India’s Capital City Is Witnessing A Season Of Protests And Paranoia
· Free Press Journal
October is no longer a season of mists and mellowness. For us Delhiites, it has become a season of protests. The most recent and poignant dissent is that of Ankita Bhandari’s aged parents, who are being forced to protest the appointment of BJP’s former Uttarakhand in-charge, Dushyant Kumar Gautam, as governor of Sikkim at the India Gate. Ankita Bhandari, the attractive 19-year-old receptionist, was murdered close to the Vantara resort by a BJP minister’s son, Pulkit Arya, in 2022 because she refused to provide sexual favours to two VIPs.
In the chats recovered by the police, Ankita told her boyfriend two days before her death that Pulkit was putting pressure on her to provide ‘extra services to a VIP’ for which she was being offered Rs 10,000. She told her friend, “Being a poor woman does not mean I am willing to sell myself.” Pulkit is now serving a life sentence, but this hill state has been on the boil ever since her death, demanding the arrest of the VIPs.
Visit biznow.biz for more information.
Protests after her death have not relented, forcing the state Chief Minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, to order a CBI enquiry earlier this year. With the noose tightening around the two VIPs, namely Dushyant Gautam and Ajay Kumar, both were known to have made a quiet exit from the state, having been replaced by BJP national vice president Ram Madhav.
The surprise announcement of Dushyant Gautam as governor of Sikkim has created shockwaves in the hill state and has only resulted in the protests shifting to the capital city. The victim’s parents, who were on a sit-in protest at the India Gate on October 13, were joined by several Congress leaders, including Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi. The aged couple were picked up by the cops later that night. Undeterred, they are now threatening to go on a hunger strike until the accused are punished. They have also issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the centre to cancel Gautam’s appointment.
The articulate Congress leader, Sujata Paul, based in Dehradun, expressed her horror at this appointment and wrote on social media that “he (read Gautam) has been given this appointment to provide him with constitutional immunity in order to prevent any criminal charges from being levied against him. At the moment, the FIR has been lodged against an ‘unknown accused’ and has not named either him or Ajay Kumar.”
During the last week, New Delhi was gheraoed not by protesters as much as by the security forces. A phalanx of 40,000 security personnel were brought in to prevent the supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party from gathering at Jantar Mantar on October 10 in order to put pressure on the government to force the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign.
The kind of inconvenience we Delhiites suffered is unparalleled in post-independent India. The city’s lifeline, the Metro, was shut down. Schools were shut down, and several examinations were cancelled. Worse, 245 trains scheduled to reach Delhi on October 10 were cancelled, and horrific stories of passengers, including pregnant women, who found themselves stranded in all kinds of mofussil towns, made the rounds on social media.
The Opposition parties and the CJP are not letting up the pressure on the Modi government. They had planned to unfurl the Tiranga at Connaught Place’s Central Park on Friday. Having obtained prior permission from the Delhi High Court, they informed their supporters to march towards Connaught Place on October 16. The Delhi police, however, denied the permission and also imposed restrictions on their planned flag-unfurling and protest demonstrations. The entire Central Park area and the roads leading up to it have been barricaded with prohibitory orders under Section 163 being imposed across central Delhi.
On that fateful October 10, which saw even women journalists covering the event being manhandled by the cops, around 7,000 people connected with the CJP were detained.
What began as a campaign against electoral fraud has now become a wider fight over the right to protest. The government shows no hesitation in changing the goalpost and has now denotified Jantar Mantar as a protest venue, prompting the CJP leaders to march to Central Park, although that is not an approved protest venue either.
The young protesters insist that the right to protest is enshrined in Article 19 of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and expression, and the right to voice dissent and criticise government policies. This is obviously something Modi’s chief ministers are not willing to adhere to. A bird’s eye view of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh will only serve to confirm that Modi is not alone in his determination to crush protests. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s governance model is equally dictatorial. When, during a press conference in Lucknow recently, freelance journalist Divya Srivastava pressed upon Yogi Adityanath to answer a few questions, the Chief Minister did not bother to reply to a single query. However, her daring to put a question to him made her the butt of online threats and harassment from the Hindutva brigade.
During his tenure as Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath has ordered the closure of 26,000 schools, with 5,000 more schools set to follow suit. Have these closures helped improve the facilities in the remaining 80,000 or so functioning schools? Far from it. Anyone daring to film the pathetic state of these schools ends up facing criminal charges for spreading misinformation. Criminal cases have been filed against social media activist Rajat Sharma from Deoria in eastern UP for circulating a video that showed the dilapidated state of the government school there. Similar criminal cases have been registered in Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Hardo, Hathras, Meerut, Lucknow, Amethi, and Siddharth Nagar. Several state districts have banned the entry of outsiders, especially YouTubers, in these schools without proper authorisation.
There is little doubt that the confrontation between the Modi government and the Opposition-CJP combine is only going to intensify in the coming weeks. As the disenchantment with the current regime increases, efforts to suppress voices of dissent will become more strident. Time can only tell whether this shift to electoral autocracy can be reversed. A vibrant and vocal civil society and an independent judiciary alone can reverse the democratic backsliding under the current administration.
Rashme Sehgal is an author and an independent journalist.