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New Delhi, India – Bloodstains on the walls, overturned curtains, broken glass and shoes scattered on the road. A dress here, a broken glass and a torn shirt there are like remnants of the chaos that gripped India’s capital.
The heart of New Delhi – Parliament and Connaught Place, a colonial-era site – has a picture of the police on Monday attacking thousands of protesters, many of them students, who blocked the capital, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
A group of protesters reached the entrance of the parliament building before leaving as the police fired tear gas at them. More than 100 students were injured.
“I still can’t believe I’m in Delhi,” said Anshul Dev, 18, who grew up in the capital. “Part of it is because the tear gas is still there,” he added, laughing with his group of friends. One of them had bandaged both legs.
“This government, which our elders voted into power, is treating us like criminals and criminals,” Dev said. “This is our country, and we are taking it away from their hate politics. We are here to solve this problem.”
Anger among India’s youth, the world’s largest Gen Z group, has been running high for the past two months over a series of entrance exams that have left millions of students stranded. Sometimes, test papers were leaked; in others, students who wanted copies of their answers found that they had been misled. More than 20 students have died by suicide, many citing the paper leak.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not spoken about the protests, although he was seen smiling on Monday in parliament, meters away from demonstrators at one point.
Analysts said the student protests face major hurdles before getting permission from the Modi government. However, the protests, the government’s refusal to take responsibility for their actions and the violations of the law have also fueled the accusation that the Prime Minister has long faced from critics and opposition parties – that even though he is democratically elected, he acts as a dictator.
‘Protests will continue’
After dark on Monday, Abhijeet Dipke – the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the political pressure group that had called for the march – returned to the decrepit CJP protest site near Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory that is now a key protest site.
“These brutal Delhi police beat our students and friends. We are saddened,” he said, addressing the nearly 2,000 protesters who remained behind after the attack. “We will continue to resist and hold the government accountable. We will not back down until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.”
Mr Dipke told the protesters that the Delhi police had “acted brutally to destroy our hope” of Pradhan’s resignation. He said: “This was our first call to march. “There will be more. Don’t lose hope.”
Volunteers started collecting garbage, pitching a tent together and sweeping the road at the Jantar Mantar site. This is where more than 100 people from student organizations have been sleeping for almost a whole month to join Sonam Wangchuk, who is a well-known activist in the fight for people’s rights on hunger strike in order to get the minister to resign.
The police also raided the tents and property of the student organizations on Monday.
The group grew larger last week after police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site and gave him to a state-run hospital, where he remained. His family and the CJP called it “unlawful imprisonment”, but the Delhi High Court refused immediate relief.
Wangchuk, 59, broke his hunger strike before traveling on Monday; however, he later said that he would have also “witnessed violence” against “students who are peacefully protesting”.
Delhi Police has filed at least five cases against protesters in connection with violence, stone pelting and vandalism during the March.
Meeting with the government is a ‘waste of time’
Before leaving, the CJP leaders said the government had reached a dialogue.
When thousands of protesters gathered in New Delhi, two spokesmen of the CJP met with JP Nadda, the minister of health of India, to explain the demands of the group: the resignation of Pradhan, the release of Wangchuk from the hospital and a payment of about $ 105,000 to the families of the students who committed suicide.
However, they were disappointed by the sunset. “It was a waste of our time,” said Ashutosh Ranka, CJP spokesperson. “We waited for four hours, and the minister met us for 10 minutes.”
Nadda said he met the speakers “in peace”, adding that he “asked all the protesters to end their silence and help the authorities to recover”.
Some students have been demanding that the protests be called off, so that they can go beyond the CJP to demand a response from the government.
And political experts who spoke to Al Jazeera said that maintaining the integrity of the CJP leadership is one of the factors holding the party back in the face of an unprecedented campaign.
Fighting the ‘strong man’
Since the police forcefully removed Wangchuk from the protest site, the group and the protesters have called on Modi to step down. A direct message to the Prime Minister was returned to the center of New Delhi on Monday.
The large number of protesters “is very difficult for the Prime Minister”, said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a writer and biographer of Modi.
So far, he told Al Jazeera, “Modi has decided to continue to respond naturally without giving permission to the protesters and continue to portray himself as a man of unwavering courage.”
The historian added that the Prime Minister, who has been in power since 2014, “doesn’t care before he crushes protests or uses violence until he cuts off his constituencies”.
“They will follow their hypocritical response. Modi will not want to come out with a bloody nose,” he said, “although there is a lot of anger among the youth, which shows a lack of respect for responsibility.”
The anger was sparked when Gen Z joked, the Cockroach Janta party, after India’s chief justice likened anti-government activists and unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “germs”.
Memes, online riots and students posing for photos in front of the police have flooded the Internet in India, where they have expressed their dismay at the actions of the police.
Meghnad S, a YouTuber, was among thousands of people in front of the Indian Parliament on Monday.
“It was madness, and the crowd was angry because of what the police did. It was brutal,” he told Al Jazeera from the scene of the protest on Monday night. “But traffic is always a mess. This is hard to control. We’re all cockroaches, and we’re still wandering around here.”
By Tuesday morning, the crowd had filled the place again. The winds had returned.
