Indian youth 'not scared anymore': Modi and BJP party's 'architecture of fear has met its match'

Well, we are joined now from New Delhi by Gawanda, by our spokesperson from the Opposition Indian National Congress Party, Anish Gawanda. Apologies there for that confusion with your name. Good to see you. Thank you for joining us. We do really appreciate it. You are then spokesperson with the National Congress Party, that's that secular opposition party, more centrist than the ruling BJP. It does look as if we're seeing, you know, that young people are a growing influential political force in India. There's real debate now, you know, is traditional Indian politics keeping pace with their expectations? I want to hear your thoughts on all of this. Perhaps we could first of all start by looking at what Modi has announced this idea of the fast courts. Has he done enough? Why does he not sack the education minister as the students would like? You know, let me start off by saying that I have never felt more exhilarated to be a young Indian than I have over the course of the last month. You've seen young people hit the streets in record numbers. They've been brutally beaten up. There have been sticks with nails attached to them that have been used to beat young people. Young people have been beaten on their necks and ended up in the ICU. They've been tear gassed, pellet gunned, but they're coming and hitting the streets every single day to demand accountability in a country that has forgotten to deliver upon a promise of governance that was made in 2014. And the architectural fear that the Bharatiya Janata Party had sort of put in over the course of the last decade or so has finally met its match in young Indians who refuse to give up and say we're not scared anymore. And so the prime minister's sort of bizarre outreach, which was on fast track courts, something that nobody demanded nor asked for, is falling short of the single and most important demand, which is the resignation of the education minister. And the question that you're asking is a question that every single young person in India is asking. Does the prime minister care more about the education minister or about young people in this country? It does look from what you're saying as though Narendra Modi has been caught completely off guard by the the size of these protests. And also it is true that this is over a medical exam to be a doctor. Many of those young people who took that exam will be, I'm guessing, the sons and daughters of Modi voters, middle class, you know, well-off voters. Has he lost his touch? Has he been out of touch that he didn't get this earlier? You know, we're now on the 33rd day of protests in the national capital at Jantar Mantar, an indefinite sit-in that has been called for by Abhijit Deepke and the Cockroach Janata Party. I've been there from the very first day. And it seems like the prime minister's office, which is a few hundred meters away from the protest site, is so well-guarded or well-shielded that the voices of young Indians simply do not reach that few hundred meter distance, right? Which is precisely why young people have had to take to the streets across the country now to ensure that the voice is heard in the sort of higher echelons of government. In many ways, the government tried to dismiss these protests. When they first started off, protesters were being decried as anti-national, as urban naxals, as disruptive elements spreading anarchy. Over the course of the last month, you've seen that tone shift a little. The government has understood that it can no longer decry all protesters as not genuine. But yet, there's no meaningful intent to negotiate. And in many ways, this is a telling reminder that this is a government that has been at its weakest point, right? Compared to the first two terms of the Prime Minister Modi-led government, the third term that Prime Minister Modi is leading is one where he heads a coalition government. He does not enjoy a single-party sort of dominance over the Indian polity. And he needs alliance partners, some of whom have come out in support of students protesting in New Delhi, to keep his government intact. And so what you're witnessing is the fear in a government that knows that it no longer has the control that it once did, and is fumbling to respond to public anger, anger that it did not have to confront in the same way earlier. Now, I imagine you've been talking to some of these protesters. What do they plan next? Abhijit is a very dear friend of mine. And so I think the plan for what happens next has always been the plan for what happens next on day one. We'll stop the protests as soon as the education minister resigns and build towards a culture of accountability that this country so desperately needs. But at the same time, I think the scenes that you witnessed on the national capital, 80 young people in hospital, the most brutal kinds of police repression, women being sort of beaten up by male police officers. These are scenes that will not leave the minds of young people very easily. And these are sort of instances of police brutality that also need to be met with some kind of accountability from police forces. In addition, the government has tried to embark upon a brutal sort of spree of repressive tactics like filing cases against innocent protesters. We're all committed to ensuring that no case should be filed against anybody protesting peacefully, else these protests will continue. And finally, I think you've seen this in the past as well, right? In 2016, in the national capital at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the government tried to clamp down on protests and succeeded. During the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, the government clamped down on protests and succeeded. But the number in which and the numbers that you're seeing coming out onto the streets in New Delhi today are such that the government simply has no ability to prevent young people from staking claim to their democratic right to protest. Well, I'm afraid we are out of time. Thank you so much for your thoughts and your ideas on that. Anisha Gawande, you are a spokesperson for the Opposition Indian National Congress Party, of course, the opposition party there to Narendra Modi's BJP. Thank you so much for your time.