The taxi bringing me to my hotel in Delhi circled Connaught Place. When it stopped at a red light, a voice could be heard asking the public to disperse. It was coming from a loudspeaker installed on a pole with spikes around the top. The voice was on a loop, informing the public that an assembly of four or more people was illegal: “Your attention, please. Please leave in peace.”

Connaught Place is in many ways the heart of the sprawling capital. The area includes the Jantar Mantar observatory, a marvel of eighteenth-century architecture and astronomical science; the observatory was used to measure and predict the movements of the sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies. This summer, student activists staged a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, to call attention to corruption in the education system. Initially, their anger was directed at Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister in Narendra Modi’s Cabinet. In May, India’s National Testing Agency had announced that, after investigating claims that entrance-exam papers for Indian medical schools had been leaked and sold, the exam, which had been taken earlier that month, would be scrapped. The financial and emotional distress was such that at least twenty-one students died by suicide.

The summer protests brought about Pradhan’s resignation—they also ignited a widespread social movement led by the young. In India, there are three hundred and seventy million people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, and student mobilization produced a crack in the wall of power that Modi—who leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), the ruling Hindu-nationalist party—has always sought to project. In mid-October, a few days before my arrival, Jantar Mantar was “de-notified” as a protest site. It was no longer available as a place to put democracy in action.

My hotel—on Barakhamba Road, a stone’s throw from the high school I attended—was a short walk from Jantar Mantar. In the morning light, each traffic crossing around Connaught Place bristled with bright-yellow metal barricades. The ten-day holiday festival of Dussehra was coming to an end. The period from Dussehra to Diwali, which this year falls in early November, is a busy shopping season, but the crowds in Connaught Place were sparser than usual. More visible were the buses parked by the roadside, some containing soldiers in the camouflage uniforms of the Central Reserve Police Force (C.R.P.F.). Other soldiers loitered outside, staring at their phones. The vehicles of the Delhi Police, some with flashing lights, idled at street corners, and constables in well-pressed khaki uniforms stood around chatting.

Outside Jantar Mantar, a young man named Mujeef Ali was selling healing oils to the C.R.P.F. men. I found myself buying a vial of the oil for a hundred rupees. Ali offered to rub the oil on my aching left knee. I was reluctant to lift my trousers on the street and have a stranger massage my joints. The C.R.P.F. men had gathered around me. One of them said in Hindi, “Do it, do it, you are among your own.” Ali rubbed the concoction on my skin; it burned, and the fumes from the oil stung my eyes. I had identified myself as a journalist, and now I pointed at the bearded soldier from Kashmir standing near me, and asked Ali if his oil would heal me if I caught a blow from his baton. The soldiers laughed, and I wondered whether, through this little drama of staging journalistic access, I was betraying the poor students.

Anjali, who is in her mid-twenties, is a member of the All India Students’ Association (AISA). She told me that, away from the cameras of the media, the police and the paramilitary treated the protesters with savagery. Even when the students were coöperating with their detention, complying with all instructions, “they were constantly beaten, slapped with open palms, and kicked,” she said. On the night of one of the protests, near a barricade at Connaught Place, a male cop had yanked up Anjali’s shirt while pushing her into a bus used for detention. She said, “This regime feels humans should be humiliated.” She insisted, however, that the incident had left her not humiliated but enraged.

Anjali has a master’s degree in gender studies and is now enrolled in another master’s course, in Buddhism. The protest movement that began this summer has given her greater confidence in her ideas about democracy. “People are not scared anymore,” she said. “What do we have to lose?” Support has sometimes come from unexpected places. A female constable at the back of the detention bus told her that she had watched videos of the protesters and liked what they were saying. The constable said that she would remove her hand from the latch that kept the door locked. You can escape this way, she said, and the young women had hurried out.

It is not just students who have been detained. A journalist named M. Rajshekhar has reported on how he was detained in a bus and saw others “pummelled.” With him was Arjun Unnikrishnan, a lawyer, who has spoken publicly about detainees being slapped and kicked in the genitals. The bus took them to a distant detention center; when they were released, it was late at night, and their phones had been confiscated.

