For weeks, the roads around Delhi's Jantar Mantar and, eventually, the approach to the Prime Minister's residence itself filled with students. They had gathered first over a leaked medical entrance examination paper, the kind of grievance that on its own might have burned out in a news cycle. Instead it became the largest youth mobilisation India had seen in over a decade, and by the time it ended, an old argument about who really leads Indian protest movements, and who profits from them, had swallowed the protest itself. On the Nous Podcast, host Bushra Khan put that argument to the Mumbai-based political commentator Raju Parulekar, a longtime critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh who has also, in this conversation, turned his fire on the very coalition that claims to have run the protest. Khan opens the interview by noting how much had changed since an earlier episode recorded before the sit-in even began: a movement that seemed, in its first days, to be a spontaneous eruption of student anger had by its end acquired leaders, spokespeople, closed-door negotiators and a disputed origin story, and it is that transformation, as much as the protest itself, that the conversation sets out to examine.
A Paper Leak, and Then a Reckoning
The trigger, in Parulekar's telling, was a national medical entrance exam paper leak that arrived after years of accumulated anger, what he calls "the last straw that broke the camel's back." The first organisers on the ground, he says, were not the group that would later claim credit but Congress's youth wings, the Indian Youth Congress and the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), who brought students out in city after city. The crowds, in his account, were large enough that "you could tell the country's patience had snapped." What followed was not gentle. Students were baton-charged; pellet guns were used on protesters, an unusual step against a domestic civilian crowd; some were tracked down afterwards using facial recognition run through Meta's smart glasses, according to Parulekar. Teenage girls were made to apologise on camera. Homes were visited by police. Parulekar says women were targeted with particular intensity, and that the Prime Minister publicly framed the daughters who swore and shouted at the protests as a sign of cultural decline, while ignoring, in Parulekar's telling, the routine abuse directed at Muslim women by Hindutva-aligned organisations close to his own party. Eventually, in the only concession the government made, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. The protest's central demand, the resignation of Home Minister Amit Shah over the crackdown, was not met.
A Movement With a Contested Author
The dispute Parulekar wants to have is not with the government but with the group that came to be known through the conversation simply as "CJP", an acronym neither he nor Khan spells out on air. He insists CJP was never the protest's real author. "This movement was never CJP's," he says flatly, arguing that it belonged to the students and to Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, who camped outside the Prime Minister's residence in a show of solidarity that Parulekar calls the protest's real turning point: only after Gandhi personally joined the demonstrators, he says, did the police crackdown finally ease. CJP, by his account, was fronted by a figure he refers to as Deepak, who along with two younger spokespeople, Saurabh Das and a colleague he calls Ranka, is said to have received unusually swift police permissions, the kind of clearance Parulekar claims only a Home Ministry favourite could expect, while the Congress-linked crowds who first filled the streets got no comparable access and no comparable coverage. He draws a pointed contrast with a young hunger striker from a different political outfit, Neha, whom he credits with actually fasting, unlike CJP's leadership, even as he is careful to say her naivety, not her sincerity, is what concerns him.
A Deal Struck Behind Closed Doors
Parulekar's sharpest accusation concerns how the protest ended. He alleges that Saurabh Das and Ranka negotiated directly, and privately, with Union minister Jitendra Singh and BJP president J.P. Nadda, cutting out Rahul Gandhi, who he says was present and willing to press the government further, and cutting out the wider body of students and "stakeholders" who had actually faced the lathis and pellet guns. "Whatever the two of them dictated, Jitendra Singh and Nadda simply accepted," he says, comparing it to a labour negotiation conducted without the workers in the room. He points out that footage of the actual talks was muted wherever it surfaced, that the government's own news agency, ANI, had access international outlets such as Al Jazeera, The Wire and The Hindu were denied, and that no written record of the settlement's terms was made public. The result, in his framing, is a betrayal of the young people who bled for a bigger demand: "This is utter betrayal," he says of the deal that swapped Amit Shah's resignation for Dharmendra Pradhan's.
The Ghost of 2011
Much of Parulekar's suspicion is rooted in an older grievance. He repeatedly likens CJP to the 2011 India Against Corruption movement fronted by Anna Hazare, which he says was actually steered from behind by Arvind Kejriwal, the man he holds responsible for the current coalition's conduct too. He recalls a public dispute over roughly four crore rupees in crowdfunded donations that Hazare's own camp said it never received or saw accounted for, and asks why CJP, which he says is likewise unregistered, faces no obligation to publish its accounts either. "No books, no ledger, whatever Arvind says goes," he says, reviving the old jibe against Kejriwal's style, and dismisses CJP's explanation, that crowdfunded tents and food do not need itemised accounting, as identical to arguments once made for the RSS and for India Against Corruption. It is, in his account, a recognisable template: build a following outside any registered structure, collect money and moral authority without either, and let a single leader's word substitute for a ledger. When Khan puts the question to him directly, whether it is fair to hold a protest camp to the accounting standards of a company, Parulekar's answer is that any street collection, whether coins dropped by passersby or meals sent by sympathisers, still has an owner once the cause ends and money is left over, and that owner, in a crowdfunded movement, is the public that funded it, not whoever happens to be holding the loudspeaker when the tents come down.
