‘The idea that Modi must be feared because he holds all levers of power has gone out of the window’

Turning now to India, where police are stepping up efforts to muzzle anti-election commission protests. On Wednesday, two of the country's youth-led Congress Janata party members were remanded in custody for five days over their alleged repeated attempts to disturb public peace and violate the law. Their arrest comes a day after the pair jumped security barricades to wave the Indian national flag at Jantar Mantar, a decades-old protest site where police had banned people from gathering for protests. Let's take a listen now to their lawyer and the leader of the CJP movement. The police argued that they have violated the bond signed between CJP leaders and Delhi police. Their presumption is that they can commit a crime again. What they've done is a violation of the law. I want to tell Narendra Modi, if you want to impose an emergency in the country, do it officially. Why are you unofficially imposing an emergency in the country like a coward? Why are you taking people into custody just for waving the Indian flag at Jantar Mantar? Why did waving the national flag become such a big crime in this country that you had to send people to five-day judicial custody? Well, for more on this, then we're going to cross to Subir Sinha, director of the SOAS South Asia Institute and also a reader in development studies. Thank you very much for joining us today, Subir. So to start, I mean, how significant of an escalation against India's opposition movement do you see these arrests? It is an escalation, but I don't think anyone is surprised that this has happened. I think the government's options in terms of dealing with the demonstrations are narrowing by the day. And after many days of being on the defensive or on the back foot, as we like to say, we now see that they have today come out swinging in terms of the preventive in terms of the judicial custody handed out to two of the leaders but also as you mentioned lots of people have been arrested there are temporary holding areas in which people are reporting being beaten up and tortured and if you look at these statements of the Home Minister Amit Shah he has come out very combative so i think that to the extent this is going to have an effect at all it's going to have a negative effect on the government uh because this this is a sort of hard line that uh i think will will provoke uh the protesters on the ground now in any uh serious uh democracy obviously uh the the judicial wing is an important check on power as a reminder at the end of their five-day remand period uh the pair's detention could be extended they could be granted bail or they could be released. How do you expect the courts then to treat this case? The courts have actually behaved in a fairly strange way. I mean, if you look at the beginning weeks of the protest, someone who identified himself with the Hindu far right had come out and made all kinds of very grave threats of violence against the protesters. He was taken into custody and then he was given bail not too long after. So if that is held as a point of comparison with respect to what is happening with the CJP activists who have been put under custody, then that is obviously going to escalate matters because the court is going to be seen, and it already is seen, as not impartial and as favouring the government. It has also not helped that the Supreme Court Chief Justice said that this was merely a law and order matter and that his office is not concerned with that, and also that he denied permission for the leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi to meet him and to discuss the matter so the Supreme Court is actually not looking too good at the moment in terms of its neutrality in this in this conflict in well contention and in a way that is that plays well into the hands of the demonstrators and the protesters because the narrative that they want to create is that there has been a wholesale takeover of key institutions. And if the court is increasingly seen as being nonpartisan and partisan in favor of the government, then that particular perception is only going to solidify. Now, for decades, Jantar Mantar had been a major spot for political protests. What is behind them, the Modi government's decision to remove it from the list of designated protest venues, especially because people obviously can theoretically continue to protest elsewhere? Well, Jantar Mantar is right on the edge of Connaught Place, the absolute heart of Delhi. What the government has had to do in the last few days and weeks, it has basically closed down many of the railway stations, the metro stations in the area. It has had to implement internet and social media blackouts. That has obviously put a very large number of people, including offices and businesses, under grave discomfort. Now, the government is basically saying if he wants to go ahead and do protests, and it has given out a list of places, they're nowhere close to the center of the city. They're in the far peripheries of Delhi by and large. And remember, the government has already put very severe restrictions on the other site in which a lot of protests historically have taken place, which is a place called the Ramleela Maidan or the Ramleela Grounds. So to make protests more difficult while claiming to be super democratic, and especially while speaking to foreign audiences, saying we are the mother of democracy and that kind of thing, it just makes the government look not credible, both domestically and also increasingly internationally. because the coverage from the Financial Times or the New York Times, the Guardian, I'm sure newspapers and television stations in France and elsewhere, have been far more critical this time around than they have been in the past, where they seem to have treated Modi's claims of democracy with much greater deference. Indeed, although that is ironically hard to do in many countries that are dealing with their own major protest movements, including here in France. And that comes up in the conversation all the time in India. Yeah, I bet. Especially the French case does, yeah. So I do want to move to what this all means for the opposition. