I

ndia’s student protest movement has gained momentum online after demonstrations against examination paper leaks triggered a wave of social media posts criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The protests, led by students demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, intensified after a march toward Parliament on July 20 brought central New Delhi to a standstill.

According to protesters, more than 100 students were injured during a police crackdown. Police denied allegations of excessive force, but videos recorded by demonstrators circulated widely across social media platforms.

The footage showed scenes from the protests, including clashes between police and demonstrators, tear gas, baton charges, and students fleeing the area. The videos quickly spread on Instagram and other platforms, generating memes, commentary, and calls for further demonstrations.

“If nothing, we are televising our revolution,” protester Avanshika Singh told Al Jazeera during the demonstrations.

Cockroach Janta Party leads campaign

Young protesters said social media had become a central tool for documenting events and mobilizing support.

Posts criticizing the government and demanding accountability over repeated examination paper leaks have spread widely, while official posts by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have reportedly been flooded with comments calling for the education minister’s resignation.

The protests have also inspired demonstrations in other Indian cities, including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Patna, Lucknow, and Aizawl.

The demonstrations are being organized by the Cockroach Janta Party, a political pressure group formed after remarks by India’s chief justice comparing young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites” sparked backlash online.

The group has said protests will continue peacefully until three demands are met: the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, assurances that criminal cases will not be pursued against protesters, and compensation for families of students who died by suicide following exam paper leaks and cancellations.

A reversal of social media dominance

Political analysts say the movement represents a significant shift in India’s online political landscape.

Modi and the BJP were among the earliest political forces in India to effectively use social media to build support. However, analysts say Generation Z protesters are now using the same platforms to challenge the government’s narrative.

Cultural critic Anurag Minus Verma described the protests as an example of online irony and meme culture being transformed into a political organizing tool.

“The criticism and hate directed at Modi in the capital is not only acceptable now, but even cool,” Verma told Al Jazeera.

Prime Minister Modi addressed the issue on social media, saying that “nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth” and noting that the government had established fast-track courts to punish those responsible for examination paper leaks.

The response was quickly challenged online by leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party, who continued to criticize the government’s handling of the crisis.

As protests continue in New Delhi, organizers say social media remains central to their strategy, allowing students to document events in real time and build support beyond the streets of the capital.

(Source: Aljazeeera English)

The corona virus pandemic has affected and devastated the world. Every country in the globe has been affected by the virus which does not distinguish between developing or developed countries, rich or poor.

COVID19 has changed the lives of millions, disrupted, and even uprooted the lives of many others. There are not many people in this world who have not experienced the devastation of COVID19. Countries that fared well during the first wave have failed in their responses to their second waves such as India.

As the pandemic raged in its first wave, India’s strict lockdown policy between March 25 to May 31, 2020, proved to have worked to limit the number of cases and even bringing the average down to 20% of its peak compared to the population of India of 1.3 billion people. India was an exporter of vaccines, shipping 66 million doses since January, while its own cases rose.

However, India is devastated with its second wave of COVID19 infections leading up to 23 million infections with 250,000 dead in mid-May alone according to The New York Times, while the actual figures are much higher and go unreported.

Hospitals are overwhelmed and depleted of oxygen tanks which have become as valuable as gold as people are dying on the streets. Funerals have been held en masses where resources for the funeral pyres have also become hard to find and afford.

It is devastating for families that must cope with their loved ones going through the ravages of the pandemic while families that live in diaspora have no way of helping their loved ones back home including the frustration of cancelled and banned flights from and to India.

For Indians living in the diaspora, the anguish of helplessness for their family members grows day by day.

For Indians living in the diaspora, the anguish of helplessness for their family members grows day by day. The constant anxiety that our loved ones are at severe risk has made many scrambling to secure oxygen tanks for family members and send funds that can give them a chance at life, so they do not end up like thousands who had been rejected and turned back by multiple hospitals.

My mother for one, calls upon her family a few times a day just to see if her cousin who lives with a pre-existing condition and nieces and nephews are safe. The most tragic confrontation with COVID19 my family has faced in India is my aunt’s contracting the virus, who became a widow a few months ago with the loss of my uncle. Her situation was so dire that the doctors at the hospital had no indication that she would make it out of the hospital alive.

