Jantar Mantar today became a cauldron of rage, with thousands pouring into the streets of Central Delhi to join the Cockroach Janta Party’s march to Parliament, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Their rage had them courageously face down a brutal police crackdown. Such was their rage that they even chanted slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is feared and respected in equal measure.
Their rage proved the cynics and the pessimists wrong. They had believed a social media phenomenon such as the CJP could not mobilise people against a government inclined to silence voices of discontent and dissent. Their rage spilled out of Jantar Mantar with an intensity that showed it could not be suppressed by the Modi government, which cows MPs and MLAs into submission with threats of tax raids and imprisonment.
Within hours of the march beginning, the government read the rage as proof that its strategy of ignoring the CJP, in the hope of making it ineffectual, had failed. The CJP was invited to talk to Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda—a former BJP president—a climbdown for a government averse to bending before reason and popular pressure.
The CJP’s victory may still turn out to be Pyrrhic. But pause and consider: it took farmers a year of sit-ins and more than 700 deaths to pressure the government into withdrawing the three farm laws they opposed; and months of protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, merely delayed its implementation but did not scrap it.
Those two movements gathered momentum because they inspired people to overcome their fear of the Modi government. Since then, though, a pall of silence has shrouded the public arena, not least because of the incarceration of anti-CAA protest leaders under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Even the indignities heaped on citizens by the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls did not push people into the streets. Fear of the consequences of protest overwhelmed their anxiety about how their future was being mangled.
Into this vacuum stepped Abhijeet Dipke, the CJP’s founder, who turned outrage over the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test paper leak into a campaign for education reform. Such a campaign could not succeed with the youth still fearing the government. This is why, when the CJP made its leap from online to real life at its first Jantar Mantar gathering on June 6, Dipke had the assembled crowd chant: “We will not be scared by your politics.”
In under two months, it seems the young—and generations older than them—drew on Dipke’s defiance to break their silence over exams they had prepared for, only to find the papers leaked. The thousands who marched towards Parliament are eloquent testimony to the ebbing of fear among young citizens.
This did not happen overnight. On visits to Jantar Mantar, volunteers admitted to fearing what might await them for exercising their right to protest. They found reassurance in the collectivity at Jantar Mantar, their fear submerged in the fervour it generated. The longer they stayed, the less afraid of the government they became.
Security personnel stop Cockroach Janata Party supporters shouting slogans at Patel Chowk, New Delhi, on July 20, 2026. Delhi Police went on high alert and imposed prohibitory orders ahead of the Parliament’s Monsoon Session and the CJP’s “Chalo Sansad” march.
| Photo Credit:
MONEY SHARMA/PTI
Some will say the crowd that marched towards Parliament pales beside other protests India has seen. They forget that the regimes then were far more liberal than the current one. With silence having become the country’s default mode since the pandemic, the CJP’s protest today signifies an attempt to reclaim India’s argumentative voice, to assert it as a right, and to carve out a public space where citizens can challenge state power.
A new alliance of the online and the offline
The CJP’s success in mobilising people also underscores the diminishing role of the legacy media as democracy’s watchdog. For days, legacy media, like the government, ignored the CJP protest and the popular discontent driving it. Its relative absence from the mainstream press created an impression that the CJP was doomed to wither.
It was social media coverage of the rage building at Jantar Mantar that amplified it manifold, persuading many that this was a movement worth joining. India has entered an era in which the online and the offline reinforce each other—not only in the exercise of governance, but in opposing it when it fails citizens, as the NEET paper leak did.
Indeed, the CJP protest at Jantar Mantar had been limping along until the educationist and activist Sonam Wangchuk and members of the All India Students’ Association—Neha Bora, Manish Kumar and Ameen Amitosh—began a fast unto death. On the first day of their fast, fewer than a thousand people were present at Jantar Mantar. By the day before Wangchuk was removed by the police to hospital, the crowd had grown substantially, largely on account of news of the fasting activists’ deteriorating health.
They drew large numbers because of what their fast unto death signified—a meaning perhaps best understood through the cultural theorist Terry Eagleton’s writing on the motivations of martyrs. In A Different Way of Death, an essay published in The Guardian newspaper in 2005, Eagleton wrote that ordinary, non-political suicides are the acts of those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out—martyrs, he argued, are more or less the opposite.
Martyrs do indeed consider their lives precious. Yet they court death for a more abundant life all around, believing that a “life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for”. With that “something” missing from collective life, a political suicide signifies that “death is preferable” to a wretched existence.
Such a death, or the possibility of it, becomes a severe indictment of those who could restore what is missing from collective life but who are either incapable or unwilling to do so. This was the message conveyed by the fast unto death of Wangchuk, Bora, Kumar and Amitosh.
For them, that “something” was the Modi government’s repeated failure to conduct examinations without question papers being leaked. The first step towards rectifying this systemic failure was for Pradhan to take responsibility and resign. Their demand for his resignation was not only about accountability: with Pradhan still in office, they believed, the education system could not be reformed, and the life chances of students would remain imperilled.
The images of the fasting activists, lying inert on mattresses and drained of energy, became a daily reminder to the Modi government that it had battered the education system to a point where even death seemed preferable to some. Widely circulated on social media, these images undercut the government’s claims of having delivered acche din for citizens.
Modi could have asked Pradhan to resign, but doing so would have amounted to admitting his government had been inept. Its first response was to ignore those fasting and to have its supporters online paint them as inveterate ideological opponents of the BJP. But as Wangchuk’s health and that of others fasting with him deteriorated, the government appeared to recognise that any deaths would be blamed on it, an outcome it sought to avoid by moving Wangchuk, against his will, to hospital early on July 18.
The government’s action gave Jantar Mantar a new meaning: that it preferred repression to dialogue with those voicing grievances against it. The CJP’s mode of protest suggested its willingness to talk. A fast unto death, after all, does not end in sudden death; the slow, deliberate act of exiting life is itself an invitation to negotiate the redress of grievances.
By refusing to open a dialogue with the CJP, and by remaining indifferent as life ebbed from those fasting, the Modi government appeared to most as callous and authoritarian, and this fuelled public anger. In their fury, people took to the streets and compelled one of the most powerful governments in recent memory to bend, if only a little. This is historic: July 20 belongs to the CJP, which has offered three lessons—a movement is the most effective form of opposition to a regime that refuses to heed public demands; movements cannot be born in a climate of fear; and their success depends on the sacrifices we are prepared to offer.
Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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