The government of the world's largest democracy is shutting down the subway and cutting off the internet in its own capital to stop a movement that was a social media joke five months ago. The question hanging over the fall of 2026 is simple: which will prove more resilient, Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist power structure or a generation with nothing left to lose?
At 10 p.m. on October 9, 2026, mobile internet went dark within a four-kilometer radius of the intersection of Janpath and Kartavya Path in central New Delhi. The shutdown was authorized by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs for exactly twenty-four hours. The metro closed entrances and exits at 45 stations, though the original list had included 57. The railways canceled trains arriving at New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin stations between 4 a.m. and 2 p.m. on October 10. According to available reports, some 26,000 personnel from the central security forces and more than 20,000 police officers were brought into the capital, and 37 checkpoints went up on the approaches to Jantar Mantar.
The movement against which a nation of 1.4 billion people deployed this machinery was born on May 16. That day Abhijeet Dipke, a thirty-year-old native of Aurangabad, a student at Boston University, and a former staffer in the media operation of the Aam Aadmi Party, announced on social media the founding of the Cockroach Janta Party. The name mocked the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. No one intended to register the group with the Election Commission.
The cockroaches now have a single demand: the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The trigger was the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, during which more than 130 million names disappeared from them. That figure exceeds the population of Japan. The Bharatiya Janata Party itself, citing Commission data, breaks it down as follows: 28 million dead, 63 million relocated, 10 million duplicates, and 30 million people whom officials simply could not find at their listed addresses.
I treat this arithmetic with understandable caution. The numbers come from the party with the greatest stake in making the purge look like bookkeeping. Even by its own account, nearly one in four of those removed lost the right to vote because an inspector could not find them at home. In a country where millions lack even a birth certificate, that wording says more than any opposition slogan.
India's slide into autocracy is usually described as a slow, almost imperceptible drift. October 2026 showed something else. The regime has reached the point where it must close the subway to keep out students, which means its familiar tools, investigations, courts, airwaves, and budgetary largesse, no longer work on their own.
Worse Than Under Indira: What the Indexes Delhi Calls Colonial Reveal
The Swedish V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in its March 2026 report, kept India in the category of "electoral autocracy." More telling is this: the country's electoral democracy index fell to 0.38, whereas in 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, jailed the opposition, planted censors in newsrooms, and extended the term of parliament, the score stood at 0.39. On the electoral democracy scale India ranks 106th out of 179; on the liberal democracy scale, 105th. America's Freedom House downgraded the country from "free" to "partly free" back in 2021, and in its 2026 report the score dropped another point, to 62 out of 100.
Official Delhi responds to such reports with accusations of bias and a colonial mindset. In Baku, we know the political lens of Western indexes firsthand, and I do not urge anyone to take them on faith. One argument, however, cuts against Indian diplomacy: the same V-Dem report dropped the United States from 20th to 51st place over the first year of Donald Trump's second term. It is hard to accuse the institute of singling out India.
My method is simpler. Wherever possible, I check the indexes' conclusions against the Indian state's own statistics: government answers to parliament, Election Commission data, ministry reports, and court rulings. The picture does not get any softer.
The Washing Machine: 115 Out of 121
The main instrument of pressure on opponents bears a dull name: the Enforcement Directorate, or ED. This Finance Ministry agency investigates money laundering under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act of 2002. From 2004 to 2014, under Manmohan Singh's government, the ED conducted 112 searches under that law. Under Modi the count has run into the thousands: according to figures the government presented to parliament, there have been roughly 3,000 searches and more than 5,000 registered cases. The value of seized assets rose from 53.46 billion to 1.16 trillion rupees, or about $14 billion.
The political targeting is evident from who ends up under investigation. Indian investigative journalists found that of 26 prominent politicians investigated by the ED between 2004 and 2014, 14, or 54%, belonged to the opposition. After 2014, of 121 politicians under investigation, 115 were from the opposition. Exactly 95%.
