India, the world’s biggest secular, liberal democracy, has held a run of elections that settles a question some of its street agitators keep trying to reopen.
In May, the Indian National Congress, the country’s main national opposition party, won the southern state of Kerala. It did so as part of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a Congress-led alliance. The UDF took roughly 100 of the state’s 140 seats and ended a decade of rule by the Communist-led Left Democratic Front. In neighbouring Tamil Nadu, C. Joseph Vijay, a film star turned politician, became Chief Minister following a stunning electoral debut this year, just two years after founding his party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), in 2024. His party emerged as the single-largest force in the 234-member Assembly, defeating the incumbent DMK and the AIADMK-led alliance, which included Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP.
The ruling party has not been immune either. In the 2024 national election, the BJP fell from 303 seats to 240 in the 543-seat lower house. That cost it a majority in its own right, and Modi now governs only with the support of coalition partners.
Every one of these results came from the same Election Commission, India’s equivalent of the Australian Electoral Commission, and the same electronic voting machines. The Commission is the institution the latest round of ‘protests’ in Delhi attacks as compromised, alleging ‘vote theft’. A system cannot be honest when the opposition wins and fraudulent when it loses. The voters have tested the EVM narrative at the ballot box, and they have rejected it each time. Indians are tired of attempts to create anarchy and unseat an elected government, and those funding them should not test that patience.
The other target is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. Its purpose is to remove the dead, the duplicated, those who have moved away and anyone not eligible to vote. Bogus names on a roll are an invitation to election fraud. No democracy can allow that, and cleaning the rolls is the opposite of subverting an election.
Same toolkit, different cause
The issues change, but the playbook does not. It comes with a viral hashtag, a ready-made social media kit, a rush to the capital’s cameras, the language of “the death of democracy” and a deadline for the government to resign. Some causes are legitimate and some are not, but the machinery is the same. It is a template that moves from grievance to grievance, and that is how you spot the professional protester.
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) is the clearest example. It began this year as a ‘youth’ movement over exam paper leaks, a long-running problem in India’s competitive exams. This year’s leak hit the NEET medical entrance exam, which was held on 3 May and then cancelled. The system responded. The Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s federal investigative agency, opened a case within days and arrested 13 people. A re-exam was held on 21 June. The government then went further and gave in. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on 25 July, and the CJP called off its 36-day agitation, saying its demands had been accepted.
That should have been the end of it. Within two months, however, the same leaders had picked a new target, the Chief Election Commissioner, and a new cause, the electoral roll revision. A “movement” that moves straight from one grievance to the next bears the hallmark of a protest industry, hopping from subject to subject. Nor is it a coincidence that opposition leaders keep hitching their wagons to these agitators. Several of them were detained alongside the protesters in Delhi and later released.
It also raises a question that deserves an answer: who is paying? After the minister’s resignation, videos of CJP leaders dancing at a hotel celebration went viral. The movement’s founder, Abhijeet Dipke, was living in Boston until June, when he flew home to launch the campaign. And while the CJP took on the Centre, it did not bring the same energy to similar paper-leak controversies in Jharkhand, Punjab and Karnataka. All three states are run by opposition parties, not the BJP. Yet it found its voice again in Maharashtra, another BJP-ruled state, where it backed protests over the state’s public service exam leaks and demanded the resignation of the commission’s chairman.
This toolkit does not seem to be confined to India. Well-known commentator and Fox News Digital investigative journalist Asra Nomani has documented how this kind of machinery operates in France, which has also been rocked by violent protests. She traced a transnational network of about 50 groups mobilising around the French student riots, of which only a third were youth groups. Her latest piece carries the subtitle “From France to Greece, India and the US”. A genuine grievance gets taken over by organised outsiders, then packaged and exported through a global propaganda network and amplification machine.
How democracies are actually brought down
In 1953, Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh, a liberal, elected prime minister who had nationalised the country’s oil industry, was removed in a coup engineered by the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Paid crowds and street disorder created the look of a popular revolt, and the army finished the job. Iran has lived with that rupture ever since.
South America tells the same story many times over. In Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973, street agitation and disruption came first, each presented as the voice of the people. Then elected governments fell, and the generals who replaced them were not liberators. This does not mean every protest is a conspiracy. It means “people power” is the most effective cover for those who want to subvert an elected order.
Since Modi took office in 2014, India has lived through repeated agitations that turned violent. Among the many protests was the February 2016 Jat quota agitation, which paralysed the state of Haryana for nine days. The state’s police chief put the death toll at 30, with more than 200 injured, and government buildings, shops and hospitals were set on fire. In 2018 came the Bhima Koregaon violence in Maharashtra. Then came the 2019–20 protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, including the months-long Shaheen Bagh blockade of a major Delhi road. They preceded the Delhi riots of February 2020, which killed 53 people. In January 2021, a ‘farmers’ tractor rally’ on Republic Day broke through police lines and stormed Delhi’s Red Fort. In June 2022, protests against the Agnipath military recruitment scheme spread across several states, and at least 12 trains were set on fire.
Whatever the cause, and its merits can and should be debated, anarchy, mob rule and violence cannot be allowed to subvert law and order. A country forced to witness near-permanent agitation for years is entitled to feel exhausted and entitled to suspect that there is a ‘protest’ industry meant to undermine the progress of the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
Peaceful protest is a democratic right, and a confident republic protects it. But a protest needs permission, and where permission is refused, you cannot hold one. Violence, blockades, arson and deliberate chaos are not dissent, and no democracy can allow anarchy. Australians know this. Our own authorities will not let a protest shut down a city for days simply because its organisers feel strongly.
That is why, when the CJP pressed ahead with its 10 October 2026 Jantar Mantar protest in Delhi without permission, police detained hundreds of people who were gathering, including those with criminal records, as a preventive measure. The CJP’s leaders were also detained on landing at Delhi airport. The force this time deployed an all-women “Pink Force” unit, with body cameras fitted to officers’ uniforms.
The cameras are to protect the public and the police alike. They will show whether the police or the agitators did anything to anyone or not. They give an honest, unedited record to set against the fabricated clips and doctored narratives that a well-oiled international propaganda machine could use to smear police and governments and also hold them to account if any misconduct happens. If a story is true, the unedited footage will show it. If it is false, the footage will expose it.
CJP leaders Abhhijit Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka have all been released today (11 October 2026).
The other factor to take into consideration is that anything that happens in Delhi gets coverage far beyond its real weight, and social media now amplifies it. A few thousand people with good camera angles can look like a national uprising. But India is not the Delhi news cycle. It is the oldest continuous living civilisation on earth and the world’s most populous nation with over a billion people. Its voters, from Kashmir to Kerala, have shown that they know how to deliver a verdict. It has outlasted far more serious challenges than a hashtag campaign.
A healthy democracy needs a strong opposition to keep the government in check, and the 2024 result showed that voters want one. But an opposition that stands beside street agitators who reject police orders and electoral verdicts is telling voters it is not ready to govern. If it keeps choosing the street over the ballot, its road back to power in Delhi will only get harder.
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