If it was not for a family member living in the United States, who had direct connections to the hospital’s doctors and staff, they would not have treated her with attention. We have been blessed that her condition had turned around, that was not the case for so many as her sister, who accompanied her at the hospital, had to witness numerous people leaving the hospital in body bags.

Up until recently, another personal scare was when my close friend in Delhi sent a voice note that her entire family has been affected and her father is in the hospital in serious condition. Luckily for her and her family, her father made it while many did not. There have been countless stories I hear from friends who have lost loved ones already.

One of my friends who resides in London, England, has lost three members of his family in India. One was his cousin who left behind two little girls who will never know the love of their father again.

However, politics prevail over life in this case as the failure of the second wave falls completely on the rights-wing Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narinder Modi. Instead of following COVID19 guidelines of wearing masks and social distancing in public places, he held mass political rallies and allowed religious zealots to hold mass festivals that became super spreaders.

It came to the point where Narinder Modi and other political leaders tried to prevent social media sites and other media sources from showing images of the apocalyptic scenes of people dying in the streets and the cremation sites.

Previously, the state of Punjab where our family is from was not as affected until outside residents started to come into the state for medical treatments at the hospitals. This has pushed COVID19 cases in the state of Punjab further. It is more upsetting to have learned that Narinder Modi and his government has denied the state of Punjab to facilitate an oxygen corridor to procure oxygen tanks and gases from Pakistan who is a traditional ‘enemy of India’ since its inception and partition of 1947.

This is despite Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan offering to help India in providing medical aid.

The chief minister of Punjab Amrinder Singh and many other politicians have repeatedly asked Narinder Modi’s government to procure the lifesaving equipment from the city of Lahore, Pakistan which is only 31 miles from Amritsar, Punjab, instead of waiting for oxygen, health equipment and other medical aid from the state of Jharkhand, 1,088 miles away. It is tragic that the right-wing Indian government cares more about maintaining their political egos than accepting much needed help from a neighboring country that they see as their ‘enemy’ while millions of people have been affected with COVID19 and thousands are proclaimed dead each day.

It is heartbreaking and tragic to witness the thousands of lives lost each day to COVID19 from afar. The thought that maybe someone we know, or a family member can easily become one of those statistics is a constant anxiety.

The fear that the next phone call from the motherland will bring intense news of sadness makes us all feel we should have done more in the past to be with them. Only if we can take a flight back home and console them that they are not alone, we stand with them shoulder to shoulder, from afar.

Three new farm laws – The Farmers Produce, Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation Act), 2020; Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Service Act, 2020; and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020 – were hurriedly enacted by the Indian Parliament during the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020 following an earlier ordinance in June of the same year.

However, these laws do not address the structural challenges of Indian agriculture such as landlessness, the growing cost of agriculture, agricultural indebtedness, and farmers’ suicide. They do away with restrictions of selling to the agricultural big markets (mandis). They do away with middlemen in the sale of agricultural produce whereby farmers can directly sell to the buyers, both state and market-based. The removal of the middlemen in the laws is a welcome step. The new laws also do away with the state’s ability to levy fees on these sales which infringe on the state’s rights, and continue the dangerous trend of increasing centralization and destruction of the fragile culture of federalism in India.

The law on contract farming facilitates the latter but it is much more biased towards big landlords and corporations rather than small, marginal, and landless farmers. Contract farming seems to be a guise for corporate farming. The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020 removes food stuffs such as cereals, pulses, potatoes, etc. from essential commodities which gives rise to a fear that the trade of these commodities might lead to hunger and famine.

The lack of a statutory minimum support price (MSP) in the bills is a matter of grave concern for the farmers especially in Punjab and Haryana where 65% of wheat is procured through the MSP by the Food Corporation of India and state agencies. But experts challenge us to realize that legalization of an MSP in the bills is not necessarily helpful and it could lead to depression of agricultural markets forcing farmers to sell at below MSP prices as private buyers may go where prices are cheap.

Farmers have been protesting against these laws since September 2020.  Farmers’ protests have a long genealogy in India. Upon assuming office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to change the Land Acquisition Act, easing corporate and state acquisition of lands which followed huge popular protests leading to halting the move. The three farm laws were enacted in both houses of the Indian Parliament without following due process of parliamentary procedures such as sending the bills to the relevant Select Committee of the parliament.

