Violence has been the stark signature as well as the underlying motif of the Modi regime. It is important to understand this when coming to grips with what happened at the recent protest of India’s youth, raising demands related to education and employment. The protest came together through online mobilisation under the banner of the Cockroach Janata Party, with a clutch of Leftist student organisations protesting and fasting alongside but separately on the same demands.Regrettably, insufficient attention has been paid in public discussion, even by dissenters and the regime’s political opponents, to the systemic and systemised violence in Modi’s India. This is despite hardly an aspect of life that is not being shot through with violence on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s watch.Violence as governanceIndeed, the very idea of homogenising India’s myriad layers and selves is clearly seen in the slogans the regime has popularised: ‘One Nation, One…’. The flagship Modi project is a massive enterprise in state violence wreaked upon one section of the population or another. The government’s intent is to bludgeon its way through if it can, or dissimulate and backtrack when it must, but only to return to the strategy at a more conducive moment.The risk of disregarding the violence in plain sight is clear: not confronting systemic and frequent state violence can ripen tendencies that pushing India along the path of fascism, which does not appear to be in the far distance any longer. Disregard of visible violence works as impunity.Also read: When Every Door Opens Into Another Queue – India’s Education CrisisKey institutions of constitutional democracy have already been brought to heel. Thus we now have judicial bureaucrats, not judges; we have election bureaucrats, not impartial election commissioners or administrators.Accordingly, recent state elections turned out to be a massive tragedy as well as a farce, perpetrating violence against key constitutional principles and premises – and eventually upon citizens. We saw the deletion of crores of ordinary people’s names from voter lists through the mammoth SIR exercise, following the stuffing of ballot in some states, both of which have ensured results that put the opponents of the regime at a disadvantage. All this has ensued from within a violent ideological framework, the party that governs by that framework and its governmental apparatus.A decade of state crackdownsOvert and monolithic state violence was perpetrated by Delhi Police during the Jamia Millia crackdown in the course of the anti-CAA stir. Such incidents ultimately funnelled into the so-called Delhi “riots” – a state-approved and majoritarianism-endorsed soft-pedalling term for pure communal violence. The attacks on the JNU campus by armed gangs of regime proxies was practically overseen by the police. The farmers’ protest was framed as an effort of so-called Khalistanis and “anti-national” elements. The last is now a stock expression used by the regime to tarnish protesters. And we have witnessed bulldozer ‘justice’ in Uttar Pradesh and several other BJP-governed states.A policeman approaches the CCTV camera in the Jamia library to break it. Photo: Screengrab from video released by Maktoob Media.To this count of infamy must be added three more instances of blatantly anti-poor mass violence: the NRC-related pain and dislocations and the transportation of hundreds, even thousands, to makeshift facilities in Assam under the approving gaze of the Supreme Court. Also the Covid-19-era march home from cities to villages that was forced upon lakhs of poor families due to the sudden lockdown announced at four hours’ notice.And the third: the livelihood of millions was wiped out in minutes when, 10 years ago, Modi announced demonetisation based on a whim fostered by the RSS ecosystem. The effect of that economic shock has not worn off. That episode injured India’s economic system as a whole, wiping out employment for the neediest sections of society.In the Modi years, India has truly become a state-sponsored hell for citizens. An arrogant leader with dictatorial tendencies was confident that the people would remain with him, by and large, so long as he kept making references to religion, forgetting the oath of allegiance to the democratic compact the constitution enjoined on him. What now is the question? Addressing the parents of the youth who are questioning the regime, political satirist and singer Neha Singh Rathore recently said: “You voted Modi to turn the screws on ‘Abdul’, and now he is turning the screws on your children!”The young Indians who fasted and protested for 36 days to safeguard their education and livelihoods and forced the prime minister’s hands (and that of their parents), are part of a core constituency that Modi has relied on for survival. How would they now look at ‘Abdul’, whom Modi and his fanatics love to corner and beat up? Much of the potential of the ‘cockroaches’, and their future as agents of political action and change would turn on this single question.Jantar Mantar: the latest flashpointThe episodes of state violence just recalled were immediate precursors to the barbarity and brutality that was visited on them by the police and other forces during their massive Jantar Mantar mobilisation against anti-education and employment-dampening policies. The leak of the NEET-UG examination papers was only the trigger of that protest.Also read: As Images of Lathicharge, Tear Gas at Protesters Surface; Delhi Police Says No ‘Sporadic Use of Violence’The violence unleashed on the students was unprecedented. Their mammoth protest and the accompanying fast remained remarkably peaceful. The idea of the young folk was just to march to Parliament on July 20, to simply press their demand for the resignation of the Union education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. This is an entirely normal, very benigh idea in any democracy. But the Indian state under Modi turned it into something else.For daring to question the regime, the protesters were portrayed as anti-national. So violence, brutality and sexual violence against the women protesters was carefully worked out. Overnight, one Delhi Police chief was given marching orders and the regime wheeled out a new one, evidently handpicked to execute a punishment of young India.At New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a barely ten-minute walk from Parliament House, and in nearby areas such as Connaught Place (Rajiv Chowk, a couple of kilometres away), the protesters faced violence of a scale and degree that will enter the annals of history as a cruel landmark. Fascist and dictatorial regimes do those things, not democracies.A badly injured protester, Anil Kumar from Madhya Pradesh, raises slogans during a protest march, at Sansad Marg, in New Delhi on July 20, 2026. Photo: PTI/Salman Ali.Lathi charge and tear gas were the least of what they faced. Women protesters were chased and molested as policemen’s batons were used as instruments to prod and shove and injure the body as well as the mind. Pellet guns were fired, as in Kashmir, and at least one protester has probably lost an eye. Men were seen carrying lathis with nails embedded in them to use against the unarmed young protesters. Such a weapon was last heard of in 2020, when Indian and Chinese troops clashed in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh, when India accused the Chinese of coming up with such brute play.The barbarity of the police and its civilian auxiliaries, i.e., ideological supporters of the regime, has been captured in dozens of videos that have been transmitted through social media across the world. They have shamed India, its political leadership and its government’s approach. It has brought under the spotlight the violence-imbued ideology and thought processes of those wielding authority in India.The Supreme Court’s testWill the Supreme Court of India call the Delhi Police and the Union ministry of home affairs which controls this force, to account? Or will it make a show of doing this while giving the government a free pass? Or, quite simply, will the petitions hang fire until this government is in power? This too is a part of the toolkit, as the nation saw the top court decide that the regime’s actions in respect of Kashmir in August 2019 were constitutional.While hauling up the home minister and his political custodian comes under the top court’s brief, what about the man who has set the chess-board since 2014? Dealing with him is surely the people’s brief.The interregnum between May 2014 and now, the Modi era, may well be remembered in history as an inglorious phase of ‘State and Counter-revolution’, to flip the title of V.I. Lenin’s famous tract. Historians often refer to India’s lenghty non-violent struggle against colonial rule to establish a democratic republic as a revolution. Seen in that light, the violence-filled decade since 2014 has surely been the reversal of Swaraj and democracy. The fact that the ‘Jantar Mantar protest’ exploded on the national stage despite the violence India’s youth faced on July 20 shows the country can deal with this counter-revolution. Young Indians can deal with it.Anand K. Sahay is a veteran journalist.