‘We Will Build Our Own Jantar Mantar’

Por Danish Ali — Tribune

Over the last week, a fresh wave of protests against corruption within India’s Electoral Commission, which recently purged millions of people from the country’s voter lists, has erupted in Delhi. The protests are the latest phase of a youth-led mass movement sparked by the failings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government. Building on the momentum of the summer’s ‘Cockroach’ protests against leaked exam results and diminishing prospects for young people, protestors are now looking to topple chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, just as they ousted education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in early August.

The resurgence of protest in Delhi has been met by a full-scale police crackdown and the mass arrests of activists, including of Cockroach Janta Party leader Abhijeet Dipke. Today, thousands of protestors, including representatives of India’s opposition parties, are marching to the Supreme Court to demand it take action where the Modi government won’t.

Danish Ali, a student leader and organiser in Delhi, spoke to Tribune about the movement’s fresh demands, the growing coalition behind it, and the legitimacy crisis engulfing Modi’s regime.

Evan Robins

When we spoke in August, the education minister had recently resigned and you were on tour supporting protests in Bihar. The focus seemed to be shifting out of Delhi. What’s happened since then to get to this point?

Danish Ali

The biggest achievement of the summer was not the resignation of the education minister, but that people from all across India became aware of the political crisis that we’re in. Before then, it was all so depressing: people used to think that nothing could be changed in this country, that things would always be like this. But times have changed quite a lot since then. That protest made everyone realise that if we collectively struggle and fight for something, change can happen. Now, there’s a very hopeful atmosphere in the country.

After the protest in Jantar Mantar ended, a lot of people started protesting in different parts of India. There was a twenty-five day protest in Jharkhand, and a lot of students were protesting in Bihar, Mumbai, Maharashtra, Bangalore and Kolkata. Those actions created a fertile ground for other protests to develop in Indian society. Right now, we’re seeing that so many people have become disillusioned with the current regime. They’ve realised that this government is not just insensitive, it’s very brutal and keen on curtailing every kind of people’s movement.

Frustration is mounting against this government, and people were waiting for something like this to happen. The issue now has to do with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, which is a voter eligibility review undertaken by the Electoral Commission. Through this process, 130 million names have been removed from the election roll, including many legitimate voters.

This is a very big issue. It’s also not limited to students, but is something that affects each and every person of this country, so there’s a lot of energy and excitement in the movement and on our campuses. The government is very much on the back foot right now.

A new wave of protests has been happening since 2 October. In response, the government has been closing metro stations in Delhi, including more than fifty-seven stations ahead of the protest on 10 October. They also stopped trains going to Delhi from different parts of the country. District police were actually making students exit trains they had boarded to get here. And in Delhi, they’re not allowing us to gather en masse. But despite the crackdown, the people of this country have shown this government that they are not going to be silenced anymore. They are going to put up a fight, and the government has to face it.

Evan Robins

What has it been like in Delhi over the past week?

Danish Ali

The police are no longer allowing us to gather in Jantar Mantar, where protests regularly take place. When we went there on 2 October, all the roads were blocked and the whole area was barricaded. A lot of police were on duty and the whole of Delhi felt like it was under curfew. All the main gates of Jawaharlal Nehru University were blocked, and when the students were trying to go out of their campus to join the protest, more than twenty students were illegally detained. But we are of the belief that if they don’t allow us to go to Jantar Mantar, we will build our own Jantar Mantar.

We were detained on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of October. After that, we held a press conference and did a lot of campaigning in different areas of Delhi, and outside of Delhi as well. Then there was a call for a protest on 10 October.

The day before that protest, our comrades were threatened with house arrest and there was intense surveillance of students and activists. I personally left my campus the night before because I expected that I would be detained if I tried to go to the protest site in the morning from the campus. Despite the crackdown, we somehow managed to gather near the AIIMS Metro station. There’s a hospital there, so they can’t officially block the station. We gathered and hid under the trees before starting the march because we knew police would detain us if they spotted us.

