What India’s October Agitation Settled And What It Left For November
The campaign that produced more than seven thousand detentions in Delhi in a single day and a finding of prima facie contempt against the authorities, was announced to the press on 30 September with the dates attached
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| Representational image Source: @INCIndia on X |
What followed is mostly on the court record now. On 9 October the Supreme Court called the Delhi Police orders restricting public transport overreaching. The next day police detained more than seven thousand people, mobile internet was cut within four kilometres of Jantar Mantar for twenty-four hours, and metro stations were closed.
On Sunday 11 October a bench sat specially, held that a prima facie case of contempt had been made out against the authorities, and directed that transport and internet run normally and that nobody be detained except by procedure established by law. One judge spoke of the gargantuan magnitude of the detentions.
Four days later the same court issued notice to the Election Commission on a petition brought by Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders. You know what is most interesting here?
The government did not change its diary. Across the same fortnight the prime minister addressed an international investors’ forum, the foreign minister received his Canadian counterpart, a warship was commissioned, a naval squadron completed a port call in Seychelles. There was no address to the nation and no concession.
The crowds were smaller than the operation mounted against them. Police put the largest gathering of the final week at about two thousand, in a city of more than twenty million. The Congress set the calendar. The newcomers filled with the numbers, which is when the party once again used the swell to its advantage.
The phrase that will outlast the fortnight arrived when advocate Prashant Bhushan said a change of regime was the aim and that this is what any opposition seeks. A prominent student leader had said earlier that she was influenced by the movement which removed Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh.
In Lucknow the next day the defence minister, Rajnath Singh, lambasted them by saying that some wanted a Bangladesh-style change of government and were making young people instruments of anarchic politics. The Congress replied that governments are changed at elections, and recalled 1977, said its youth wing had ample inspirations from the freedom struggle to look up to.
The remarks were made and will not go away. India has a government with a parliamentary majority, armed forces whose loyalty nobody has seriously questioned, and courts taking cases from both sides. A chief election commissioner can be removed only by special majority in both houses.
Jantar Mantar was removed as a designated protest site on 12 October, with three grounds on the city named instead. The roll petition has reached only the stage of notice. The rally called for 1 November is yet to happen. The Election Commission does not belong to whoever holds office. Restoring confidence in it is no favour to the opposition.
Sovereignty does not belong to whoever holds office either. A mandate is lent at elections and taken back the same way; sovereignty was born with the republic, is in nobody’s gift, and nations that lose it do not survive the loss. So a demand to change the government is ordinary politics however loudly it is made, while a change sought with help from outside would be no politics at all. Nobody has placed evidence of the latter before the public as of this filing.
(Saket Suman is Editor at IndianRepublic.in, and the author of The Psychology of a Patriot.)