A CLUTCH of unforeseen events have combined to pose the existential crisis Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing from unemployed youth and young students, who after claiming his education minister’s scalp recently are now determined to win the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commissioner whom they call “a vote thief”.

The first trigger for the youth to take to the streets came with the cancellation and corruption in the entrance exams to India’s medical colleges, which led to nationwide protests amid a dozen suicides by dejected students. Then the chief justice of India described unemployed youth as cockroaches, setting off a response nobody expected. But the safety pin from the fraught grenade was pulled by Ritika Chopra, who broke the Indian Express story on Sept 23 about two election commissioners officially calling out their chief Gyanesh Kumar for alleged illegalities in deleting 130 million voters from the electoral rolls. The deletions altered the outcomes in Bihar and West Bengal polls to the BJP’s advantage.

That Modi is not prepared to allow the fall of a key pivot of his winning electoral machinery is evident from the paramilitary units he has mobilised, including from troubled Jammu and Kashmir and from platoons purposed to guard the frontier with Pakistan. They have been joined by the Delhi Police supported by street criminals from the Hindutva fold to jointly barricade New Delhi against protesters led largely by the recently formed Cockroach Janta Party.

On their part, the Cockroaches are predominantly from the........

© Dawn