The shadow of the recent youth protests in Delhi looms large on prime minister Narendra Modi, as clearly seen during his unimpressive speech on the Independence Day. He was struggling with and juggling around the same stale ideas that nobody cared for anymore. Fearing a political backlash of the anger of the youth, he tried very hard to pacify them, but that ship has already sailed.To divert the attention of the country once more from the real issues he used the word ‘dimagi Naxals’ or ‘intellectual Naxals’, obviously for those who oppose him, which shows that he is in deep shock about the youth protests in Delhi. His words and body language betrayed his loosening grip on power. It seems the fire has now reached the chamber of power that the Modi-Shah duo created and commanded with full authority for a long time now. The heat is becoming unbearable for the duo with each passing day. They are trying very hard to recapture the narrative but it’s only getting stronger against them.Modi-Shah made a mockery of the parliament and shredded all democratic norms and ethos to pieces by brazenly avoiding the whole monsoon session. The scared duo didn’t want to face the parliament on the issue of the police atrocities committed on the youth agitating in Delhi on July 20.Recently, Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi said in his speech at a programme in Delhi , “Mark my words – until the day Narendra Modi resigns and Amit Shah steps down, neither of them will be able to sleep. We will keep them awake, keep them up all night, until they finally collapse and admit, ‘This is beyond us; forgive us, let us go’.”Arrogance of powerModi has been continuously in power since 2001, first as Gujarat chief minister and later as the prime minister since 2014. Shah has been his most trusted companion sharing this power. Would it be so easy that the opposition would ask them and the Modi-Shah duo will leave this power and go, especially when they still have numbers in the Lok Sabha and the next general elections are still three years away? Since 2014, the Modi government has been continuously engaged in systemic oppression of the citizens and suppression of the opposition, by capturing the state institutions designed to check such unbridled power and through weaponisation of the state machinery. But the Modi-Shah duo never takes any responsibility for such acts.Full of arrogance of power, Amit Shah has neither given a statement about the police crackdown on the protesting students, nor resigned, as the opposition demanded. This is not the first time. The failures of Shah, as Union home minister since 2019, is too long to ignore anymore. His acts of omission and commission – the atrocities committed against the farmers during their 2020-21 protests around Delhi, his failure to control Delhi riots in 2020, his failure to control the civil war like situation in Manipur since 2023, the oppression of the women wrestlers’ protesting at Jantar Mantar in 2023, his failure for the terror attack on tourists in Pahalgam in 2025, his failure for the blast in front of the Red Fort in 2025, his crushing of the student protesters in Delhi in July 2026 – all these are the examples of his abject failures as the home minister but he has never taken any responsibility for any of these failures.In fact, it’s the collective failure of the Modi-Shah duo. We can’t shield Modi from sharing the responsibility for these failures, as nothing moves without his permission or concurrence in this government. Besides, he always comes forward to take credit for all the achievements of his government. So, he is also equally or maybe more responsible for all these failures.Institutions captured and weaponisedThis regime has shamelessly weaponised its investigative machinery – Enforcement Directorate (ED), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Income Tax (IT) department – to systematically dismantle the political opposition. By instilling fear of arbitrary arrest and financial ruin, the state has engineered the splintering of established political parties, stealing their MPs and MLAs and the mid-term collapse of elected opposition state governments.The Election Commission of India (ECI), once an independent custodian of the elections that ensured peaceful transfer of power, has betrayed its fundamental mandate of conducting free and fair elections. In fact, it is brazenly partisan now. It’s acting only to protect and perpetuate this regime. This is a huge breakdown of its Constitutional duty. Instead of ensuring an impartial electoral process, the ECI has overseen severe discrepancies. Most alarming are the targeted deletions of voter names from the electoral rolls, systematically disenfranchising specific sections of the population to benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).The judiciary has largely abdicated its role as the guardian of the Constitution, as a check on the executive overreach, and the protector of the fundamental rights of the citizens, repeatedly looking the other way when the structural manipulations are brought before the courts. Through prolonged delays in hearing vital constitutional matters and a visible reluctance to challenge state actions, the Judiciary has institutionalised a culture of state impunity.The voice of the citizens and the media is being suppressed without any care of the constitutional provisions of free speech and democratic norms. Most of the media, especially the mainline media has already prostrated in front of the power. The few independent media platforms are regularly hounded for showing truth to the power. The government is now relentlessly pounding the social media companies to control the narrative that’s going against it, as revealed by the high numbers of the content blocking orders issued by the government to these firms.The power is no longer maintained through the consent of the governed, but through the coercion of the opposition, oppression