India Unleashes "Massive Crackdown" on Youth-Led Cockroach Movement After Education Minister's Ouster

Guests - Neha Boranational president of the All India Students Association. - Shuddhabrata Senguptaartist with the Raqs Media Collective who writes on social and political issues in India. We go to New Delhi for an update on India’s youth-led, anti-government “Cockroach” movement. After weeks of street protests against Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and the ruling BJP party, Pradhan tendered his resignation on Saturday. Now, however, protest leaders are accusing right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of reneging on his promise to not take punitive action against demonstrators. “Because this government and its policy is, and has always been, that of vengeance, … we are witnessing a massive crackdown on student activists across the country,” says Neha Bora, a doctoral student at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the national president of the All India Students Association. Bora spent 23 days on hunger strike during the protests. Indian writer and artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta points out that the movement is not the first major “Gen Z”-led protest in the country. Six years ago, India’s streets exploded in protest of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which purported to provide asylum seekers from religious minority groups a path to citizenship, but excluded Muslims, who face severe levels of persecution under the BJP’s Hindu nationalist government. “There’s clearly a restlessness for change and an unwillingness to accept the lies and the slander that the regime produces on a daily and a nightly basis,” says Sengupta. Transcript AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Anjali Kamat, who’s rejoined us at Democracy Now!, has spent this last several years working on a PBS/Firelight-supported documentary film about India’s rightward shift. So, it’s great to be doing this segment with you. It is amazing to see what’s happened in India. You just returned from India. Could you have predicted what took place? ANJALI KAMAT: No. This is absolutely, you know, unprecedented, the scale of protests. I mean, there have been mass protests for many years in India in the past, especially during the past 12 years of the Modi regime. But this, the number of people who came through to these protests, young people, who weren’t necessarily politicized, who weren’t organizers, who weren’t activists, but who just felt compelled to come out. Well, we turn now to India, where the youth-led Cockroach movement has accused the right-wing BJP government of backtracking on its promise not to take punitive action against student protesters and has threatened to restart demonstrations. Weeks of protests by hundreds of thousands of young people in India’s capital New Delhi and cities across the country led to the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, on Saturday. This is Abhijeet Dipke at the main protest site in the heart of New Delhi, Jantar Mantar, shortly after receiving news of Pradhan’s resignation. ABHIJEET DIPKE: [translated] It’s a victory for the Constitution of India. It’s a victory for the people of India. And it’s a defeat for the dictator. … Action must be taken against the police officers who attacked us, Deputy Commissioner of Police Sandeep Lamba, Assistant Commissioner of Police Ajay Sharma, Shashank Sharma. These batons, you used in the name of Home Minister Amit Shah and Prime Minister Modi. As of now, there has only been one resignation. Remember, don’t mess with cockroaches. ANJALI KAMAT: Following the education minister’s resignation, the Cockroach movement agreed to call off the mass protests Saturday once senior members of the Modi government assured them that protesters would not face any repercussions. But in addition to the police violence against demonstrators last week, hundreds of students have been detained since the protest ended. Police in states governed by Modi’s BJP have reportedly arrested over a hundred students in the days since the protest was officially called off, filing harsh criminal cases against many of them. In West Bengal, where the BJP recently won elections, the Hindu nationalist chief minister suggested that the protesters were all Muslims. And on Tuesday, the Supreme Court of India passed an interim order allowing the government to proceed with existing cases against students. Leaders of the movement have decried the detentions as a witch hunt and vowed to resume the protests. AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined now from New Delhi by two guests. Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist with the Raqs Media Collective, writes on social and political issues in India. His recent essay about the protests, published in The Wire, is headlined “Night Shifts at Jantar Mantar.” And Neha Bora is with us, the national president of the All India Students Association. She was on hunger strike at the protests in New Delhi for 23 days, completing her Ph.D. in theater and performance studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, or JNU, in New Delhi. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Neha, let’s start with you. If you can talk about the significance of these mass student protests, but then the crackdown once they stopped, and now young people saying they’re going to start again if these arrests and the punishment continues? NEHA BORA: So, what happened at Jantar Mantar, when Dharmendra Pradhan tendered his resignation, is nothing that has happened before. It is unprecedented in the history of India in the past 12 years. In our country, we have a government. We have a ruling — we have the ruling BJP, which one year after coming to power declared that there need not be any resignations under this government. It used to happen in previous governments, but there need not be any resignations now. Since then, there have been massive protests against the government on citizenship policies, on the farm law, that were brought in. But this kind of step back from the government due to mass protests, this is happening for the first time. For a cabinet minister in the BJP government to resign is not — it just does not mean that an individual has resigned. This is the acceptance of defeat, even if it is temporary, for a government that prides itself on being beyond any form of accountability, on being beyond even the very idea of democracy, where elected representatives are answerable and can be removed from office if they don’t perform. So, for us, this win is massive. It means that the government that we are facing right now, even that government, with an extremely repressive state mechanism, with a government that has almost dismantled all institutions of democracy, for that government to accept defeat in front of a mass movement is a moment of great joy for us. It helps us feel rejuvenated in the struggles that we are yet to fight, that we are yet to win. But because this government and its policy is and has always been that of vengeance, they know that the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan is a big blow to the reputation of this government, to any form of arrogance that this government