Can You Really Have "Sabka Vishwas" With Tear Gas and Lathis?
Reading the Week Delhi's Streets Turned Into a Battleground
On the opening day of Parliament's monsoon session this July, the roads of central Delhi looked less like the approach to the seat of India's democracy and more like a cordoned-off conflict zone. Barricades stacked three deep. Riot police in formation. The acrid sting of tear gas drifting over Parliament Street. And thousands of young Indians — many of them students, many of them first-time protesters — trying to walk toward Parliament to be heard.
By the end of that Monday, Delhi Police say nearly 180 people were hurt: 118 of their own personnel and 60 protesters, with roughly 70 demonstrators detained. Within hours, the story was everywhere — on the front pages of every major English daily, on primetime television, and in the sharpest edit-page reaction of the week: an editorial in The Indian Express that put into words what a lot of people were already thinking — that a government cannot simultaneously claim to have "everybody's trust" while greeting its own citizens at the gates of Parliament with batons and gas shells.
That single, cutting line has become a shorthand for a much larger argument now playing out in India: about what happens when a government's chosen political language collides with the reality of how dissent is handled on the ground. This piece isn't a reproduction of that editorial — it's an attempt to unpack the episode it was reacting to, the history it sits inside, and the uncomfortable questions it raises for a democracy that prides itself on being the world's largest.
How We Got Here: From a Courtroom Remark to a Street Movement
To understand why thousands of young Indians were marching on Parliament in July 2026, you have to go back two months, to a courtroom in May.
During a Supreme Court hearing on an unrelated contempt matter, the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, made an offhand remark about unemployed youth — comparing them to "cockroaches" who, lacking real jobs or a real place in professional life, turn to media, social media, and activism to make noise. It was the kind of dismissive aside that might once have disappeared into a court transcript. Instead, it detonated online.
Within a day, a political communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke — who had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party — announced the formation of a new, deliberately absurd political outfit: the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP. Its slogan: "Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed." Its eligibility criteria, posted with a straight face: being unemployed, being "chronically online," and being able to rant professionally. It was satire, and everyone involved knew it was satire. But satire has always been one of the sharpest tools available to people who feel unheard, and this particular joke landed on a nerve that was already raw.
That nerve was the state of India's higher education and examination system — and specifically, the fallout from NEET 2026, the country's medical entrance exam. Days after the exam was conducted, reports surfaced that questions had been leaked ahead of time and that the process had been compromised in other ways. The exam was cancelled. For the lakhs of students who had spent a year or more of their lives preparing for it — often at enormous financial and emotional cost to their families — the cancellation wasn't a bureaucratic inconvenience. It was catastrophic. In the days that followed, reports emerged of at least a dozen NEET aspirants dying by suicide. Grief turned into public anger, and the loose, satirical energy of the "cockroach" movement suddenly had a genuine, devastating cause to organize around: accountability for the exam's collapse, and the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
What started as a meme became a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site in central Delhi that has hosted decades of Indian demonstrations. Social activist Sonam Wangchuk, known for his work on education reform and his earlier hunger strikes over Ladakh's statehood demands, joined the cause and began his own fast, calling for Pradhan's resignation over the alleged lapses. Reports of his forcible removal from the protest site only added more fuel. By mid-July, the "cockroach movement" — as international media had started calling it — had grown from an online joke into what several foreign outlets described as the most significant youth-led challenge to the Modi government in years.
Then came the call to march on Parliament itself, on July 20, the day the monsoon session opened.
The Day the Tear Gas Came Out
What happened next depended enormously on which paper you read the following morning, and that in itself tells you something important. A comparison of front pages across major Indian dailies later showed just how differently the same afternoon could be framed: some headlines centred the protesters and their grievances, some centred the police operation to "restore order," and the choice of a single verb — "crackdown" versus "disperse," "storm" versus "march" — did a lot of ideological work before a reader had absorbed a single paragraph of the story.
The bones of the event, however, are not seriously disputed. More than 10,000 supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party attempted to march from Jantar Mantar toward Parliament. Delhi Police, backed by paramilitary personnel, had already thrown up barricades and shut down mobile internet in parts of the city in anticipation. When protesters pushed past the barricades, police responded with baton charges and tear gas. Photographs distributed by international wire services showed officers striking protesters — including, in some images, bystanders and minors — while demonstrators improvised shields and tried to fling tear gas canisters back at the police line. One protester, according to widely circulated images, lay on the ground with his clothes torn; another was seen wrapped in the national flag as he was struck.