Close to Jantar Mantar was a large blue van with a white sign on it reading “Anti-Terrorist Squad.” Above the din of the traffic, on another nearby pole, the same voice played on a loop: “Your attention, please. Please leave in peace.”

A scene from the Dussehra celebrations in New Delhi.

新德里杜塞赫拉节庆祝活动的一个场景。

October 20th was the final day of the Dussehra festival, marking the triumph of good over evil—the victory of Lord Rama over the ten-headed demon king Ravana, who abducted Rama’s wife, Sita. On the last day of Dussehra, an effigy of Ravana is set on fire after a performance called the Ramleela, the enactment of Lord Rama’s story. The narrative is a contested one, and I’ll stay close to the conventional interpretation: in a Manichean conception of the world, righteousness belongs to the fair-skinned ruler from the north, who kills in battle the dark-skinned denizens of the south. The poet Derek Walcott, in his Nobel Prize lecture, spoke about how he had been wrong in seeing the Ramleela as theatre when it was, in fact, faith. But in Indian politics, at the present moment, everything is theatre—especially the Ramleela, because Lord Rama has been adopted as the mascot of the B.J.P. It is under the banner of Lord Rama, and the battle cry “Jai Shri Ram” (“Glory to Lord Rama”), that the greatness of the Hindu nation is proclaimed. As an exclusionary ideology, which grants true citizenship in India only to Hindus, it is “Jai Shri Ram” that Muslims are forced to chant when they are being beaten or lynched.

To witness the Ramleela and the burning of effigies packed with fireworks, I went to the northwest Delhi locality of Pitampura, home to many government employees. The effigies have the appearance of puppets, and Ravana and his brothers have ridiculous mustaches that make them look villainous. Ravana effigies are found everywhere, but I was on my way to the Netaji Subhash Place, where, in addition, an effigy of a cockroach was to be burned.

The cockroach is the new demon in the Hindutva—Hindu-nationalist—mythology. The student movement erupted in India after the chief justice referred to the unemployed youth in India as “cockroaches.” Abhijeet Dipke, who had recently finished graduate school at Boston University, responded on social media, “What if all cockroaches come together?” He then launched online, almost as a joke, the Cockroach Janta Party (C.J.P.). Its numbers quickly swelled into the millions. In a few short months, the C.J.P. has become a major opposition power in Indian politics. Its first victory was the resignation of Pradhan, the education minister. After a newspaper investigation raised concerns about the legality of India’s efforts to purge its voter rolls, the party’s focus shifted to demanding accountability from the Election Commission. The summer protests led to a tidal wave of youth mobilization across India. The current protests, probably because they are of a more political or constitutional nature, are concentrated in Delhi. In early October, opposition parties that are part of a coalition led by the Congress Party joined tens of thousands of protesters in a march to the Supreme Court.

But by the final day of the Dussehra, there had been a lull in the cockroaches’ activism. Two of the C.J.P.’s top spokespeople had breached the barriers at Jantar Mantar and waved the national flag, and were sentenced to five days in judicial custody. Dipke had recently been released, after signing a “peace bond,” vowing to maintain good behavior. There were no barricades, and few police, at the fairground at Netaji Subhash Place. Before the Ramleela performance got under way, a B.J.P. legislator asked the audience to chant “Jai Shri Ram.” The crowd was thin when I arrived, but by nightfall all the seats were taken. Peering out through the surrounding dark, I could see another crowd gathered against the walls of a nearby mall. It seemed that what the people wanted wasn’t faith but fire.

Everything in India, at least under the B.J.P., is spectacle. Each event is an exercise in propaganda. The Ramleela performance was soaked in sentimentality, the epic reduced to a melodrama about filial piety and fraternal devotion, enacted in front of seemingly A.I.-generated backdrops of idyllic forest scenes with fluttering butterflies. After several stoppages, owing to power outages, the audience was treated to homilies by local leaders. One called for an end to diversity. A B.J.P. politician, Kapil Mishra, said that the cockroach represented an alliance of filth, Naxalites, jihadis, and the corrupt. Mishra, who is now a cabinet minister in the government of Delhi, was accused of instigating a riot in 2020. He lit the thirty-foot-tall effigy of the cockroach, which quickly went up in flames. Then it was the turn of Ravana’s kin and finally Ravana himself, going up in a giant conflagration, to add to Delhi’s terrible pollution.