of the citizens especially the minorities and organised manipulation of the elections with the ECI acting as their most trusted partner, with a compliant Judiciary overlooking the whole game as a mute spectator and a puppet media misleading the nation.This raises a vital question for the political opposition and the citizenry: When formal institutions collapse and power acts with total impunity, must a nation wait for the scheduled calendar of a 2029 general election to remove such a regime from power, or does democratic theory mandate immediate, ‘specific resistance’?There is no guarantee that in the 2029 general elections the playing field will remain fair and the current regime won’t commit political oppression any more or unleash the power of the state against its own citizens. The traditional referees of Indian democracy have already failed their constitutional mandates. In such a captured system, waiting another three years till 2029 is not a strategy; it is an invitation to absolute subversion. So what should “We, The People of India” and the opposition do now?‘Specific resistance or general rebellion’ is justifiedIn his seminal political treatise “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill argued that to protect vulnerable citizens from being exploited by countless predators, society needed a central authority, powerful enough to keep those predators in check. But since this governing power could easily turn against its own people, citizens had to remain in a constant state of defence against its absolute power. He argued that the true goal of patriots was to set clear limits on the power a ruler could exercise over the public. Citizens have such political liberties and constitutional rights that the ruler should not legally violate. If the government did cross those lines, ‘specific resistance or general rebellion’ was considered completely justified.The people of the country and the opposition, drawing on Mill’s advocacy for “specific resistance” against executive overreach, must embark on a peaceful mass movement to force the current government to either uphold the social contract in word and spirit, which they’re unlikely to do or resign forthwith.India’s political opposition cannot rely on the 2029 electoral cycle to remove this government due to the collapse of traditional democratic checks. The government’s systematic neutralization of the judiciary, electoral machinery, capture of media and weaponisation of investigative agencies necessitates immediate, mass mobilisation – similar to the 2020-21 farmers’ protests, or the recent youth movement in Delhi – to reclaim democracy and uphold accountability.To break the stranglehold of the Modi-Shah duo over the republic and its institutions, the INDIA coalition must look beyond the floor of the Parliament, where its voices are routinely suspended or outvoted. If the opposition limits its battles to a rigged institutional framework, it merely participates in a charade that legitimises the ruling regime. The opposition should assemble a vast, multi-sectoral alliance – synthesising political parties, farmers and labour organisations, and youth movements –to initiate a massive movement.The precedent of resistance: The farmers’ and Gen Z protestsThe historic 2020-21 farmers’ protest serves as the most potent precedent for how a powerful government can be forced to capitulate. When the Modi government passed the controversial farm laws, lakhs of farmers marched toward New Delhi. Met with barricades, tear gas, and water cannons. They converted the capital’s borders into permanent, self-sustaining protest townships.For over a year, the farmers maintained a peaceful but unyielding physical blockade. This action disrupted the state’s narrative of absolute control, forced international attention, and created a prolonged crisis of legitimacy for the regime. The continuous physical leverage of the blockade achieved what the outvoted opposition could not do inside Parliament: it forced Modi to formally repeal the laws. The farmers proved that numbers on the street can overrule numbers in the legislature. The recent Gen Z protests are another example of the humbling of an arrogant power. They forced a Cabinet Minister to resign from a government where resignations are considered against their norms.Reclaiming the republicAs Mill warned, when the ‘king of the vultures’ uses its beak and claws to torment the youth, oppress the farmers, silence the people, subvert elections, break the opposition parties, capture the institutions and control the media then the citizens must adopt an attitude of defiance and resistance. The executive’s refusal to take responsibility for the student protests has exposed the limits of India’s formal democratic structures. The choice to mobilise a multi-sectoral alliance for a mass movement is not an undemocratic disruption; rather, it is an attempt to restore balance to a broken social contract.It asserts that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed not their oppression, not merely from the manipulation of captured institutions or from farcical elections. By bringing the collective energy of youth, farmers, labourers and political parties to the gates of the capital in a disciplined, peaceful manner, the opposition can force the executive to recognise that while they may own the numbers in Parliament, the ultimate sovereignty remains parked on the streets of the republic. The recent youth movement that erupted across the country has amply shown that this regime has lost the popular mandate. Modi-Shah must go now. We, the people of India will ensure it.The writer is a farmers’ leader and was actively involved in the farmers’ agitation and wrestlers’ agitation. He is an alumnus of the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) and frequently writes columns in all the major national newspapers like The Indian Express, Dainik Jagran, Navbharat Times and Amar Ujala.