estimated at around 40 battalions (40,000 personnel). It is as though the borderlands had moved to the nation’s capital. For comparison, at the height of militancy in Kashmir, the deployment was estimated at around 100 battalions.
The closure of dozens of Metro stations in New Delhi, the cancellation of around 250 trains entering the Delhi area, and the beating of protesters black and blue in police vans and detention centres were additional measures. Female agitators braving the streets were not spared either.
The state’s anxiety appears to stem from the fear that its violent methods will prove to be of no avail and that the moral force of the Gandhian method employed by the people will bring down the rulers.
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This is the deepest worry. It is rooted in political calculus. After all, in 2024, the BJP lost the parliamentary election. Its numbers slid to 240, well below the majority mark it had enjoyed earlier. Its allies are keeping it alive. To avoid being at their mercy, the principal actors in the regime evidently went rogue after the fateful result.
The dangers of unbridled power
They planned to dexterously modify the electoral system so that it would make them nearly impregnable in a future election. The hated, illegal and unconstitutional SIR was the answer. To achieve this, the key was to control Election Commission appointments by suitably changing the law and, furthermore, to grant immunity to the CEC and the two ECs for life, not just for actions taken while in office. This was an invitation to the appointees to engage in unfair practices, deception and roguery for the benefit of the regime.
The great pity is that the Supreme Court failed to appreciate the dangers posed by an unbridled poll panel designed to lean one way instead of remaining ramrod straight as an unwavering guardian of the election process, from start to finish, as the democratic ethos demands and as our Constitution ordains.
The Supreme Court failed to appreciate the dangers of an unbridled poll panel that leans one way instead of acting as an unwavering guardian of the election process
The EC and the regime have naturally treated this as a bonanza. It has not even occurred to them that brazenly snatching away voters’ rights is unprincipled, morally repugnant and tailor-made to attract the ire of citizens who would fear that democracy itself was being thrown under a bus.
Apart from police and paramilitary repression, with men in uniform in Bihar actually using AK-47 assault rifles against peaceful protesters, how has the state responded? This has happened in two stages.
In stage one, to dodge Opposition questions about who ordered the crackdown at Jantar Mantar in Delhi in July, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and the PM stopped attending Parliament altogether during the Monsoon Session. This is because the simple answer is that the Government of India may have ordered the pellet guns to be fired, more specifically its Home Ministry, even after the use of this weapon had been decried in Kashmir. Delhi Police takes orders from the Union Home Ministry.
Stage two is now. While protest-related upheavals were taking place in the national capital earlier this month, the PM declared at a Bloomberg event that India was “the mother of democracy”! Irony died a thousand deaths that day.
The propaganda machine at work
In this mother of democracy, to the shock of the world, peaceful protesters had been fired upon, establishment-oriented goons were beating protesters alongside the police force (the Swatantra Bhardwaj phenomenon), and the government was pathetically refusing to engage in dialogue with peaceful protesters to defuse a national crisis.
Journalists reporting on the tumultuous protest events were being beaten up, too, as Modi waxed eloquent about India being an open society where free debate prevailed. In truth, by using the tools of totalitarian propaganda that George Orwell brilliantly portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the leader of the government sought to delegitimise the Gandhian-style protesters by claiming that, while he presided over a functioning democracy, hoodlums were sowing chaos and threatening stability and democracy itself.
Journalists reporting on the tumultuous protest events were being beaten up, too, as Modi waxed eloquent about India being an open society where free debate prevailed
Totalitarian dictatorships turning the meaning of normal, everyday words on their head is shown with great clarity by Orwell. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Goebbels, was candid when he said that a lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth.
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That is the new game being played by the ecosystem of the ruling establishment. Its toolkit has latched on to “regime change”, an expression with a negative connotation that prominent sections of the media, especially television, are seeking to amplify through their echo chambers. Much-reviled but regime-favoured anchors seek to throw wool over people’s eyes by holding phoney and meaningless discussions to extract even more favours from their masters.
No, the revolutionaries are not sowing great disorder; the world is witness to that. Nevertheless, the regime seeks to make out, falsely, that it is being sought to be hounded out of office despite having won office democratically. In truth, the people’s anti-SIR movement is aimed at stopping the democracy-usurpers in their tracks by forcing them to roll back the SIR, which has robbed 130 million Indians of their voting rights, with the aim of ensuring that the regime’s wish to perpetuate itself may be fulfilled.
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