The Protest That Shook Modi Government—But Did It Change India?

A movement, and a resignation

Weeks after the student-led protests known on the show as the CJP demonstrations wound down outside the Prime Minister's residence, Raju Parulekar returned to Nous Podcast to take stock with host Bushra Khan Fahad of what, if anything, the movement had actually won. The visible result so far was the resignation of Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Parulekar's answer to what that changed, delivered early in the conversation, was blunt: on its own, not much — and he spent much of the episode arguing the real fight had been fought, and partly lost, behind closed doors.

Whose protest was it, really

Parulekar pushed back hard on the idea that the CJP was the movement's true author. The protests, he insisted, were actually set in motion earlier by the Indian Youth Congress and the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), Congress's student wing, following anger over a leaked national entrance exam — a mobilisation he said went largely uncovered because, in his words, pliant television channels ("godi media") would not show the footage. He credited Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi with turning the moment into a genuinely national movement by protesting directly outside the Prime Minister's residence, calling him "the biggest magnet" the demonstrations had.

The deal nobody saw

Parulekar's central allegation was that two CJP-aligned negotiators, identified in the conversation as Saurabh Das and a figure referred to as Ranka, met privately with Union minister Jitendra Singh and BJP president J.P. Nadda and called off the protest without consulting the students and workers who had faced lathi charges, pellet guns and, he said, targeted facial-recognition tracking through what he described as Meta AI glasses. He compared the closed-door negotiation to a labour dispute settled without either side's rank and file present, and called the outcome "a betrayal" of the young people who had been beaten in the streets. He also noted that neither the CJP nor two other organisations he named in the same breath — the RSS and the earlier India Against Corruption movement — are registered bodies, leaving their crowdfunded finances effectively unauditable.

Kejriwal as "a virus"

Much of Parulekar's anger was directed at Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal, whom he accused of engineering a distraction to protect Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah from the resignation demands actually driving the protest. He likened Kejriwal's political style to malware: an intervention that corrupts communication and narrative regardless of the system it enters. In this case, he argued, the target became a controversy around ethanol-blended fuel policy meant to force out Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, diverting energy that should have stayed focused on Shah. Parulekar claimed this was at least the third time Kejriwal had, in his view, inadvertently or deliberately protected the Modi government at a moment of vulnerability.

Five wins, and a caveat

Pressed by his host for a balanced accounting, Parulekar offered five gains he said the protests had secured regardless of how the negotiations ended: India had become an "argumentative" country again, with young people willing to question authority rather than treat leaders as untouchable; the attempt to stoke Hindu-Muslim division through Islamophobia had visibly "spilled" and backfired; open contempt for Modi and Shah among young people was now on public record, visible in the comments beneath their own social media videos; solidarity with Iran and Palestine remained intact among the generation that took to the streets; and the episode had restored his own confidence that ordinary public judgment cannot be permanently underestimated.

His host complicated that account, raising a recent incident during a Hindu religious procession in which women wearing hijabs were deliberately taunted. Parulekar's response was that such hostility is state-rewarded rather than organic, and predicted it would evaporate once political power changes hands. He pointed to spontaneous Hindu support for Muslim causes during the episode — describing calls and messages of solidarity he received over the killings of two Muslim men, Irfan and Junaid, and Hindu students who joined efforts to prevent a demolition at Jauhar University — as evidence that ordinary social relations remain intact beneath the politically manufactured hostility.

As in his earlier appearance on the show, Parulekar ended with his standing forecast that the Modi government's exit is now certain sometime between March and April 2027 — a prediction he offered with characteristic confidence, though it remains, for now, only that.