In August 2024, answering a query in the upper house of parliament, the government acknowledged that of 5,297 cases the ED had opened over the decade, 40 had ended in conviction. A conviction is beside the point. The process is the punishment. Section 45 of the money laundering law shifts the burden of proof to the accused and makes bail nearly unattainable, and in July 2022 the Supreme Court upheld these provisions as constitutional in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary.
The timeline of election year 2024 reads like an operational briefing. On January 31 the ED detained Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, who had managed to resign a few hours before his arrest. In February the tax authorities froze the accounts of the Indian National Congress over claims related to its 2018–2019 fiscal year return, and the country's oldest party entered the campaign without access to its own money. On March 21, less than a month before the first phase of voting, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested, the first sitting head of a state government to be jailed in the republic's history.
The flip side of the mechanism is captured in a journalistic tally from that same year: of 25 prominent opposition figures who defected to the BJP after 2014 while facing criminal cases, 23 received relief, with their cases closed or put on ice. The opposition calls this the "washing machine." The phrase is crude but accurate.
The financial side was handled by the electoral bonds scheme introduced in 2017: donors remained anonymous to the public but not to the state-owned State Bank of India. On February 15, 2024, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously struck the scheme down as unconstitutional. By then, according to data disclosed later, the Bharatiya Janata Party had received about 60 billion rupees through it, nearly half of all bonds redeemed.
An Election Commission Appointed by the Prime Minister
Readers familiar with the post-Soviet world need no explanation of how an election commission is turned into an appendage of the executive. India's version took nine months. On March 2, 2023, in Anoop Baranwal, the Supreme Court ruled that commission members should be selected by a panel consisting of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, and the chief justice. In December of that year parliament passed a law replacing the chief justice with a Union minister of the prime minister's choosing, and the panel's math became two to one in the government's favor. The first chief election commissioner appointed under the new procedure, in February 2025, was Gyanesh Kumar; opposition leader Rahul Gandhi filed a dissent.
The commission's manner is well illustrated by a single episode. On April 21, 2024, in Banswara, Rajasthan, Modi delivered a speech that nearly everyone took as aimed at Muslims, talking about "infiltrators" and those who have more children. The commission sent its notice not to the prime minister but to the president of his party, Jagat Prakash Nadda, extending the same courteous procedure to Congress. On paper this looked like evenhandedness. In practice, the chief author of the language of hatred in that campaign never had to answer personally.
Trust in the commission fell in step. According to the Lokniti-CSDS research program, 51% of Indian voters expressed high trust in it in 2019; in 2024, 28%. In Uttar Pradesh the figure fell from 56% to 31%, in West Bengal from 68% to 41%. That last number proved prophetic.
The Special Intensive Revision of the rolls began in Bihar in the summer of 2025. Some 4.7 million people dropped off the state's final list, published on September 30, and a month and a half later the BJP-led coalition won the election there in a landslide. Next came West Bengal, where Muslims make up more than a quarter of the population and where Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress had remained an impregnable fortress for fifteen years. By April 2026 about 9.08 million people had been struck from the Bengal rolls, nearly 12% of 76.6 million voters, with the most removals in Murshidabad, Malda, Nadia, and both 24 Parganas districts, areas with large Muslim populations. On May 4 the BJP won the state for the first time in its history, taking more than 200 of 294 seats. Mamata Banerjee lost even her own constituency of Bhabanipur.
An honest caveat is needed here. It is impossible to prove that the purge decided the Bengal election. The revision also hit the belt of the Matua community, Hindu refugees from Bangladesh who vote for the BJP. Turnout reached a record 92.47%, and fatigue with Banerjee's fifteen-year rule was real. Still, after Bengal, the textbook formula holding that strong regional parties will forever block the expansion of Hindu nationalism needs revisiting. The south is holding for now: in Kerala a Congress-led bloc returned to power, and in Tamil Nadu a new force led by the actor Vijay became the largest party. The east has fallen.
