Hello and welcome to The Wire Wrap. I'm Shravasti Dasgupta. Days after the Delhi police unleashed a brute force on protesters who were responding to the Cockroach Janta Party's call for a sunset march on Monday, crowds have continued to swell at Delhi's Jandar Mantar. Protests have spread across the country and young people have continued to come to these protests despite the police putting in restrictions, traffic controls, as well as internet shutdowns. The opposition, on the other hand, has also kept up pressure on the government, demanding Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation. They have been insisting on this both inside and outside Parliament. Leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi staged an unprecedented protest outside Prime Minister Modi's residence. And Prime Minister Modi yesterday has issued two statements in one day in which he has promised to set up pass-track courts to impose strict punishment for paper leaks. Now, is this enough and is the Modi government in a corner that it has not found itself before in? To discuss all this, I am being joined today by Anand Mishra. He is political editor at the Hindu Frontline and Yamini Iyer. She is a policy analyst and we are also going to be joined by Vijayata Singh of the Hindu shortly who will be joining us online. First off, I wanted to start with you. Let's start with the two statements that Prime Minister Modi issued on Thursday, which was yesterday. One was in the morning when he put out a tweet early in the morning saying that he will not spare those who are playing with the future of the youth and fast track courts will be set up. And then in the middle of the night, close to midnight, he put out a reel for the Instagram audience, one could say, because it was in that vertical format. And then he said that he's spoken to people in all departments and a bill is going to be brought to set up these fast track courts and put a stringent punishment. But this response from the Prime Minister, which has come after the police action, has made no mention of the police action. Neither does it say anything about Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation calls. So how do you see his response really yesterday? So this response, I feel it's too late and too little. it has come after already the protest has spread nationwide. It is no longer a Delhi affair. It is not only a Jantar Mantar centric thing now. In different state capitals, different cities including in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's and Amit Shah's Gujarat, the protests have begun. I am surprised why did it take the government so long to respond. Because So after all, youths have been the constituency of Mr. Modi since 2014. It was youths who had overwhelmingly supported his government and the signs were tell This is not the first protest that happened at Janthar Mantar If you see last year we saw similar protest happening in Bihar and during BPSC exam leak And even then when Prashant Kishore and some opposition leaders have lent their support to the protest, it was being said that these protests are being politically motivated. But when the elections came, we saw Prashant Kishore's party not winning a single seat. So the lesson that has to be learned from Bihar protest was that who were actually behind those protests, agitation. Had it been a political agitation, then Prashant Kishore would have been Chief Minister by that time, which means that despite no political backing, the protests were happening on the ground, youths were angry and they wanted the Prime Minister, the BJP government to listen to them. Had they been listened to earlier, then perhaps this situation would not have arisen. Mr. Modi has made a reach out, that reach out is welcome, any reach out is welcome because after all the protest cannot go on for an indefinite period and if it does then the possibility of violence cannot be ruled out because, mind it, they are young people, they can go desperate and then there are also possibility of anti-social elements entering the protest. We have seen such public protests going here where if they are not addressed in time. So, as far as reach out is concerned, okay, it is welcome for the Prime Minister to help me reach out. But definitely the reach out has come quite late. Yamini, I want to come to you on this. So, because the reach out, a lot of people, as you are just mentioning, are saying that it has come late and the signs were there earlier. But the crowds in Jantar Mantar seem to have just swelled in the last four days despite the police action that we saw on Monday. The government messaging in this scenario is, is this a miscalculation to some degree because the people on the ground are not really paying attention to what tweet is coming or whether Nadda has met Sonam Wangchuk or whether they have called them for talks. It feels like the BJP is using its old tactics to tackle a new challenge. Absolutely. So I think it's worth unpacking a little bit what those old tactics were. It has always been using state coercion, the threat of dominance via the police, the rapid action force, the constant bringing in the CRPF from different parts of the paramilitary forces from different parts of the country. This has always been part of how the Modi government's playbook in terms of responding to protests. Secondly most protests have and we had a series over this last decade tend to come from a certain kind of interest