These laws continue the hurried and authoritarian promulgation of laws and ordinances such as the demonetization of currencies in 2016 by PM Modi and the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir in August 2019 by acts of the Parliament of India.

Indian farmers have been striking by sitting at the Delhi border in Sindhu and Tikri since November 26, 2020 amidst biting cold and a lot of difficulties.

But while the Supreme Court of India is still sitting on the constitutional validity of the government’s new laws on Jammu and Kashmir, in the case of the new farm laws, the Supreme Court has held the ruling government accountable to some extent. It has raised some questions. It appointed an Expert Committee for consultation on these issues, but members of the committee do not have the trust and confidence of the protesting farmers.

The new farms laws in India and the handling of the issue by the ruling government reflect the breakdown of trust between the ruling establishment and the people of India at large, and especially the farmers and non-corporate India.

Farmer leaders such as Rakesh Tikait are holding Mahapanchayat meetings in Haryana, which are made of people from different villages, in Haryana and they want to hold panchayat-level local meetings all over the country. This helpfully would galvanize the people’s protests against the policies of the ruling regime which is bent on the corporatization and privatization of India.

The budget just presented by the government has reduced allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and for women and child development programs, and is on a mad spree of privatization of public sector assets and companies.

The Indian government’s handling of the protests has been authoritarian and draconian. The farmers’ protests have been deliberately painted as linked to anti-national elements such as the Khalistan movement. Since the beginning of the protests, international leaders such as Canadian PM Justin Trudeau have supported the movement and have called for a dignified dialogue between the government and the farmers. Support has recently grown with endorsing declarations by pop singer Rihanna and young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg who shared a tool kit for non-violent grassroots protests on Twitter.

The Delhi Police has filed a report against Thunberg. Furthermore, the Delhi Police and a number of Indian states have filed reports against politicians and journalists such as Shashi Tharoor and Rajdeep Sardesai for their reporting on the violence in Delhi on January 26. The Indian Supreme Court has fortunately come to their rescue by preventing any arrests. Sedition charges are also being slapped on critical thinkers and journalists. Such measures continue the regime’s efforts to create a state of fear and terror so that nobody can publicly dissent.

Modi himself has termed international concern over the farmers as “foreign destructive ideology” (FDI), calling the protestors “andolana jeevi” (living off the protest) and “parajivee” (parasites). Farmer leader Rakesh Tikait and others have responded by calling Modi and others “corporate jeevi” (living off corporate funding).

Nearly one thousand people have died in the farmers’ protests including people committing suicide in protest. Protesting farmers treat the latter as martyrs and the government’s calling them “andolana jeevi” is seen as disrespectful. Those who make such accusations are, in turn, considered para rakta jeevi (parasites thriving on other people’s blood).

Modi has argued that these agriculture laws would be a watershed moment in Indian agriculture leading to prosperity in the way the Green Revolution, which had also faced opposition, was a watershed moment for India sixty years ago. However, the Green Revolution was possible because of the collaboration of the state, the scientific community, and the banking sector.

It was a state-driven project. We now need a new Green Revolution—an “Evergreen Revolution” as Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, the father of India’s Green Revolution, articulated, creating bio-happiness, food security, and cultural and bio-diversity. We need transformative initiatives in agriculture, economy, technology, science, and people’s movements. These new laws, however, are corporation-driven. Instead of corporatization of agriculture and privatization of both agriculture and industry, we need more initiatives by the state and the people.

We need land reforms and land for the landless as was articulated by the Gandhian people’s movement Ekta Parishad. Ekta Parishad organized the Jan Satyagraha 2012, a non-violent foot march, from Gwalior to Delhi on October 2. Back then, the ruling establishment under the dispensation of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agreement with Ekta Parishad that it would enact a law that grants land to the landless.

But this agreement has been on the shelf since then. The present government could have built on such transformative initiatives rather than promulgate the new farm laws which do not address the root causes of agrarian distress or poverty and misery in rural India.

The slogan of doubling farmers’ income seems to be an empty one. Real prosperity in India depends upon transformative initiatives such as an Evergreen Revolution creating sustainable and ecological agriculture, the creation of farmer-producer organizations, greater public investment in agriculture, a new extension of education, and the creation of a culture of dissent, dialogue, and diversity.