More than 25,000 police officers were deployed across New Delhi recently to prevent demonstrations led by India’s new youth-led political movement, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Government authorities had denied the CJP permission to protest on public-order grounds.
The ensuing security operation saw the authorities shut one in six metro stations in the capital, barricade dozens of central roads and cancel over 250 trains in what Indian rail officials called an “unprecedented closure.”
Thousands of protesters were detained, with documented accounts of police brutality. While the epicenter is in Delhi, protests have been documented in five other major cities.
The protests underscore a paradox at the heart of Indian politics. On the one hand, they show just how far India’s democracy has declined. On the other, they offer up glimmers of the key ingredients needed for democratic renewal: widening political participation, greater opposition coordination and mobilization around concrete demands.
The protests grew out of discontent over a nationwide electoral roll review known as the Special Intensive Revision. The revision, which began in 2025, has removed more than 130 million names from eligible voter lists – almost a tenth of India’s entire population.
India’s Election Commission has led the revision and says it is necessary to remove duplicate and ineligible voters. But critics allege the review has political motivations.
In the state of West Bengal earlier in 2026, almost 12% of registered voters were removed from voter rolls before India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sailed to an election victory in a state it had not previously governed.
One analysis found that in a large number of constituencies the BJP won, the number of deleted voters exceeded the party’s margin of victory. These events do not definitively prove that Special Intensive Revision deletions changed the state election results. But the pattern is troubling.
So when the Indian Express recently reported that Election Commission members themselves raised 14 objections to voter exclusion during the revision, all of which were overruled by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the CJP called for his resignation and took to Delhi’s streets.
All of this is occurring in the context of considerable democratic decline under Narendra Modi’s government. This has taken the form of executive centralisation, intensified use of anti-terror laws and growing media ownership concentration.
No democracy watchdogs currently classify India as a full democracy. In 2021, Freedom House downgraded India from “free” to “partly free”, while the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute now classifies the world’s most populous country as an “electoral autocracy.”
Arresting the decline
The protests are unlikely to arrest India’s democratic decline. Modi’s government is powered not just by the BJP, but also by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. This is a century-old Hindu nationalist organization with well-organized networks extending into schools, unions, charities and neighborhoods.
The combination of deep grassroots organization and effective government control of the media makes Modi’s government extraordinarily capable of mobilizing supporters. These advantages help explain why Modi has remained in power for 12 years in a country historically known for turning incumbents out of power.
But the cockroach movement is getting three aspects of its political activism right. First, the movement has begun to restore a sense of political efficacy in India, or the belief that collective action can force a powerful government to retreat.
Earlier in 2026, CJP-led protests successfully forced Modi’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign over a scandal involving leaked exam papers. The stakes are extremely high. In a country where university graduates make up two-thirds of unemployed 20- 29-year-olds, success in such exams offers a rare pathway to upward mobility.
One indication that participation in the protest movement is now widening came from popular Indian YouTuber, Dhruv Rathee. In a recent interview, Rathee told the BBC that he was not a political figure but now felt compelled to participate in his first protest because “basically the foundation of our democracy is at stake here.”
Second, the protests have brought together previously distinct forces across broad sectors of Indian society. For example, lawyers, farmers’ organizations and activists have come together to back the protests.
It is especially important to coordinate the CJP and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (India) of opposition parties. This is because challenging a dominant party at the polls requires above all opposition coordination.
Opposition groups need not agree on every policy. The CJP is able to supply youth mobilization without the historical baggage of an established opposition party, while the India bloc can bring parliamentary representation and organization.
Third, protests are more effective when they coalesce around a clear and specific demand. Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March, a 24-day, 240-mile march to protest the British colonial monopoly on salt production and trade, epitomized this strategy. It brought together broad social alliances in opposition to a discrete policy that could be reversed.
A focused demand, in this case the resignation of the chief election commissioner, also gives any movement strategic flexibility. This includes the ability to pause mobilization after concessions without entirely dissolving the coalition that produced it.
India’s incumbent government retains formidable advantages. The BJP has enormous organizational resources, and nearly three years remain before the next national election in 2029, though an upcoming 2027 election in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh will provide an important test of the government’s popularity.
That is ample time to outlast protests, exploit opposition divisions and wait for public attention to shift elsewhere. So, the recent demonstrations have not reversed India’s democratic decline.
But they have widened political participation, focused public attention on the institutions that underpin democracy and weakened the belief that public resistance is futile.
Maya Tudor is professor of politics and public policy, University of Oxford.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