The plan to scale the Bengal experience to the whole country is what drove people into the streets. In early October, Chief Justice Surya Kant demanded that the government, the commission, and Kumar personally give a clear and transparent account of what was happening to the rolls. Meanwhile BJP leaders declared that those removed would also lose social benefits meant for citizens. The link between the right to vote and a bowl of rice is the central plotline of this story, and I will return to it.
The Bulldozer Instead of the Judge
According to the 2011 census, Muslims make up 14.2% of India's population, roughly 200 million people. Only Indonesia and Pakistan have more. Hindu nationalist politics has turned this mass into an object of management. Amendments to the Citizenship Act passed in December 2019 for the first time made religion a criterion for fast-track naturalization; the rules implementing them took effect on March 11, 2024. Protests against the amendments ended in the February 2020 pogrom in Northeast Delhi, where 53 people died, most of them Muslims.
The bulldozer became the signature of the era. The routine is honed to automaticity: after clashes or protests, municipal authorities discover "illegal structures" belonging to those involved and demolish their homes and shops without trial. On April 20, 2022, in Delhi's Jahangirpuri, bulldozers kept working even after the Supreme Court ordered the status quo preserved. Only on November 13, 2024, did the Supreme Court rule that the executive cannot substitute itself for the courts, requiring that owners receive notice at least 15 days before demolition. The practice slowed afterward but did not disappear.
The mechanism of the dual state, where law applies to the loyal and expediency to everyone else, is plainly visible in the case of Pehlu Khan. In April 2017 a mob of "cow protectors" beat him on a highway in Alwar; he died two days later. In August 2019 a court acquitted all six defendants. By then Rajasthan police had already charged the dead man himself and his sons with cattle smuggling. A detail usually omitted: the charge sheet against the victim was filed in court under a Congress state government. The rot runs deeper than a single party, and that makes it more dangerous.
According to independent monitoring groups, the number of documented incidents of hate speech against religious minorities rose by 97% over 2023–2025. I consider this a floor: the count includes only public events captured on video.
The hope that coalition partners would restrain the BJP's ideological zeal after the 2024 election also proved unfounded. In April 2025, Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam and Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) voted for amendments to the Waqf Act, which Muslim organizations regard as an assault on the management of community property. Since January 27, 2025, Uttarakhand has lived under the country's first Uniform Civil Code. A nationwide code is on hold for now, but it is being road-tested at the state level.
The press and civil society are handled more subtly. Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit and defender of tribal rights, died in custody in July 2021 under the antiterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, without ever going to trial. Prabir Purkayastha, founder of an independent news portal, was arrested under the same law in October 2023, and only in May 2024 did the Supreme Court declare the arrest illegal. Over the past decade, by available accounts, more than 20,000 nongovernmental organizations have lost their licenses to receive foreign funding. In the 2025 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, India ranks 151st out of 180. For six straight years, from 2018 through 2023, the country led the world in internet shutdowns, ceding first place only in 2024 to war-torn Myanmar.
A Sack of Rice With a Portrait: How Modi Bought the Poor
Had the regime rested on fear alone, it would not have won three consecutive national elections. Modi built something no Indian prime minister had before: a direct link between his own face and the voter's kitchen.
The foundation is the Aadhaar biometric system, which has issued more than 1.3 billion identity numbers, along with a mechanism for direct transfers to bank accounts. Through this pipeline the federal government distributes gas cylinders, money for toilets under the Clean India program, housing subsidies, and payments to farmers under the PM-KISAN program. Since January 1, 2024, free grain under the PMGKAY program has been guaranteed to 813.5 million people for five years. Indian political scientists named this new electorate the labharthi, the beneficiaries. Village headmen and local officials were cut out of the chain, and some of the corruption went with them. This success must be acknowledged; otherwise Modi's electoral staying power remains inexplicable.
The price was the personal character of the largesse. The prime minister's portrait was printed on COVID-19 vaccination certificates and on sacks of free grain. The benefit is presented as the leader's personal gift; there is no constitutional right anywhere in the picture. Hence the straightforward logic of the threat voiced in October: whoever is struck from the voter rolls may lose his rations as well. The right to vote and a bowl of rice turned out to be tied to the same digital identifier.