By the police's own account, 118 of their personnel and 60 protesters were injured, and 70 protesters were detained, with legal action initiated against them. CJP organizers offered a starkly different number, telling reporters that some 150 of their supporters had been hurt. That gap between the "official" injury count and the movement's own count is itself a familiar feature of Indian protest coverage — one that goes back decades and rarely gets resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
The morning after, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke made an announcement that was less a retreat than a recalibration: the movement would not organize further street marches through Delhi, out of concern for the safety of its young supporters, but it would not leave Jantar Mantar either, and its central demand — Pradhan's resignation — was not going anywhere. When police reportedly dismantled the protesters' tents at the site following the crackdown, demonstrators simply began rebuilding them in the rain. A 20-year-old student protester's comment to reporters captured the mood better than any official statement could: the crackdown, she said, had only strengthened her resolve to stay until the government listened.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi weighed in sharply, calling the government "anti-youth" and arguing that tear-gassing and lathi-charging students has no place in a functioning democracy — a charge the ruling establishment, naturally, rejects, with Delhi Police maintaining that its actions were a necessary and proportionate response to a crowd that had broken through barricades and endangered public order near a high-security zone during an active parliamentary session.
The Editorial, and the Argument Underneath It
It was into this charged atmosphere that The Indian Express published its edit-page response — reportedly the only editorial any major paper ran on the subject that day, and prominent enough that the paper flagged its headline on its own front page, an unusual move that signalled just how strongly the paper wanted its position seen.
The argument, in essence, is a play on language the Bharatiya Janata Party itself has used for over a decade: Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas — "everyone's support, everyone's development, everyone's trust." It's a slogan built around inclusion, around the idea that no citizen, however marginal or however loud their dissent, stands outside the circle of the state's concern. The editorial's pointed rejoinder was essentially this: trust is not something a government can declare into existence through a slogan while, in the same week, its police force is photographed beating unarmed young people with sticks on a public road. You cannot claim "sabka vishwas" — everybody's trust — through the barrel of a tear gas canister.
It's worth being fair to what this argument is and isn't. It isn't a claim that the police broke the law, or that every baton blow that day was unjustified, or that crowd control at a high-security location during a live parliamentary session is inherently illegitimate. Every state, democratic or otherwise, reserves some capacity to manage crowds who break through barricades meant to protect the seat of government. The argument is narrower and, in some ways, harder to dismiss: that there's a real cost — political and moral — when the default answer to youthful, largely peaceful frustration is force rather than dialogue, and when the gap between what a government says about itself and what its police do in its name grows too wide to paper over.
The government and its supporters would, fairly, offer a different reading of the same events. They would point out that the protesters had been offered a designated site to demonstrate — Jantar Mantar exists precisely for this purpose — and chose instead to try to march on Parliament itself, a restricted zone, on the day the House was in session. They would argue that no government can allow every protest, however sympathetic its cause, to physically breach security cordons around Parliament without some response, and that treating any use of force by the police as evidence of bad faith sets an impossible standard for governance in a country of 1.4 billion people. They would note that Delhi Police reported more of their own personnel injured than protesters, which they read as evidence that officers were responding to, not simply inflicting, violence. These aren't frivolous points, and a fair account of the controversy has to hold both readings in view rather than treat one side's framing as self-evidently correct.
A History That Makes the Image Land Harder
Part of why this particular editorial — and this particular set of photographs — cut as deep as they did is that they don't exist in a vacuum. The lathi has a long, loaded history in India, one that predates the republic itself. It was British colonial police who first turned it into an instrument of routine crowd control, complete with a formalized vocabulary of blows — "jabbing" to the gut, "cutting" to the neck and head. Freedom fighter Lala Lajpat Rai is widely believed to have died from injuries sustained during a lathi charge by colonial police in 1928, a fact that historians of the independence movement still invoke whenever the instrument reappears in the news. The bitter irony, often noted by historians, is that a tool forged to suppress Indians demanding freedom from the British is the same tool still used, generation after generation, by the postcolonial Indian state against its own citizens.
