hello and welcome to the wire It's barely 48 hours since the protest at Jandar Mantar moved, but it seems all the action has remained. It has just shifted location. It's happening in Parliament. It's happening outside Parliament. There's news of 450 protesters being identified by the Bihar government, where AK-47s are said to have been used against them during the heat of the protest. In Parliament also, there is hectic activity from the opposition benches. where they are demanding answers from the Prime Minister, demanding accountability from the Home Minister for why such violence was used against the students. At the same time, the CJP has said that it will be forced to pick up the protest again in case the government's actions continue, that it's a violation of the agreement it had. Joining me today on this live is the wire team's Srivasti Dasgupta, who brings us a report from what's happened to date, the absolute latest in the news. Chisti is joining us, the editor of The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, and MK Venu, also founding editor of The Wire. Let's begin with Sravasti. Sravasti, can you just bring us up to speed on what all has happened today? So we saw that today there was the expectation that the opposition and the government would try to discuss the bill on paper leaks. The government was expecting that since Dharmendra Pradhan has resigned on Saturday, then the discussion on the new paper leak bill will take place. But the opposition has changed tactics and now their focus is on demanding answers from the government on the police brutality that took place during the protest. demanding there was a protest outside the parliament premises where they have been demanding that Home Minister Amit Shah make a statement in the house as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi should apologize to the students. They stood outside parliament holding banners that said vote chori, paper chori and chanda chori referring to the Ayodhya temple, Ram temple donation embezzlement case and then inside parliament we saw repeated at least three times. The government tried to bring the paper leaks bill in the Lok Sabha but there was a sloganeering by the opposition and the opposition was very clear that Home Minister Amit Shah was not even in the house and he should come to the house and he should make a statement. And also in the Rajya Sabha in the second half the house was adjourned again and the opposition demanded a discussion. A leader of opposition Malik Arjun Kharge sought to make a statement saying that the police had used excessive force on the protesters, but he was stopped from doing so. In fact, he was cut off by the chair and the house was adjourned. And I must remind our viewers that this has happened for the whole of last week, Monday to Friday, and then again today, Monday. So six days of the session. And every day, Kharge has been cut off as he has sought to bring this up. And then the house reconvened at five o'clock, both the houses. And in the Rajya Sabha, the government sought to start the discussion which is the insult to national symbols and anthems but there was a huge uproar from the opposition benches and Kharge again stood up and he said that Home Minister Amin Shah should come to the house and he should make a statement and Kiran Rajuju who is the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister he accused the opposition of not participating in the discussion he said that earlier the government had agreed to the opposition's demand of a discussion and the opposition wanted to have a discussion but now they are not willing to participate. There was a huge sloganeering in both houses and both houses were adjourned at the end of the day but now we are hearing that there is a chance that tomorrow the bill will be taken up in the Lok Sabha. Opposition leaders did meet Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla after the house was adjourned for the day and there is the expectation that it will be taken up tomorrow but after that a leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi has also met one of the protesters whose The video had gone viral. He was first covered by Lalandop Irfan who had spoken in quite detail about how he has tried to give exams and what brought him to the protest and we are just now learning that Rahul Gandhi has met him and he is standing by the students and the Congress has firmed that Modi must apologize to the students. Right, Shravasti. Thanks, Siddharth. Just wondering, the opposition is doing what it's doing, but what is the government doing? What are they thinking? It's evident that there is a strong... uh undercurrent of incel insincerity and everything that the government has said about so far The fact that 48 hours have elapsed and the government is still not given their commitments in writing, let alone bother to get them implemented. I'm talking about the withdrawal of cases. Right. You know, speaks volumes for the dishonesty with which the government is approaching this. There can really be no excuse. We're not talking about a chaotic system where the government doesn't know what is happening. You know, we're talking about double and triple engine governments. Absolutely. And so the BJP is in power in Delhi, it's in power in Bihar, it's in power in... other states. How is it not possible that this most powerful leader on whose ishara Dharmendra Pradhan finally resigned, right? And we're seeing posters in Delhi, laughable posters, put up by the BJP Yuga Morcha saying, "Gen Z stands with Narendra Modi." So if this is how Modi is going to come good. on assurances that his own ministers gave in public, right? We all saw the press conference. Then this is a pretty bad, you know... pretty bad augury and I think we had a glimpse perhaps earlier when on the first day itself when they appointed pralad patel as the acting uh education minister uh somebody who uh is the activation i'm sorry i'm confusing with pralad patel who's the other guy uh vjp mp from vjp so prad joshi culture minister being seconded now for education not somebody with a great record at all somebody with a record of having made pretty ghastly statements in the past and then you have this committee that they've set up compri you know supposedly to look into overhauling the examination and education system comprising. you know people who have either no experience at all in education or whose experience is uh you know like kamako professor kamakoti a former uh director of iit chetna madras who basically has extolled the virtues of gomutra as a way of curing fevers stuff like that so so i think that on every front frankly i think prime minister modi did the barest minimum that he felt he he needed to do in order to get the protests called off and get get young people back into their homes, but by doing everything else in his power to kind of sabotage the essence of what should have been a new start. I think Modi is only preparing the grounds for further confrontation. Siva, what do you think? Will the protests actually revive in some form again? Is it over? The signs, the writing on the wall is that in some sense, the protest is continuing. Well, the protest is continuing. I would say that by doing this, we know what spurred the protests on last time. The police action and the brutality which was seen through by all protesters, their relatives, their parents of Gen Z, their other cousins, It just blazed through people of India across rural-urban divides, across Modi voters and non-Modi voters, across all class divides. We are seeing what Saroj Giri, the sociologist, called the "ferial underclass." That is somebody whom Rahul Gandhi has gone and met, if I can call them that, along with very urban students from a completely different group. So this kind of cross-class alliances that came together. repress them again. This is classic Modi government methodology. Though I'm a little confused, maybe the whole system has got programmed to functioning with this blueprint of how do you behave the morning after. We must cleanse the place of any joke, any laugh about Modi that must not survive for the next week of The Economist, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Japan Times, The Don, all international press which has been brutally honest about how these protests have gone. So I think there's a deep desire to somehow just almost put a lid slap a lid on on a boiling pot of water so i don't know how this is going to go and it doesn't look like there is much uh faith also in themselves on how to negotiate this politically and develop some flexibility if only tactically for yourself to get out of this uh perhaps the biggest crisis the modi government finds itself in definitely after 2024. What is the sense that you got, were you there on the last day and what is the sense that you get from what you saw there and what's happening now? Was there ever a feeling among the protesters or even the organizers that this would be the fallout of their agreement with the government? Would they feel left out? You know, I... Pragya, on the last day, I went a day before the... The previous day, the penultimate day. before they actually called off the, they withdrew the dharna. after meeting with the You know with the BJP ministers, Jitendra Singh and... No doubt. And I heard after coming back. dude They were in a celebratory kind of mood and all three of them, Dipke, Ranka and all others, Neha and others, they were celebrating. And then later I heard one statement by Saurabh Das saying that we are waiting for a written agreement. uh to come before we formally withdraw. while they were celebrating. Now, what surprised me was before the written agreement came, They trusted the government and they assumed that since Dharmendra Pradhan had resigned, the written agreement on... on releasing all the students detained by the police all over the place is only a matter of formality. I think they assume that it was a small thing which the government will never release on. Not realizing that Today, Ranka has, I think yesterday, Ashutosh Ranka put out a tweet saying that we need a full return.