When the police found out that a march was happening, they barricaded the road. We broke two layers of barricading to get through. I was with comrade Neha Bora — president of the All India Students’ Association — who was dragged by the police and detained in a very brutal manner. A lot of students were dragged and beaten, and we were also teargassed. The way in which the Delhi police treated the student protestors, and particularly female students, was very shameful. I personally saw many female students being dragged by the male police officers. Their clothes were torn and their hair was pulled. The police also issued threats like, ‘We will ruin your career. We will ruin your life. You will get beaten up while in detention’ and so on. Many people were actually beaten up while they were in detention.

The police’s strategy is to just roam around the streets of Delhi, force you onto a detention bus, and then drive you to some fringe police station that is not even in Delhi, but in a nearby city. But the protestors have become so resilient. Many people, myself included, actually jumped out of the detention buses. There’s a lot of support from the common masses. If they see a police bus taking away students, they come out to help. In my case, a crowd argued with the police and made it possible for us to jump out of the windows. Then together we forced the police to release all of the students on the bus.

Evan Robins

What are the movement’s demands now?

Danish Ali

Our demands are very simple. Gyanesh Kumar, who is the chief election commissioner, has proven to be very compromised and partial to the BJP. He is responsible for the deleting the names of so many legitimate voters, most of whom are actually from marginalised backgrounds, including Muslims, gender minorities, and poor people. He was also responsible for including the names of very illegitimate voters just to ensure the victory of BJP ministers in different localities.

When this kind of corruption is going on, I think that person should take some responsibility, and he should be immediately removed from that post. And not just removed — I think he should be arrested. A lot of the time this government labels students as seditious. But when a person is actually sitting in the Election Commission and murdering the very spirit of democracy in this country, that’s real sedition. We want him to be removed, we want him to be arrested, and we want a serious inquiry into the Election Commission.

We also want all the processes going on under SIR to be stopped immediately, because we know that this has always been done in a very compromised and biased manner just to benefit the BJP government. We can’t trust that any elections will be done in a transparent or a fair manner. Finally, we want the Modi government to take some responsibility and provide some assurance that the Election Commission will do what it was designed to do from now on.

The administration cannot actually remove Kumar from his position because the position comes with special protections. So today, we’re marching on the Supreme Court with the aim that it will take some cognisance of this matter.

Evan Robins

What kind of coalition is marching today? How has the composition of the movement changed since the summer?

Danish Ali

All the opposition parties have given the call for the march today. That includes the leader of opposition, Rahul Gandhi, who is the president of the Congress party, as well as other left organisations and parties, like the Samajwadi Party. Of course, the student organisations are also involved. Essentially, all political entities other than the BJP are protesting against Kumar right now.

I think it’s very good that the opposition parties are finally taking a stand. Back during the protests against the paper leak at Jantar Mantar, they weren’t so involved. Rahul Gandhi did join the protests, but only after a while. So I think it’s good that this time they have taken the lead now, and they are taking this very seriously.

Obviously, the opposition parties have a lot to say about the Electoral Commission. For some time, we’ve been hearing these parties complain that many ministers of their parties, in all different states of India, have lost seats by a very small margin — a margin ensured only through corruption of the people sitting in the commission who were openly supporting the BJP government.

This isn’t just a problem for those parties, but for all sections of society. And even BJP voters should realise that their vote is devalued, and that when the government stays in power not by the people’s mandate, but by corruption and scams, the whole idea of democracy is under threat. Every single citizen of this country should be concerned about this fact and should start coming to the streets, coming to demand transparency and responsibility and accountability from the Electoral Commission and from the government

We’re not expecting the Modi government to act in a very positive manner because we have seen that these are fascists. They don’t believe in democracy at all. We know that whenever we go to any protest site, we will be detained, beaten up, lathi charged, and sent to jail. But we still go because we can no longer wait. We know that this is going to be a long fight, and they’re not going to go down that easily. But in the coming days and weeks, we will maximise our efforts, not just in Delhi, but all across the country.

Fonte: Tribune