group And the playbook is to use social media and other tools to delegitimize these interest groups. So CAA demonizing the Muslim, farmers' protests demonizing the farmer. These are entrenched vested interests, Khalistan. You know, that's been the standard playbook. And then eventually the whole thing sort of dissipates because of this combination. time round they've been completely caught because what is out there is not a singular interest group it's a multiplicities of interest groups that there's been a kind of uh this has been brewing for some time the exams and the leaks are one aspect of it jobs unemployment the frustrations of the youth and the sense that the future possibilities are getting more and more shrunk It's been brewing for some time. And Modi had always presented himself as the governance king, in a sense. Remember candidate Modi's slogan in 2014, maximum governance, minimum government. Everybody out there in these protests do not know a time when there was anyone apart from Prime Minister Modi as Prime Minister. He's been Prime Minister for 13 years. So you can't now blame anyone else. with absolutely no face can Modi now say this is UPA's failure or this is Nehru's failure because this is now about him, his governance and it is a cross-section of people that he cannot demonize because this is a cross-section of people. There's no one singular actor and what is also making this so because of all these factors it's this kind of organic outpouring which has also meant that I think the protests now are much larger and much beyond the catalyst of its leadership, right? So not to take away from the sacrifices of its leadership, the leadership itself, but everybody who's sitting there is there to express a deep frustration with the bargain that we were supposedly accepting. What was that bargain? That bargain was silence and place your democratic rights at the altar of this Hindutva and a quote-unquote capable government. And neither one of these are enough anymore because a capable government was a fraud anyway. Hindutva is also now being challenged in the language and grammar of many of the young people there. They are questioning all of this. That's a really important step forward for what this protest symbolizes and how it's moved beyond just the very specific issues of the examination and the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, which remain critical, but the protest is more than that. Let's also talk about the kind of response that we have. We are just learning that the talks took place between the CJP leadership and J.P. Nadda today, and they insisted that they will not accept anything except Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation. But before I come to that I also want to go across to Vijayeta before we come to the political question Vijayeta Singh is joining us online Vijayeta can you hear me Yeah I can hear you So I wanted to ask you, Vijayeta, we were just speaking about the police action earlier and the kind of response that we saw. You have reported extensively on the kind of police action that we saw on Monday. And you have also reported on the fact that for the first time perhaps in Delhi, there has been the use of pellet guns. Earlier, we have seen this in Jammu and Kashmir as well as in the northeast. But this is the first perhaps documented instance of such use. But tell us what you have found in your reporting in terms of the injuries that people have suffered on Monday's protest and the police response. Yes, the police is still in denial. They've consistently maintained that they did not fire pellets at protesters. So they are trying to confuse here because we have clearly said in our reports that it's the rapid action force which is under CRPF and which is which was under the operational control technically of the Delhi Police because it's the requisitioning authority. And today morning I was told we were told that CRPF is looking into the media reports and they are investigating at their own level but till now no concrete statement has come from either the Delhi Police or the the Ministry of Home Affairs regarding the excesses used against protesters. And as far as injuries are concerned, as mentioned in our report by Ashna Bhutani, one of the protesters, 19-year-old, he risks losing vision in his right eye. So pellets, if you look at them, they're not, I mean, in first instance, it's a sight, they're not like very lethal but if they're fired from a certain distance and the way they are fired it can go anywhere and if it gets lodged in your like eye or upper part of the body then it can damage the nerves and this is what has happened with 19 year old sahil locha he has undergone surgery and now i think he has to undergo another surgery because it requires specialized intervention now there has also been a case of a reporter from outlook and outlook has reported this as well that they have also uh the reporter has suffered injuries from what appears to be uh pellet guns but uh tell us also about the fact that what is the uh the protocol really for using such uh such machinery against protesters we've not seen this before in the national capital as you have mentioned in your reporting that that this has been done earlier in jammu and kashmir and in North East. So what is the protocol really of using this on protesters? So after they were first introduced in Kashmir in 2011, there were several complaints because they were life-threatening.
