INDIA’S youth protesters called for nationwide demonstrations yesterday even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government urged them to join talks, while shutting metro stations and mobile internet services and curtailing business in central Delhi.
The youth protesters, led by the self-named Cockroach Janta Party movement, are demanding the resignation of the education minister over leaks of medical school entrance test papers that affected some two million students in May and have been linked to several student suicides.
The protests have swelled into the biggest youth challenge to Modi since he came to power in 2014. Opposition parties have echoed the youth movement’s demands and have disrupted the monsoon session of parliament that began this week.
It marks the biggest political crisis of Modi’s third term, which began in 2024. The government made a fresh appeal on Thursday to the protesters to join talks to resolve the crisis but they responded by calling for nationwide peaceful protests on Friday in solidarity with students who alleged police brutality during a march on parliament on Monday by tens of thousands of people. Thousands of people had returned to the Jantar Mantar protest site by Thursday afternoon, carrying anti-government posters and chanting slogans amid heavy security deployment. Protests also spread to other cities, including Ranchi, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram and Kolkata, local media reported.
Authorities in Delhi shut down 16 metro rail stations in and around the central parts of Delhi where the protesters have remained camped, inconveniencing thousands of commuters. The government also ordered telecom firms to block mobile Internet services in the area, sources told Reuters.
Meanwhile, activist Sonam Wangchuk has ended his hunger strike after 26 days, he said late last night. He said in a post on X that he had ended his fast after “a long negotiation on various conditions and in view of possible violence in the country”.
Wangchuk, 59, had been on a hunger strike since June 28 in solidarity with the ‘cockroach movement’.
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