The list of moments when it has reappeared is long and runs across governments of every political stripe: the 2012 Delhi gang-rape protests, when tear gas and batons met young demonstrators demanding safety for women; the 2019 attack on students at Jamia Millia Islamia during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, when police entered a university library and hostel and beat students inside it; the farm law protests of 2020-21; countless smaller, less-remembered agitations by villagers, students, and workers going back decades, several of them predominantly involving Dalit communities and women. Each time, the same debate resurfaces: was the force proportionate to the threat, or was it a reflexive substitute for the harder, slower work of actually engaging with what people are angry about?
What makes the 2026 episode distinct is the demographic at its centre. This wasn't a protest built around a familiar ideological fault line — religion, caste, land, or an opposition party's mobilization machine. It grew out of grief over a broken exam system and a viral joke about being called a cockroach by the country's top judge. The people marching were, by most accounts, the very "Gen Z" cohort that governments across the world are anxious about — chronically online, distrustful of institutions, and unusually good at turning humiliation into a rallying symbol. When international outlets like the AP and Al Jazeera described it as among the largest demonstrations against the Modi government since it came to power, that wasn't really a comment on the size of the crowd (10,000 is not, in Indian protest terms, an enormous number) — it was a comment on how unusual it was for a protest with no major party or established organization behind it to reach this scale at all.
The Deeper Fault Line: Trust, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Slogans
Strip away the specific personalities — Dipke, Wangchuk, Pradhan, Surya Kant — and what's left is a question every democracy eventually has to answer: what is a government's language actually for? A slogan like "Sabka Vishwas" isn't just a marketing line; it's an implicit promise about how the state will behave, especially toward people who disagree with it. When that promise runs headlong into images of unarmed young people being beaten in the street, the slogan doesn't just fail to describe reality — it can actively corrode trust faster than silence would have, because it invites the very comparison that then makes the government look worse.
This is a dynamic worth taking seriously regardless of one's politics. Governments of every stripe, in every country, are tempted to reach for confident, inclusive language while managing the messier reality of policing dissent. The test of whether that language is sincere or merely decorative isn't found in the slogan itself — it's found in what happens the first time a slogan is inconvenient. Does the government use moments like this to open a real channel with protesters, the way past governments have occasionally done by receiving delegations or agreeing to talks? Or does the state's instinct default to the barricade, the tear gas shell, and the lathi, treating the underlying grievance as a public-order problem to be dispersed rather than a political problem to be addressed?
It's also worth resisting the temptation to read this only as a story about authoritarian overreach. There's a genuine governance dilemma buried in here too. Security forces protecting Parliament during a live session have a real, defensible job to do, and no government anywhere lets a crowd of any size physically breach the perimeter of its legislature without some use of force. The question isn't really "should police have stopped the march" — most observers across the spectrum would concede some form of crowd management was inevitable. The question is about proportionality, about whether force was the first resort or the last, and about whether the government's political response in the days after — dialogue, an inquiry into the NEET scandal, some acknowledgment of the students' grief — matched the scale of what had just happened on its streets. On that count, the record so far is genuinely contested: the movement's organizers say they've been offered nothing but more barricades; the government would say the situation is still evolving and that engagement is ongoing through other channels.
What This Moment Is Really About
Underneath the tear gas and the slogans is something simpler and sadder: a generation of young Indians who invested years of their lives, and their families' savings, into an exam system that failed them, and who then watched some of their peers die because of that failure. Whatever one thinks of the Cockroach Janta Party's satire, the government's security response, or the opposition's political opportunism in amplifying the moment, that underlying grief is real and deserves to be treated as the actual centre of this story, not a footnote to the spectacle of tear gas on Parliament Street.
The Indian Express editorial's central provocation — that you cannot have "everybody's trust" while your instinct is to reach for the baton — is a case worth taking seriously, even if reasonable people can and do disagree about how the specific events of July 20 should be judged. It's a reminder that legitimacy in a democracy isn't manufactured through slogans; it's earned, slowly, through how a government behaves in exactly the moments when behaving well is inconvenient. Whether the Indian state, this time, chooses dialogue over dispersal is a story that is still being written — at Jantar Mantar, in the corridors of Parliament, and in the front pages that will keep covering whatever happens next.
This piece draws on reporting from The Indian Express, Al Jazeera, NPR, the Associated Press, Newslaundry, The Print, and Wikipedia's coverage of the 2026 Delhi Jantar Mantar protests, current as of late July 2026. As this remains a fast-developing story, readers should check recent news for the latest developments.