In such a system, the cost of error is measured in lives. On September 28, 2017, in the village of Karimati in Jharkhand's Simdega district, 11-year-old Santoshi Kumari died of starvation. Her family's ration card had been canceled because it was not linked to Aadhaar, and the family had received no rations for several months. A prominent Indian human rights lawyer who represented victims maintains that there are tens of thousands of such cases nationwide and that starvation deaths have been recorded in at least 10 to 15 states. I cite his estimate as the position of a party to litigation, not as statistics.
The personalization extends to everything. The prime minister's monthly radio program, Mann Ki Baat, has aired since October 3, 2014. In twelve years as prime minister he has not held a single open press conference at home taking questions from journalists: at his one joint appearance with Amit Shah before the press, on May 17, 2019, Modi answered no questions. In October 2014, addressing doctors in Mumbai, the prime minister cited the elephant-headed god Ganesha as proof that plastic surgery existed in ancient India. At the Indian Science Congress in Jalandhar in January 2019, one speaker declared the theories of Newton and Einstein wrong and proposed renaming gravitational waves "Narendra Modi waves." The anecdote serves a purpose: civilizational pride is meant to compensate for colonial trauma and surround power with a sacred aura.
The aura cracked earlier than is commonly thought. On January 22, 2024, Modi personally performed the consecration ritual at the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Four and a half months later, the BJP lost the Faizabad constituency, which includes Ayodhya, to Samajwadi Party candidate Awadhesh Prasad. Nationwide, Modi's party won 240 seats, down from 303 in 2019, and for the first time in a decade was left without its own majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha. The government survives on the 16 votes of Telugu Desam and the 12 votes of Janata Dal (United).
A Generation With Nothing to Lose
The regime's urban base is the middle class, for whom new overpasses and a rising stock market are sufficient compensation for jailed human rights defenders. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 24 countries found that 85% of Indians consider rule by a strong leader unchecked by parliament and the courts, or direct military rule, a good form of government. That was the highest figure of any country surveyed. Seventy-two percent favored military rule, compared with 53% in 2017. Support for rule by unelected experts rose over the same period from 65% to 82%.
Beneath this loyal layer lies a stratum for whom the bargain with the state has stopped working. The India Employment Report 2024, produced by the International Labour Organization and India's Institute for Human Development, found that young people account for 83% of the country's unemployed. The share of those with secondary or higher education among unemployed youth rose from 35.2% in 2000 to 65.7% in 2022. According to the 2026 Periodic Labour Force Survey, unemployment among 15- to 29-year-olds stands at about 15%, and among college graduates under 25 it reaches 39.33%. Nearly two in five graduates under 25 are out of work.
The middle class conforms because it has something to lose. A twenty-year-old graduate from Patna or Nashik has nothing to lose. The loyalty pyramid offers him neither a government post nor a place in the private sector, and the exams that were supposed to be his ladder up have turned into a lottery riddled with leaked answers. All he has left is anger and a smartphone.
The Cockroach That Toppled a Minister
The detonator went off on May 15, 2026, in a Supreme Court courtroom. During hearings in a case on fake degrees, Chief Justice Surya Kant, who has held the post since November 2025, likened some unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites seeping into the legal profession, journalism, and the right-to-information movement. The court later clarified that it was referring to holders of fake degrees. Too late.
Dipke responded the next day. The manifesto proclaimed the party the voice of "the lazy and the unemployed": if you have no job and plenty of free time, you are a cockroach and welcome to join. By the movement's own count, a million people signed up in the first week, and 600,000 signed a petition demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Various estimates put the movement's Instagram following at 18 to 20 million; the official account of the BJP, the world's largest party, has about 9 million. The state reacted predictably: on May 21 the movement's account on X was blocked in India, and a couple of days later Dipke said the authorities had taken down its website as well.
