IN a relay race, one must trust all running partners equally, and not second-guess the other’s abilities or overestimate one’s own ability to deliver victory or gain glory. That would be a different field of activity and not the race in which the baton is passed at the quickest possible speed. Worryingly, the movement against the mass rigging of elections in India is beginning to look like a relay race in which the runners are not necessarily looking together at the end of the linear, or oval, or meandering track ahead.
In some tellings, the challenge is trickier, more like a trapeze act, and without a safety net. A miss of the clap of the partner’s hands or misjudging the timing of a leap could lead to injury or worse. No matter how equipped one party feels about its own sinews to carry the baton to the finish line by itself, a collective race offers no quarter to one-upmanship.
If the objective is to bring down the Modi government, which is what Congress and its supporters say they hope to do, there is an absence of team coordination. A clear discussion is required with all stakeholders for a shared understanding of the game plan. Call it a common minimum programme, if you like. If the objective is to clean up governance, which is what the Cockroach group has committed itself to from the start — a transparent, humane judiciary, an independent corporate-free media, accountable bureaucracy, a trustworthy election commission, a truly representative parliament with 50 per cent women MPs — all these objectives are also ways of reaching the same outcome: the desire for the dismantling of a right-wing regime.
Cockroach leader Abhijeet Dipke’s reported comments that his party is aiming for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, and that it doesn’t share the enthusiasm for regime change, need to be parsed and accepted with empathy. The youngsters may not have built the appetite for prison visits or the daily brutal assaults by police and state-run goons. Besides, they may genuinely fear their agenda was being hijacked by allies with larger resources or experience in the field.
Nearly everyone opposed to the Modi government is overlooking the acumen needed to learn from history.
There could be nothing truly wrong with a call to change the Modi regime. Modi has similarly called for removing Manmohan Singh, and the JP movement was all about overthrowing Indira Gandhi’s government. In which case, everyone should be made aware of what is involved in the effort and whether they all feel equipped to bear the inevitable pushback from the regime they seek to dismantle. There is already an undeclared emergency. If push comes to shove, the government has the wherewithal to formally suspend civil liberties. The BJP echo chamber has been describing the campaign against vote theft as a leftist conspiracy. It may not be a coincidence that the government has timed a verbal exchange with China over India’s curiously announced renaming of certain places in Ladakh at the height of the Delhi protests. The timing coincided with an evolving attack on communist parties that have participated with full strength in the protests. The bulldozer attacks on communist book stalls in BJP-ruled West Bengal during the ongoing Durga puja celebrations offer a clue to this plan.
The one obstacle that comes to mind against an open declaration of emergency is not one from the activists. It could come, instead, from the RSS, the fountainhead of the Hindutva fold, which wouldn’t want to hand over any extra powers itself to any prime minister or his cabinet. Anyone familiar with the history of the Third Reich would know of the swiftness with which the Führer eliminated the leadership of the SA in what is remembered as the Night of the Long Knives. In that fear lies a potential deterrent to a formal clampdown, though the right-wing state has equipped itself with all manner of underhand methods to keep a truly mortal challenge at bay.
Nearly everyone opposed to the Modi government is overlooking the acumen needed to learn from history. The last time an entrenched fascist party was removed from power, it needed a world war and an unconscionable toll of human lives. In a more recent and relatively local context, it took the so-called champions of global democracy 20 years of war and trillions of dollars in treasure and human lives to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. If we align the world’s three most implacable right-wing ducks in a row — Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Narendra Modi — the most organised to fend off dethronement should be the Indian duck, followed by the Israeli and the American. Of the three, the orange-haired goose, although the most powerful of the three, looks the readiest to be cooked (or impeached) after the midterms. Netanyahu needs a miracle to survive by defeating Iran. And since that is not going to happen, he may be plotting something equally kinetic to cancel the election. Modi needs to do nothing of the sort.
The required first step to restore a functional democracy in India is for the current regime to go. Would it go the same way as another regime was shown the door in 1977? Extremely unlikely. Today is not 1977 and Narendra Modi is not Indira Gandhi. The West opposed her short-lived dictatorship not for the love of democracy but because she was a mainstay of the Soviet camp during the Cold War. Modi became prime minister as a consensus candidate for India’s big businesses, with their comprador levers abroad. Like the Israeli lobby in the US, they too ply their MPs. Modi can be removed if the consensus switches sides. But that brings the status quo, not change. The Cockroaches, Congress, and every runner in the fray have just one choice — to plan to win the relay race, to defeat the quarry instead of bickering over the baton.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2026
