{"id":55024,"date":"2026-07-21T14:55:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/55024\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T14:55:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:55:27","slug":"wont-back-down-indian-student-protesters-return-after-police-crackdown-protests-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/55024\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Won\u2019t back down\u2019: Indian student protesters return after police crackdown | Protests News"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Delhi, India \u2013 Blood spots on the walls, overturned barricades, shattered mirrors and sandals strewn across the road. A scarf here, broken glasses and a torn shirt there lie as remnants of the chaos that took over the Indian capital.<\/p>\n

The heart of New Delhi \u2013 Parliament Street and Connaught Place, a colonial-era square \u2013 bears the imprint of Monday\u2019s police crackdown on thousands of protesters, most of them students who had shut down the capital, demanding that Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign.<\/p>\n

A swarm of protesters reached parliament\u2019s doorstep before retreating as the police tear-gassed them. More than 100 students were injured.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still cannot believe my eyes that I\u2019m in Delhi,\u201d said Anshul Dev, an 18-year-old who grew up in the capital. \u201cPart of it is because tear gas still stings,\u201d he added, bursting into laughter with his group of friends. One of them had both legs bandaged.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis government, whom our elders voted to power, is treating us like terrorists and criminals,\u201d Dev said. \u201cThis is our country, and we are reclaiming it from their hateful politics. We are here to break the spell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anger among India\u2019s youth, the world\u2019s largest Gen Z cohort, has been simmering for the past two months over a string of compromised entrance exams that affected millions of students. In some cases, exam papers were leaked; in others, students who sought copies of their answer scripts found that they had been wrongly graded. More than 20 students died by suicide, many citing the paper leaks.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not addressed the protests, even as he appeared smiling on Monday in parliament, barely metres away from demonstrators at one point.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday afternoon, India\u2019s leader of opposition, Congress\u2019s Rahul Gandhi, camped outside Modi\u2019s residence in New Delhi, joined by other members of parliament \u2013 and gave a public call to assemble.<\/p>\n

Analysts said the student protests face formidable obstacles before they can extract concessions from Modi\u2019s government. Yet the protests, the government\u2019s refusal to hold any of its own accountable and the crackdown have also embellished a charge that the prime minister has long faced from critics and opposition parties \u2013 that although he is elected democratically, his government has weakened democratic checks and accountability.<\/p>\n

\"TearTear gas spreads around protesters in New Delhi on July 20, 2026 [Anushree Fadnavis\/Reuters]\u2018Protests will continue\u2019<\/p>\n

After dark on Monday, Abhijeet Dipke \u2013 the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a political pressure group that called the march \u2013 returned to a torn-down stage at the CJP\u2019s main protest site near Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory that is now an important location for protests.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis barbaric Delhi police has beaten up our students and comrades. We are heartbroken,\u201d he said, addressing about 2,000 protesters who stayed back after the crackdown. \u201cWe will continue to resist and demand accountability from the government. We will not back down until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dipke told the protesters that the Delhi police \u201cbrutally cracked down to crush our hopes\u201d that Pradhan would resign. \u201cIt was only our first call to march,\u201d he said. \u201cThere will be more. Do not lose hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Volunteers began to pick up rubbish, tie a tent together and sweep the road at the Jantar Mantar site. This is where more than 100 protesters from student unions have been sleeping for nearly a month to join Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent activist, in a hunger strike seeking the minister\u2019s resignation.<\/p>\n

The police also rampaged through these student unions\u2019 tarpaulin tents and belongings on Monday.<\/p>\n

The movement gained momentum last week after the police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site and restricted him to a government-run hospital, where he remains. His family and the CJP have called it \u201cillegal detention\u201d, but the Delhi High Court has refused immediate relief.<\/p>\n

Wangchuk, 59, broke his hunger strike before the march on Monday. However, later he said he would be at it again after \u201cseeing the brutality\u201d against \u201cpeacefully protesting students\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Delhi police have filed at least five criminal cases against protesters related to violence, stone-throwing and vandalism during the march.<\/p>\n