One of the country’s main papers that morning ran the headline “Why the World Is Taking to the Streets.” A line was being drawn linking the youth in India, France, Belgium, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Albania, and Argentina. But, speaking with student protesters in Delhi and elsewhere, I didn’t get the impression that they were participating in a worldwide uprising. Their issues were national, and their targets were specific.

The first wave of protests emerged from the despair of young Indians faced with corrupt national exams and a dwindling confidence in their future prospects. But, in the current explosion, the real issue is the deletion of more than a hundred and thirty million names from the electoral rolls. The government undertook a revision of the voting lists to remove duplicate, deceased, or undocumented people. But the results have been dubious and often inconsistent. It is clear that the names of minorities, the poor, and members of marginalized groups have been disproportionately excised. The protesters have been calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the head of the election commission.

One such protester is Neha Bora, the charismatic twenty-nine-year-old president of AISA. In the summer, Neha, who uses they/them pronouns, had gone on a twenty-three-day hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, in support of the Cockroach Party’s appeal for the resignation of the education minister. Now, during the push to restore voting rights, Neha has emerged as an irrepressible force, often flouting police restrictions to insist on every citizen’s democratic right to protest peacefully. In the first two weeks of October, they were detained and released more than ten times. Unlike the Cockroach Party leaders, Neha has refused to sign a peace bond.

I met Neha at the office of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, with which AISA is affiliated. Outside, red-bottomed rhesus monkeys strutted or sat among the neem and frangipani trees. It was pleasant in the shade. Neha has a talent for making statements with a confrontational clarity. For example: “If the state does not want there to be violence, the state should not do violence—it is as simple as that.” Neha told me that people had long asked them why it was necessary to oppose the B.J.P.—after all, there must be good people in it, too. But, Neha said, “when you mix water, tea leaves, and milk, you will get tea. You will not get Coca-Cola. Similarly, if you vote for the B.J.P., you will only get violence and riots and corruption. You will not get anything else.”

Earlier that day, a journalist had asked Neha about Modi, who had been chief minister of Gujarat before gaining the Prime Minister’s office. His popularity couldn’t be easily dismissed. “I said to him that the B.J.P. has a long history of theft and violence,” Neha told me. “You have to see Narendra Modi and Amit Shah”—the Minister of Home Affairs and a close Modi ally—“as representatives of violence.” Earlier this year, the B.J.P. won its first-ever victory in elections for the West Bengal state assembly. Neha and others believe that deletions from the electoral rolls may have played a role, since, in two hundred and ninety-four seats, the so-called cleanup removed nearly three million voters from the register. The revelations about the irregularities in the electoral process, including the centralization of voter databases in Delhi, have cast doubt on the election results of the recent past.

The next day, I was far away from the capital, in Bareilly, a city in Uttar Pradesh. At an event for Hindi literature, I met a young activist named Samyun Khan, who was taking part in a reading. She had gone to Delhi on October 12th to join the march on the Supreme Court. When she shouted slogans demanding the resignation of the election commissioner, she was quickly shoved into a bus with other detainees. For eight or nine hours, she was denied food and water. In Uttar Pradesh, she said, Muslim voters had received notices asking them to produce papers to prove their identity, while non-Muslim voters’ names had appeared more than once on the electoral rolls.

There is a popular story in Indian mythology about a king who had a secret: his life force resided in his parrot, who lived in a gold cage. The leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party believe that Prime Minister Modi may prove the truth of the story. They think that Kumar, the head of the election commission, is the parrot, and that, if he goes, the B.J.P. will not be able to win the next election. The B.J.P. has at its disposal the might of the state and a huge war chest; the youth join the battle with their courage and their cunning. ♦