Hindus and Muslims on the Same Side of the Barricade
Not every thread in the conversation is about factional credit. Khan pushes Parulekar on a harder question: even if the protest was genuinely inclusive in the moment, would that inclusiveness survive contact with a real communal flashpoint, a lynching, a bulldozed home? Parulekar answers by pointing to two Muslim protest figures, named in the conversation as Irfan and Junaid, whom he says knew exactly what they risked by joining: that their homes, unlike those of "upper-caste Hindus", could be bulldozed for it, and who stood their ground regardless. He says the calls and messages he personally received expressing concern for Junaid, and grief after watching footage of Irfan, came overwhelmingly from Hindu callers, evidence, in his reading, that young protesters no longer sort each other by religion. He also cites a moment at a university where a demolition was halted by a crowd that was not exclusively Muslim. Whether that solidarity would hold at scale, against organised Hindutva provocation of the kind Khan describes, remains, on the strength of this exchange, an open and untested claim rather than a settled fact.
Five Things Parulekar Says the Protest Changed
Asked directly what the months of protest actually achieved, setting aside the organisers he distrusts, Parulekar lists five outcomes he considers durable. First, he says, "India was an argumentative country. It has returned," meaning that open political argument, and open refusal to treat the Prime Minister as untouchable, has become normal again among the young. Second, he argues that attempts to stoke Islamophobia around the protest, which he links to the RSS and, more provocatively, to what he calls Israeli and "Zionist" backing for the government's messaging, have visibly failed and "spilled over" on those who tried it. Third, he says open hostility to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, once confined to comment sections, is now sayable in the mainstream, evidenced, he claims, by the tone of replies under the Prime Minister's own social media videos. Fourth, he points to continued youth sympathy for Palestine and discomfort with the government's ties to Israel as proof that a founding instinct of Indian foreign policy has outlived a decade of realignment. Fifth, and most sweepingly, he argues that ordinary citizens' collective judgement, which he says the government spent years telling itself it could safely ignore, has been vindicated. On the strength of these five points he goes on to predict that Modi's government will be forced out of power "between March and April 2027", a specific and striking forecast that should be read as Parulekar's own political wager rather than an established or shared prediction.
What Parulekar Says Has Not Changed
The same conversation is candid about limits. Parulekar argues that the government's capture of the media landscape now extends well beyond television into independent YouTube political commentary, which he estimates at ninety percent compromised, playing the same game of mutual back-scratching he associates with traditional "godi media." As evidence he points to news anchor Rubika Liyaquat, who he says had earlier branded protesters "terrorists" on air, giving a friendly interview to CJP's Saurabh Das and asking him what he expects from her. He also argues that the public anger generated by the crackdown has not converted into measurable political cost for the BJP or gain for Congress, describing the entire Dharmendra Pradhan resignation, and a parallel campaign targeting Union minister Nitin Gadkari over ethanol-blending policy, as engineered distractions designed to keep public pressure away from Amit Shah. Separately, he cites a lockdown-style security operation during a visit by Amit Shah to Pune, where National Security Advisor Ajit Doval received an award from Shah's hands, and residents responded with what local media called a "horn protest," honking through the motorcade route in frustration at the traffic curbs. He also raises broader doubts about the fairness of future elections, pointing to the Election Commission's ongoing Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls and accusing its leadership of favouring the ruling party, a serious and contested charge he offers without independent evidence in this conversation.
Can Rahul Gandhi Carry the Anger Forward?
The interview closes on the question Khan has been building toward: can Rahul Gandhi actually convert this movement's anger into political change, given that, as she points out, the institutions that would have to certify any change of government, the Election Commission chief among them, are not seen as neutral. Parulekar does not really answer the mechanics of the question. Instead he reaches for the mythology familiar to Indian political rhetoric, comparing Modi and Shah to Ravana, Kansa and Bhasmasura, tyrants whose power, in the stories, corrodes from within once they lose the public's underlying consent, effigy-burnings that Parulekar says exist precisely so that leaders remember how such stories end. He argues that Rahul Gandhi's genuine popularity now exceeds Modi's, offering to bet on it, and insists that whatever else happens, Modi and Shah will be denied the dignified, peaceful exit that outgoing Indian leaders have historically received. It is, by the guest's own account, more conviction than forecast, and he is candid about the gap: he compares his own reasoning to a coincidence he once flagged in a foreign news assignment covering unrest in Spain, insisting that pattern and intuition, not evidence he can produce on air, are what led him to name Kejriwal's ambition as the movement's real author months before the sit-in even happened. "Whatever I feel, the public feels too, because I am the public," he tells Khan, rejecting any distance between commentator and citizen, before adding a line he says he first used on an earlier episode of the same programme, and repeats now for emphasis: that when truth stands alone, it is worth remembering the story of Hussain. Khan closes the conversation by thanking him for making the trip from Mumbai, telling viewers they will likely come away with their eyes opened, even where, as this interview makes clear, much of what Parulekar offers is pointed allegation and personal prediction rather than settled, independently verified fact.
Discussion
0Readers only · Comments are reviewed by the desk before they appear
The journalism is free for everyone — create a free account to join the discussion.