held, and ever since the protest was called off after Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, we are witnessing a massive crackdown on student activists across the country, specifically in states which are ruled by the BJP or the NDA alliance, for example, in Bihar. I was in Bihar two days ago, and we met the DCP there, the DCP of police in Bihar. He showed us an official notification from the Bihar Police, which stated that there were over 600 students who had been detained for protesting against paper leak in Bihar. Three fifty-five of them were released, and over 300 students continue to be arrested under charges as severe as attempt to murder. In Bengal, there were 14 students who were arrested. Two arrests, fresh arrests, were made yesterday morning. Out of those 14 students which were earlier arrested, 13 are Muslim students. And strict laws, akin to the NSA, have been evoked. Charges under the Goonda Act have been filed against them. In Assam, students continue to be arrested. In Mumbai, students continue to be arrested. And here in Delhi, we have — first of all, on the 20th of July, there was a massive call for march to Parliament. That call saw massive state repression at the hands of the government and the security forces. Pellet guns were used against peaceful protesters. The use of these pellet guns was being denied until two days ago, but media reports have revealed that there is a general entry in the Delhi Police’s register where the Delhi Police acknowledges having fired pellet guns. There have been reports where it is — where it is being said that a DCP-level officer ordered the firing of pellet guns on peaceful protesters. In Bihar, which is a state in India, an AK-47 was fired upon protesters by the security forces, by the Bihar Police. This kind of massive crackdown, and in Delhi what we are witnessing, is a witch hunt of protesters, specifically Muslim protesters. There is a main witch hunt of Muslim protesters in Bihar. The divisive politics of the BJP that we have been seeing for the past 12 years, that is being enforced by the security forces and the police across the country. And people are being intimidated. People are being put behind bars, specifically based on their religion. If they are Muslim students, they are being intimidated. They are being put behind bars. If they are [inaudible] — AMY GOODMAN: And, Anjali, I just wanted to say, we’ve been looking online at the pictures of pellet wounds, people who have suffered, almost like we saw in Tahrir. ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah, these pellet guns obviously have also been used in Kashmir for years against protesters in Kashmir, and now they’re being used in the city’s capital against protesters, you know, many of whom — you know, many of their parents — this is in many ways a revolt against an older generation that voted the BJP into power, you know. And, Neha, you were just talking about how, you know, a lot of those who’ve been arrested and detained with harsh criminal cases against them are Muslim. And this is something that Muslim protesters at protests, previous protests, in 2019 and 2020 are facing very serious charges, with many of them still in jail. I wanted to bring Shuddhabrata Sengupta into the conversation from the Raqs Media Collective. Shuddha, you’ve been at so many of these large protests, that Neha was talking about, over the past 12 years. What is different about this one? And talk about the kind of cultural shift that you’re seeing. SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA: Thank you, Anjali, and thank you, Amy, for having me on the program. First of all, I’d like to salute and express my gratitude to Neha’s generation, to Neha and many other thousands of young people like her, for giving us reasons for hope in what we thought was an increasingly dark time. This protest, which is, I think, mistakenly being called the first Gen Z protest, it’s not the first Gen Z protest in India. The 2019-'20 citizenship protest was led by very young Muslim women who were also Gen Z. And I think that for the last several years, we've been tracking the discontent of the young, and there’s clearly a restlessness for change and an unwillingness to accept the lies and the slander that the regime produces on a daily and a nightly basis. And that’s really the change in the air. I’ve written and compared it to a change in the scent, in the aroma of the air. It’s like the scent of jasmine in monsoon time that completely changes your sensory perception. So, that’s the case, and you rightly pointed out that there are people from the 2019-'20 protests who called for nonviolent civil disobedience, including my friend Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and several others who were arrested. Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam still remain in prison, six years, for having called for peaceful, nonviolent protests, for actually saying that if the state attacks us with violence, we must offer them — these are Umar Khalid's words — that we must offer them love in return. And it was interesting to see Umar Khalid return to haunt the Cockroach Janta Party protests, where many young people came back with signs saying “Remember Umar Khalid.” Somebody says, “He walked so that we can run.” And I think that is important to stress a certain continuity. Neha talked about the continuity between the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, the farmers’ protests, protests against suicides by Dalit students like Rohith Vemula. In this particular instance, the NEET paper leak, the N-double-E-T paper leak, was actually first brought to attention through the suicide of a young Dalit Tamil student called S. Anitha. And she brought up — she was party in a Supreme Court case against the discriminatory provisions of this examination. The Supreme Court, I think, insulted her by dismissing that case. And she had to, tragically, take her own life. So, there is a string of continuities between all these moments of articulate, passionate dissent. In the new situation, we’ve seen that the young people during the last weeks and months respond with incredible humor, with incredible cheer and incredibly high spirits. And that’s certainly something new that Neha and many thousands of young people have shown us. And that’s an inspiration for even someone like me. ANJALI KAMAT: And, Shuddha, you brought up Umar Khalid, who’s been in jail without trial for over five years. And actually, New York City Mayor Zohran Mandani brought him up while speaking about Nelson Mandela’s legacy at a recent event, and he said, “Why must we wait as Umar Khalid enters his sixth year of captivity in Delhi — a political prisoner jailed under the same manufactured charges of terrorism that were once leveled against Madiba?” AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to end it there. We thank you so much for, both, being with us, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, artist of the Raqs Media Collective, and Neha Bora, who just completed a 23-day hunger strike. That does it for our show. I’ll be in Martha’s Vineyard July 31st, Friday night, for the screening of Steal This Story, Please! and Q&A after. I’m Amy Goodman, with Anjali Kamat. Media Options