India’s ‘million mutinies’ are puncturing Modi’s aura of invincibility

Across India, students and opposition parties are turning disparate grievances into a broader reckoning with unaccountable power.

This October, India is a country where a million mutinies are gathering force.

Surreally enough, they already talk of “Gyanu” — India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar — in the past tense. What will follow — what system or person — is a question that has been put on hold. That’s for later. For now, the protestors are unified with a single, concentrated message: they want Kumar, accused of manipulating voter rolls in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, to resign.

The rest of India — those not out on the streets — is umbilically tethered to a computer or phone screen, riding alternating currents of buoyancy, pessimism, doubt and rage.

Besides, central Delhi and parts of Mumbai are locked down under heavy security — on Gandhi Jayanti, no less — compounding the crisis of optics. Modi no longer provides stable governance. At this point, he rules not by legitimacy but by brute force and fear — of losing power and the legal reckoning that might follow once power is lost. For much of Modi’s political history, hierarchy has carried its own justification. His foundational axiom is that voters work for him and not the other way around. When he was popular, it worked. He could get us to queue in front of ATMs; lock us down without fo

The protests are disparate, but their underlying demand is strikingly similar: power comes with responsibility. The Chief Election Commissioner, the upper-caste teachers at IIT Bombay and the gang rapists who posed as cops are all being pulled into the same reckoning.

This new wave of protests, the second in three months, challenges the inevitability of Modi.

Modi has, in fact, revived some of the very instruments of repression that Gandhi spent his political life resisting: restrictions on public assembly, curfews, preventive detention and the policing of dissent. The more precarious his hold on power, the more nakedly he reaches for brute force.

Over the coming days, Modi may well succeed in emptying the streets, imprisoning protesters, confiscating placards and silencing dissent. What he will not be able to do, at least not indefinitely, is compel Indian voters to believe that power is legitimate simply because it is powerful.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.