Modi Chooses Violence. Again.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury
October 18, 2026
Image: favoritesphoto / Shutterstock
Not too long ago, Narendra Modi’s party and supporters took great delight in gramophoning dubious ‘surveys’ declaring the Indian prime minister as the most popular leader among democracies, with supposedly 70 percent approval ratings. Fortress Delhi in recent days, however, betrays a nervous king hiding from his own people rather than an elected leader enjoying extraordinary support.
Modi turned the Indian capital into a semi-militarized zone last weekend to prevent protests against a highly contentious voter verification process that has disenfranchised 130 million people. A ruthless crackdown followed, exposing the regime’s declining confidence in its power of persuasion and its opting for violence as the last resort to contain dissent.
The government pulled out all stops to stifle protests as opposition parties, a newly minted Gen Z grouping satirically named Cockroach Janta Party—born out of a social media meme—,student groups, farmers’ unions and myriad other civil-society bodies have upped the demand for the sacking of the chief election commissioner and called for public demonstrations in Delhi. It cordoned off the city centre with several layers of barricades, cancelled trains and stopped buses heading to Delhi, flooded the capital with police and paramilitary forces, and suspended mobile internet and public transport in and around the capital’s designated protest site, putting the capital virtually under a lockdown.
Thousands of peaceful, unarmed protesters were detained, rounded up, and often mercilessly beaten. Women faced sexual attacks at protest areas. There are multiple accounts of protesters subjected to vicious assaults inside police buses and vans. Female protesters said police hit them “on their breasts and targeted their private parts.” Three women journalists filed sexual harassment charges against Delhi Police. Dozens of journalists were detained to prevent them from reporting.
Detainees were mostly bundled into dark buses and taken far away from the capital’s designated protest site, with much of the brutality taking place inside the buses to hide it from public view. Some recounted “blood-curdling screams” ringing out of the buses as police personnel assaulted protesters “as if they had a personal grudge.” Even an opposition Member of Parliament was not spared.
What emerged from the crackdown was a pattern of police impunity that would not have been possible without express directive of the government, especially the home minister, who controls the capital’s police and is Modi’s closest aide. But a more menacing aspect of the crackdown was the way Hindu supremacist vigilante groups were unleashed on the protesters to work in lockstep with police.
Draped in their signature orange scarves and wearing metal knuckles, members of right-wing militias aligned with Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) openly intimidated and violently attacked protesters and journalists as the police looked away.
The strongarm tactic despite the obvious risk of reputational damage and a potential escalation of an already spiralling popular movement shows Modi has by now given up on politically combating the crisis and is turning to brute force to have his way. It wouldn’t be the first time.
His unapologetic stance on the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat when he was the chief minister of the western state earned him the loyalty of a hardcore Hindu base that propelled his ascent to national politics a decade later. In 2020, not long after being re-elected prime minister with a thumping majority, when faced with a nationwide protest against a controversial citizenship amendment law discriminating against Muslims, another pogrom against Muslims in Delhi helped Modi tide over a significant political challenge. Senior BJP leaders and ministers went around the capital urging Hindus to take up arms.
But then, unlike now, the BJP used the violence to spin a popular movement as a Hindu–Muslim confrontation, helping the party to consolidate majority support. Modi’s latest turn to violence is more secular in its choice of the targeted adversary.
For some time now, he has sought to spin intellectual dissent as a security threat. “Urban Naxal” (Naxal in the Indian context refers to ultra-left) has been a pet BJP bogeyman for those who do not subscribe to the party’s majoritarian vision. He recently upped the rhetoric when in his Independence Day speech in August, he called for “dimagi Naxals”, or intellectual Naxals, to be “identified and isolated.” This labelling of ordinary political dissent by activists, academics, journalists, and even the political opposition, is intended at legitimising repression as an act of protecting national interest. The right-wing militia men attacking the protesters echoed exactly the same sentiments, justifying their violence as a way of defending the nation.
The youth movement, which Modi’s violent stormtroopers see as a foreign-directed regime change operation from which India must be protected, comes as a major boost for the country’s democratic forces. It has dispelled the aura of Modi’s invincibility and the inevitability of India’s continued democratic erosion under him, which makes it Modi’s toughest test yet.
In his third term, he already bears an unshakeable burden of incumbency, and has no one to blame for governance gaps after being at the helm for 12 years. Propaganda, polarization, and a fragmented and uninspiring opposition along with his incremental capture of India’s governing institutions have helped Modi cement his power thus far. Yet it has begun to look shaky. In the general elections in 2024, the BJP for the first time under Modi lost the absolute majority in Parliament.
Modi soon after set out to recast the electoral list through voter verification process under a chief election commissioner hand-picked by him. The roll revision has disenfranchised millions and triggered allegations that the BJP is stealing elections through voter lists curated in its favour. With the Gen Z ‘cockroach’ movement joining the protests against the roll revision, Modi now finds himself in a situation which has no easy exit.
Pushed against the wall, the trapped demagogue has decided to bare his fangs. That might not be enough to tame the streets but could be just enough to give the world’s largest beleaguered democracy a bloody turn.
Related articles:
Why India’s Opposition Parties Should Boycott Elections (3-minute read)
India’s Cockroaches Have a Message for the World (3-minute read)
Hollow Parties in India’s Cockroach-Eaten Democracy (10-minute read)