In fairness, Dipke is no random student out of nowhere. From 2020 to 2023 he worked in the media operation of Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party and made memes for its victorious 2020 Delhi campaign. Pro-government commentators cite this as proof that the cockroaches are an opposition project. The argument is not baseless, yet it does not change the main point. A professional political strategist can invent a brand, but he cannot make twenty million people sign up for it.
The material basis of the revolt was an exam. On May 3, 2026, more than 2 million applicants sat for NEET-UG, the national entrance exam for medical schools. Leaks came to light. The government handed the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation, canceled the exam, and held a retest on June 21, while irregularities also surfaced in the electronic grading of papers by the Central Board of Secondary Education. On July 20, the opening day of parliament's monsoon session, thousands of the movement's supporters tried to march from Jantar Mantar to the parliament building, and police used tear gas and batons against a crowd in which students stood alongside their parents.
From there events moved at a speed unusual for the Modi government. On July 24 Union ministers met with the movement's leaders. On July 25 Dharmendra Pradhan posted his resignation letter on X. "For me, this is not a question of personal prestige," he wrote, explaining that he was stepping down so that "anti-national forces" could not exploit the situation at Jantar Mantar. Even on his way out, the minister could not resist the era's signature label. For a regime that in twelve years had very rarely retreated before the street, the resignation ranks alongside the 2021 repeal of the farm laws after a year of farmer protests.
The finale of the July round neatly illustrates the logic of the dual state. At the request of the Delhi police themselves, following the government's decision of July 25, the Supreme Court invoked Article 142 of the Constitution to close all criminal cases against participants in the July 20–25 protests. At the same time, on the central government's motion, the court allowed new cases to be opened against 2,873 people whom the police classified as having serious criminal records. Amnesty for the masses and a list of names for exemplary treatment. The movement responded by calling off a march scheduled for September 5.
A 1978 Degree That Cannot Be Shown to Outsiders
In September, pro-government commentators tried to hit Dipke by questioning whether he had really studied in Boston. The reply turned out to be the most painful jab of the entire year. Dipke proposed that he and the prime minister release their degrees at the same time.
The blow landed on a long-festering sore. In December 2016 the Central Information Commission, acting on an activist's request, allowed inspection of the records of all Delhi University bachelor's graduates from 1978, the year Modi officially received his degree. The university challenged the decision; in January 2017 the Delhi High Court stayed it, and on August 25, 2025, Justice Sachin Datta set it aside for good. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta assured the court that the 1978 bachelor of arts degree exists and that the university was prepared to show it to the judges, but not to strangers.
I am not claiming that the degree does not exist. Such a claim would be exactly what I warn colleagues against: an accusation without evidence. The political problem lies elsewhere. A state that has spent eight years in court to avoid showing its citizens a single piece of paper from 1978 is at the same time demanding that nearly a billion voters produce documents proving their right to vote.
One Hundred Thirty Million and One Commissioner
The fall wave began on October 2 at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, where thousands gathered. That same day in Delhi, police detained about a thousand participants in a rally at Jantar Mantar, among them former Delhi Chief Minister Atishi, politician Yogendra Yadav, and Neha Bora, president of the AISA student association. On October 7, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was briefly detained during a march to the Election Commission building. On October 8, thousands took to the streets of Bangalore. On the evening of October 9, leaders of the opposition INDIA bloc delivered a memorandum to President Droupadi Murmu.
The most telling signal came from inside the ruling coalition. Union Minister Chirag Paswan, whose party belongs to the National Democratic Alliance, commented on October 9 on the detentions and the canceled trains: "These are the youth of India, and nothing will stop them." That same day the Supreme Court indicated that there should be no complete closure of the metro and roads on October 10.
Detentions also took place far from the capital. According to Dipke, police in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, served activists with notices ordering them not to travel to Delhi and tried to find out who was paying for their tickets. The Communist Party of India reported that in Madhya Pradesh, students traveling from Pune were pulled off a train at Itarsi station. Early reports on October 10 spoke of hundreds detained. The full picture of that Saturday is still taking shape, and I will not fill in the gaps.
