Addressing a press conference earlier this week, lawyer Prashant Bhushan stated that protests over electoral-roll manipulation through the Special Intensive Revision by the Election Commission had become “really a fight for regime change,” and this is a democratic right of citizens. As per Supreme Court observations on sedition, creating “disaffection” against a government is not a crime absent violence or public disorder. Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including Rajnath Singh, Nitin Nabin, Sambit Patra and others, alleged that this exposes the opposition’s agenda of street anarchy, Bangladesh-style upheaval, collusion with foreign powers or “a conspiracy to seize power by creating anarchy”.The ruling BJP’s framing of opposition calls for a “regime change” as anti-national, unconstitutional or a threat to democracy is fundamentally wrong, intellectually dishonest and historically hypocritical. Demands for regime change are not a violation of democracy, they are its primary purpose. The BJP is wrong because wanting Modi out is not the same as wanting India destabilised. And it is hypocritical because BJP and RSS leaders openly demanded political change, backed street mobilisation and called for the removal of an elected prime minister when Congress held power. Their own record demolishes their argument.1. The Modi government is not the Indian RepublicBJP President Nitin Nabin’s claim that the phrase “regime change” exposes an attempt to destabilise India is deliberately conflating three different things into one: the BJP, the union government and the country. They are not interchangeable. A government is merely a temporary administrator chosen by the electorate, whereas the nation is the sovereign entity.Removing BJP from office merely changes which party governs India. Calling that objective ‘anti-national’ is tantamount to giving Modi and the BJP a proprietary claim over the country. Modi is entitled to hold office constitutionally, but he is not allowed to have a continued stint as the prime minister be decreed as a national-security imperative.2. The constitution does not guarantee a prime minister an uninterrupted five-year personal tenureThe BJP is essentially arguing that once a party wins an election, its right to rule is absolute and immune from opposition mobilisation until the next election cycle. This is an idea alien to parliamentary democracy. Article 75(3) makes the Council of Ministers collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha. A government’s survival depends on parliamentary confidence, and not on an incumbent’s assertion that the last election insulated him from demands for resignation. Calling for regime change through democratic processes, whether elections, mass movements or parliamentary no-confidence motions is not an extra-constitutional coup, it is the standard operating mechanism of representative democracy. Demanding that Modi leave office before the next scheduled election is democracy in action. And India has witnessed this numerous times before.3. An election victory does not suspend political rights until the next electionArticle 19 of the Indian Constitution protects right to free speech, peaceful assembly and association. It needn’t be said that those rights operate between elections as well, and not just during the election campaign. An electoral mandate – with only 36% of the votes polled, i.e., 23 crore people and 240 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 – allows the BJP to govern; it does not authorise its leaders to demand public silence from all Indians. A chorus from the BJP leaders and their supporters to “respect the mandate” does not mean “stop organising against us”. In a democracy, citizens can accept an election’s outcome while campaigning from the following morning to remove its winner. Spreading political dissatisfaction against an incumbent government to persuade voters to change leadership is the cornerstone of democratic campaigning. 4. Peaceful street protests are not an unconstitutional seizure of powerPeople’s mobilisation does not acquire the legal power to appoint a government merely by assembling and protesting. But neither does the government acquire the right to criminalise that assembled citizenry because it wants Modi gone. By weaponising terms like “regime change,” borrowing foreign policy terminology to imply external subversion or illegal overthrow, BJP is hoping to frighten citizens, activist and civil society into believing that demanding a change in leadership is seditious. Does the BJP not know that the political demands of the protestors do not extinguish the constitutional protection they have? A protest can legitimately seek resignations, legislative change or the government’s electoral defeat without being vilified as an insurrection. Demanding the removal of an elected government is their constitutional right.5. An opposition that cannot seek power is not an oppositionIn a democracy, opposition politics exists to translate public grievances into political support and, ultimately, form a government and propose an alternative political programme. That is democratic accountability, not an exposed conspiracy. Congress leader Pawan Khera has explicitly described the objective of mass mobilisation as defeating the government through elections. Portraying that objective as an incriminating admission turns normal political competition into suspected subversion. An opposition is supposed to organise and work towards an alternative government, not certify the incumbent’s indispensability. This is how the Westminster system works where the leader of the opposition is considered as the prime minister in waiting and her team a shadow cabinet. After 25 years in public office, Modi should at least know this much.6. Seeking ‘regime change’ is not a confession to a criminal methodBJP leader Sudhanshu Trivedi has asserted that a change through elections is democratic, whereas “regime change” means conspiracies and violent conflict. That is a prejudiced definition, not proof of what a group of particular protesters intend. Khera’s stated electoral objective cannot simply be overwritten by the BJP’s preferred interpretation of two words. Is there evidence which establishes violence or conspiracy? A phrase cannot do the work of evidence. The demand to replace a government is the heart of democratic politics.Nabin also claims that using the term “regime change” exposes collusion with foreign powers, which it does not. A demand to remove a government or a prime minister establishes an intention to remove that government or that leader; it does not establish a foreign sponsor or an unlawful operation. “Foreign backed” cannot be used as a substitute by the BJP leaders for answering domestic criticism that Modi faces. Otherwise, any sufficiently effective opposition can be labelled foreign precisely because it has become effective7. The BJP’s has a history of seeking regime change when in oppositionThe BJP and its predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, alongside the RSS, built their entire political relevance on explicit, aggressive calls for regime change. If demanding the prime minister’s resignation and mobilising outside Parliament were legitimate when the BJP did them, they cannot become inherently subversive only when directed against the BJP. The constitutional rights involved do not change with the party occupying the Treasury benches. The BJP’s historical position, articulated many times in the United Progressive Alliance era by leaders like Arun Jaitley, was that an elected government could be confronted through sustained agitation and demands for resignation before its term got over. Senior BJP leaders like L.K. Advani routinely declared the Dr. Manmohan Singh government “illegitimate,” calling for its immediate resignation, parliamentary shutdowns and early elections long before scheduled polls. They repeatedly stated that unseating an incompetent or corrupt government was the patriotic duty of every citizen and political party.At his Varanasi rally on December 20, 2013, Modi himself said that “the people of the country want to uproot the government in Delhi.” At the BJP’s Goa meeting in June 2013, he had already given a call for a Congress-free India. Calling for the complete elimination of the ruling party from power nationwide is the ultimate form of a “regime change” campaign. Modi could then describe mass gatherings as evidence that people wanted to “uproot” the union government, but his party now portrays another movement’s desire to remove the BJP government as an exposed agenda.During Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti movement against Indira Gandhi’s government in 1975, Bharatiya Jana Sangh leaders, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani, actively participated in calling for the complete overhaul and removal of the elected Congress regime. They actively organised mass protests, strikes and parliamentary boycotts with the sole objective of forcing the Congress government out of power before its term expired. Amit Shah and other BJP leaders themselves later celebrated this history, stating that when those in power become dictatorial, “the people have the power to overthrow them.”Treating similar language or street mobilisation as democratic resistance then, but as anarchy or foreign conspiracy now, is inconsistent on part of the ruling party. When the BJP argues that the opposition’s call for regime change is dangerous or illegal, it is denying the opposition the exact same democratic mechanism that brought the BJP to power in 1998 and 2014.After all, noted Hindi poet, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s famous words have been invoked innumerable times by the opposition: “Singhasan khaali karo, ki janta aati hai (Vacate the throne, for the people have arrived).”