Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s grip on power in the world’s largest democracy — long thought to be unshakable — is loosening, as massive youth protests crowd cities across the country and deliver Modi the most serious challenge he has faced since taking office in 2014.
In a sign of the situation’s gravity, thousands of security forces have placed central New Delhi under lockdown, with arriving demonstrators quickly whisked onto police buses and internet access intermittently disabled. Even so, thousands of protesters and leaders of the political opposition marched through the capital Monday in defiance of government authorities.
“This kind of national movement and national anger probably has not been seen since 1975,” said Prashant Bhushan, a New Delhi-based public interest lawyer.
Throughout his 12-year tenure, Modi has drawn fierce domestic and international criticism for his Hindu nationalist politics, rollback of civil liberties and a crackdown on dissident groups that involved a plot to assassinate an American citizen.
But until this month’s protests, the prime minister’s political might went all but unchallenged among India’s nearly billion-strong electorate, which handed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) commanding victory after commanding victory in polls.
Now, the “hubris” of Modi’s government may have pushed things too far, said Harsh Mander, a longtime Indian civil rights activist.
The immediate cause of the demonstrations comes over a new push to “revise” India’s voter rolls and rectify erroneous entries. Protesters charge that the revision process, which has removed the names of over 130 million voters under nebulous criteria, is a brazen campaign of selective disenfranchisement to tilt the political scales in favor of the ruling BJP.
That messaging has proved to be persuasive. The protests now increasingly draw the prime minister’s former supporters, said Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and former Indian military official.
The current movement “cuts across classes, it cuts across castes, it cuts across religious groups, because voting rights are something which affect all Indians,” Singh said.
The demonstrations are spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party, which emerged after the Supreme Court’s chief justice said the country’s unemployed young people were “cockroaches.”
But after staging protests in July over a scandal involving leaked state examinations, the Cockroach Janta Party forced the resignation of the education minister, an unprecedented concession from the Modi government and a signal that the formerly tongue-in-cheek movement had come to represent real political muscle.
On Monday, that muscle was out in full force as supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party joined ranks with the Indian National Congress, the country’s long-moribund political opposition, in a massive protest that jammed New Delhi’s wide boulevards.
Modi has yet to publicly comment on the protests.
Youth-led protest movements over economic malaise and entrenched corruption have roiled South Asia — and toppled regimes — in recent years. In 2022, young Sri Lankans stormed the presidential palace and forced the country’s leadership to resign. Bangladeshi students ousted the government in Dhaka in 2024; Gen Z Nepali protesters did the same in Kathmandu the following year.
Much like other protests across the region, India’s youth-led demonstrations more broadly reflect “general frustration with the lack of economic opportunities, no jobs being there [and] the sheer sense of hopelessness in India at this point in time,” Singh said.
Though the protests are unlikely to topple the Indian government, Modi could see his political power curtailed or even face an intraparty coup, analysts said. The next national elections in India are scheduled for 2029.
The government and the youth are now at an impasse. The Cockroach Janta Party is demanding the ouster of Gyanesh Kumar, the chief of India’s Election Commission, who oversees the voter revision process and whom protesters say Modi appointed in violation of the commission’s nonpartisan norms. Protesters also demand all changes to voter rolls be annulled.
The government may remove Kumar, but it is unlikely to cave on restoring 130 million voters to the electoral rolls, said Bhushan, the public interest lawyer. “There is no way that they can win elections hereafter. The only way that they can hope to win is through electoral manipulation.”
No matter how Modi handles the protests, analysts said, the prime minister must newly contend with a different relationship to his voters.
“This regime cannot survive in the way that it did for 12 years — with an implied consensus of a significant segment of the population,” Mander said. “It can now only survive with more and more repression, even more repression than it has unleashed in the past.”
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