Why Baku Should Be Watching Jantar Mantar
The connection between Jantar Mantar and the South Caucasus is more direct than it seems. An ideology that turns 200 million of the country's own Muslim citizens into suspects also shapes New Delhi's foreign policy lens, through which Pakistan, Turkey, and Azerbaijan appear as a single hostile axis.
The facts are these. After the terrorist attack in Pahalgam on April 22, 2025, and the May military operation known as Sindoor, Azerbaijan, like Turkey, backed Pakistan, and a campaign to boycott Azerbaijani tourism erupted on Indian social media. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin in early September 2025, Azerbaijan's bid for full membership again failed because of India's position. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, stated openly that New Delhi was taking revenge on Baku in international forums for its alliance with Islamabad. Beijing, I would note, supported Azerbaijan's bid.
Meanwhile Armenia became the largest buyer of Indian weapons, as India's Finance Ministry reported as early as July 2024. According to available data, of India's $4.11 billion in defense exports in fiscal year 2025–2026, about $2 billion went to Armenia: Akash-1S air defense systems, Pinaka multiple rocket launchers, Swathi radars, and ATAGS howitzers. Indian artillery and air defense became the backbone of Armenia's rearmament at precisely the moment Baku and Yerevan are building a peace architecture.
Hence a conclusion unwelcome to those expecting geopolitical windfalls from India's protests. A weakening of Modi at home does not automatically mean a softer New Delhi line in the South Caucasus. Defense exports have become a business for India, and the anti-Pakistan consensus in Indian politics is broader than any single party. Baku would do better to build its calculations on Beijing's support within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and on its own indispensability in the Middle Corridor than on a change of mood in Delhi.
What Comes Next: Four Forecasts With Dates
I consider the scenario in which the cockroaches bring down the regime a fantasy. Modi retains the security apparatus, loyal television channels, the wallet of the labharthi, and the network of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which marked its centenary in 2025 and can mobilize supporters without any state funding. A scenario in which the protest quietly fizzles out also looks unlikely: the movement's social base of unemployed graduates will not vanish within a year.
The most likely outcome is a protracted war of attrition, and I am prepared to put four verifiable forecasts on record. Gyanesh Kumar will remain chief election commissioner as of December 31, 2026, because the government cannot surrender a second senior official to the street within six months without setting a precedent. The Supreme Court will not halt the revision of the rolls, but before the Uttar Pradesh elections in February–March 2027 it will order the commission to launch a simplified procedure for reinstating those removed. The Cockroach Party will not register with the Election Commission as a political party before those elections, preferring the role of extraparliamentary pressure. Modi will not hold a single open press conference in India taking questions from journalists before the 2029 general election.
India has its own historical precedent. In January 1977 Indira Gandhi called elections expecting an easy win, and in March she lost them along with her own Rae Bareli seat. There is a fresh European example as well: on April 12, 2026, Viktor Orbán, who spent sixteen years building an "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, lost to Péter Magyar's Tisza party, which won two-thirds of the seats in parliament on a record turnout of nearly 78%. Competitive authoritarianism can lose, as long as competition survives. That is why the main battle in India is being fought over the voter rolls. The government won the airwaves long ago.
One question remains open, and I have no answer to it. Will a movement born as a meme manage to become an organization before the state finds a way to split it along religious lines, as it has split every previous protest? In the summer at Jantar Mantar, Hindus and Muslims stood side by side. In the fall, Muslim votes became the very thing in dispute.
In the degree case, the solicitor general uttered a formula that describes today's Indian state more precisely than any index: the document exists, and it will be shown to the judges, but not to outsiders. In October 2026, the outsiders turned out to be 130 million people who were asked to prove that they exist. The cockroaches offered to swap papers. The regime responded by closing 45 metro stations and cutting the internet for a day.