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has obviously expressed support for these two arrested CJP leaders. But for now, the CJP and other opposition parties haven't yet held a joint protest. I'm curious to know why you think that is. Is that a strategic mistake? And do you expect this to change in coming weeks? It's a fast morphing situation. So, you know, I mean, from the point of view of whether or not it's a mistake, a lot of people have been talking about the Congress having missed an opportunity to ride on this movement and to make political capital out of that. But in my personal view, I think that the position taken by the Congress Party and Rahul Gandhi has its own logic, which is that they do want to share the space that has been opened with those youth movement activists who sort of, you know, set the ball rolling. Secondly, as I think everyone is aware that the protests are by now far more than just a CJP initiative. Obviously the Congress Party, but also left parties, the Communist Party of India, Marxist, the CPIML and the CPIM, all of them have registered a very serious presence. Neha Bora, the other well-known activist, as well as Ayesha Ghosh, they both belong to left-wing political formations. We also saw the entry of the Dalit party, the Bheem Army, especially within the Jantar Mantar protests and things like that. So I think it's about far more than the CJP. And I think, you know, you could have thought of it in two ways. One, to use the Congress as a centralizing umbrella for all the resistance movements. And secondly, to have a diffuse collaboration across the different elements of the movement without necessarily having to take over command and control of this movement. And the fact that you see a lot of press conferences being hosted by Rahul Gandhi, in which he gives young and in many cases unknown activists a chance to address the media and through the media, the country as a whole, to me is a different way of doing politics. And it is a more decentralized and perhaps, therefore, more democratic way of doing politics. Subir, as a final question for you, social movements are, I think, as your very detailed response did just suggest, they are obviously one of your major research areas, areas of expertise. So I do want to ask you, what do you make of CJP thus far? Do you think that the movement is here to last? And how much of a threat do you see it as being to Modi's rule? I think it is here to last whether in the long run or not but certainly for the short and medium term whether or not they will become a political party as has happened with previous social movements I think that's an open question in terms of how much of a threat they are to Modi I think that they already have been quite a threat to Modi and I want to say that in three different ways one is that they've changed the discourse regarding Modi I mean you know a lot of the self-image of Modi and I think the world knows about the massive expenditure that has gone in to create and maintain the strong leader image who's loved by the people and like who's a sort of a part of familiars that has taken a severe beating and I think for young people to use a very crude language in relation to Modi and the jokes and memes that have come out have really demolished that particular idea of the beloved leader and connected to that is the idea that he he must be feared because he has all the levers of power and i think that has really gone out of the window and you see uh relatively non-political young men and women uh along with other sections of the population old people and things like that as well uh who seem to be far more capable of uh being very critical openly on on on on television camera crews and the mics and things like that now in you remember that india has a massive youth population and the age group 16 to 30 uh if i think you know if if i'm correct uh would represent about 40 plus percentage of the population and that has the highest amount of unemployment in the country historically as well and also in comparative terms so they have uh you know the Ram temple and the religious uh communal kinds of politics and the Hindu Muslim polarization and a lot of talk that is going on right now about the presence of the foreign hand George Soros is Elon Musk funding them all of that is falling on relatively deaf ears and at a personal level among the WhatsApp groups that i'm a part of and this includes people from school and so forth a number of people who are identifiably strong supporters of Mr Modi now concede that there was a problem with the election rolls in fact many of them themselves or their family or friends have been their names are omitted but as of now they blame mistakes made by the election commission and technological glitches at the election commission that is preventing them from sort of getting reinstated on the election rolls so it's just one step away really from pinning the blame on Mr Modi and Mr Amit Shah, the Home Minister, and that cannot be comfortable because he's losing ground among social groups and among individuals that have been his long-term supporters. Subir Sinha, a pleasure to hear your expertise. Thank you very much for joining us on the program today. Thanks very much.