Everything in India, at least under the B.J.P., is spectacle. Each event is an exercise in propaganda. The Ramleela performance was soaked in sentimentality, the epic reduced to a melodrama about filial piety and fraternal devotion, enacted in front of seemingly A.I.-generated backdrops of idyllic forest scenes with fluttering butterflies. After several stoppages, owing to power outages, the audience was treated to homilies by local leaders. One called for an end to diversity. A B.J.P. politician, Kapil Mishra, said that the cockroach represented an alliance of filth, Naxalites, jihadis, and the corrupt. Mishra, who is now a cabinet minister in the government of Delhi, was accused of instigating a riot in 2020. He lit the thirty-foot-tall effigy of the cockroach, which quickly went up in flames. Then it was the turn of Ravana’s kin and finally Ravana himself, going up in a giant conflagration, to add to Delhi’s terrible pollution.
One of the country’s main papers that morning ran the headline “Why the World Is Taking to the Streets.” A line was being drawn linking the youth in India, France, Belgium, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Albania, and Argentina. But, speaking with student protesters in Delhi and elsewhere, I didn’t get the impression that they were participating in a worldwide uprising. Their issues were national, and their targets were specific.
The first wave of protests emerged from the despair of young Indians faced with corrupt national exams and a dwindling confidence in their future prospects. But, in the current explosion, the real issue is the deletion of more than a hundred and thirty million names from the electoral rolls. The government undertook a revision of the voting lists to remove duplicate, deceased, or undocumented people. But the results have been dubious and often inconsistent. It is clear that the names of minorities, the poor, and members of marginalized groups have been disproportionately excised. The protesters have been calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the head of the election commission.
One such protester is Neha Bora, the charismatic twenty-nine-year-old president of AISA. In the summer, Neha, who uses they/them pronouns, had gone on a twenty-three-day hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, in support of the Cockroach Party’s appeal for the resignation of the education minister. Now, during the push to restore voting rights, Neha has emerged as an irrepressible force, often flouting police restrictions to insist on every citizen’s democratic right to protest peacefully. In the first two weeks of October, they were detained and released more than ten times. Unlike the Cockroach Party leaders, Neha has refused to sign a peace bond.
I met Neha at the office of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, with which AISA is affiliated. Outside, red-bottomed rhesus monkeys strutted or sat among the neem and frangipani trees. It was pleasant in the shade. Neha has a talent for making statements with a confrontational clarity. For example: “If the state does not want there to be violence, the state should not do violence—it is as simple as that.” Neha told me that people had long asked them why it was necessary to oppose the B.J.P.—after all, there must be good people in it, too. But, Neha said, “when you mix water, tea leaves, and milk, you will get tea. You will not get Coca-Cola. Similarly, if you vote for the B.J.P., you will only get violence and riots and corruption. You will not get anything else.”