\"CJPCJP founder Abhijeet Dipke speaks to protesters injured in New Delhi on July 21, 2026 [Arun Sankar\/AFP]Meeting with government a \u2018waste of time\u2019<\/p>\n

Before the march, CJP leaders said the government reached out for talks.<\/p>\n

As thousands of demonstrators assembled in New Delhi, two CJP spokespeople met JP Nadda, India\u2019s health minister, to convey the movement\u2019s three demands: Pradhan\u2019s immediate resignation, Wangchuk\u2019s discharge from hospital and compensation of nearly $105,000 for the families of those students who died by suicide.<\/p>\n

However, they were disillusioned by sunset. \u201cIt was a waste of our time,\u201d said Ashutosh Ranka, a CJP spokesperson. \u201cWe were made to wait for four hours, and the minister met us for 10 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nadda said he met with the spokespeople \u201cin a cordial atmosphere\u201d, adding that he \u201crequested all the protesters to end their sit-in and assist the administration in restoring normalcy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, CJP leader Dipke said: \u201cIf the government wants to have talks again, they have to come to Jantar Mantar. We won\u2019t be going there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some students have been calling for the decentralisation of the protests, so they could move beyond the CJP to demand accountability from the government.<\/p>\n

And political analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera said maintaining the credibility of the CJP\u2019s leadership remains one of the biggest immediate hurdles for the movement in the face of an unprecedented crowd turnout for the march.<\/p>\n

\"AA CJP supporter poses next to a protest message in New Delhi after the police crackdown on July 20, 2026 [Sajjad Hussain\/AFP]Confronting a \u2018strong man\u2019<\/p>\n

Since the police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site, the movement and demonstrators have called on Modi to resign. Slogans targeting the prime minister reverberated through central New Delhi on Monday.<\/p>\n

The large number of protesters \u201cis itself a big challenge to the prime minister\u201d, said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an author and Modi biographer.<\/p>\n

As of now, he told Al Jazeera, \u201cModi has decided to continue with his instinctive response of not giving any concessions to protesters and continuing to project himself as a strong man with completely unshakeable will\u201d.<\/p>\n

The biographer added that the prime minister, who has been in power since 2014, \u201cdoes not care before crushing a protest or using brute force until it cuts through his voting constituencies\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey will go by their gut response of a crackdown. Modi would not want to emerge from this with a bloody nose,\u201d he added, \u201cdespite a lot of anger among youth, which shows the undercurrent of anti-incumbency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The simmering anger found a vent as Gen Z rallied behind a joke, the Cockroach Janta Party, after India\u2019s chief justice equated government critics and unemployed youth to \u201ccockroaches\u201d and \u201cparasites\u201d.<\/p>\n

Memes, online rants and students taking photos in front of police have flooded the internet in India, where they expressed anguish and took digs at the police crackdown.<\/p>\n

Meghnad S, a YouTuber, was among the crowd of thousands in front of the Indian Parliament on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was insanity, and the crowd was really riled up due to police actions. It was cruel,\u201d he told Al Jazeera from the protest site on Monday night. \u201cBut movements are always messy. This is very difficult to control. We are all cockroaches, after all. And we are still swarming here.\u201d<\/p>\n

By Tuesday morning, the crowd had packed the site yet again. The cockroaches had returned.<\/p>\n

\"CJPCJP supporters march towards parliament on July 20, 2026 [Adnan Abidi\/Reuters]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Delhi, India \u2013 Blood spots on the walls, overturned barricades, shattered mirrors and sandals strewn across the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[949,933,498,8,1334,1467,9,3347,67,3377,7],"class_list":["post-55024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-top-stories","tag-asia","tag-education","tag-government","tag-headlines","tag-india","tag-narendra-modi","tag-news","tag-police","tag-politics","tag-protests","tag-top-stories"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116958548692026982","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}