notes on minimum democracy
Since Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist party swept to power in 2014, India has gradually become a minimum democracy. There are regular elections, but democracy seems to have stopped there.
India just witnessed an unprecedented youth-led movement demanding the resignation of a minister in Modi’s cabinet. It began as an online satire, an Instagram account named “Cockroach Janata Party” (CJP) subtly reclaiming the mockery by the Chief Justice of India, who called the country’s unemployed youth “cockroaches” and “parasites”.
What was an insult turned into an overnight sensation, with the Instagram account and its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, amassing more than 22 million followers in just two weeks.
Indian youth have long been dismayed by the employment situation and resentful of corruption and institutional failure. The youth resentment became clearer when the government failed to acknowledge the question paper leaks in India’s largest medical entrance exam, known by the acronym NEET. When the exam was cancelled after leaked papers surfaced on Telegram, more than 2 million candidates were affected, and at least twenty of them had died by suicide. The government refused to take proper action, and the minister refused to resign.
The CJP-led student movement began with the demand for the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.
After a prolonged hunger protest by several students, along with Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent educationist and social activist from the Indian state of Ladakh, and the government’s eventual failure to address their concerns, on July 20, 2026, students and parents from all over India gathered at Jantar Mantar to march towards the Indian parliament.
Families who had lost their sons and daughters marched holding their photos, demanding justice. Students chanted slogans of “Inquilab Zindabad” (Long Live the Revolution) and “Modi Teri Tanashahi—Nahi Chalegi, Nahi Chalegi” (Modi, Your Dictatorship, Will Not Be Tolerated). And the police—nametags removed, so that no one holds them accountable—charged the protesters, beating them with batons, firing tear gas and using pellet guns.
Days after relentless mobilisation across India and the increased youth resentment towards the Modi government, Pradhan, who had dismissed the student movement as “B-team of terrorists”, has since resigned, and within hours, a new minister was appointed in his place.
But the protest mobilisation calling for the resignation of a minister following an institutional failure is a new low for Indian democracy. Not so long ago, during the coalition era of Indian politics, whenever a scandal broke out, independent agencies plunged into action, reports were published, and eventually, the ministers and top-tier bureaucrats resigned. Whenever there was a railway accident, a large-scale policy failure, or a corruption scandal, the ministers would resign on moral grounds.
The last minister to resign on moral grounds in Modi’s cabinet was Suresh Prabhu, who was the railway minister and had resigned after back-to-back train accidents in 2017. Since Prabhu, none of Modi’s ministers has resigned on moral grounds.
From demonetisation, GST mismanagement, farmer suicides, train derailments, bridge collapses, and, more recently, question paper leaks, accountability and moral responsibility have taken a back seat. The result is a complete system capture: curbs on media independence, the introduction of draconian security laws, and the weakening of independent governance institutions.
Amid the tear gas and the photographs of the dead, the demand for resignation points to what has changed in Indian democracy. Earlier, failures in institutional delivery led to ministerial resignations, often initiated by the ministers themselves. But today, Indians have been reduced to demanding what was once taken for granted. And, eerily even, the government expects its citizens not to even demand it.
Should citizens demand it or should a channel for dissent open up, the government promptly dismisses the protesters as “terrorists”, “anti-Nationals”, “Pakistani agents”, and so on. Once the movement itself subsides, the government begins to hound a select few activists through the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which allows the state to place its citizens in detention without a charge sheet for up to six months.
After a prolonged period of protests against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which introduced religion as a basis for citizenship in 2020, a number of student activists were arrested under UAPA—and one of them, Umar Khalid, remains in detention. In September 2025, Wangchuk, who had earlier staged a 15-day hunger strike for the restoration of Ladakh’s statehood, was detained using similar national security laws for roughly six months.
The Modi government’s intolerance for dissent has led citizens to demand less and expect little. What was once a moral responsibility of ministers to resign from their posts as a means of democratic accountability must now be earned—as a political demand—in Modi’s India.
Minimum democracy, therefore, is a dual resignation: citizens have been reduced to demanding a resignation, and in turn, they have resigned from demanding.