On October 7, 2001, Narendra Modi was sworn in as chief minister of Gujarat. Twenty-five years later, the Union Cabinet has adopted a resolution celebrating the achievements of those years, which is the sort of document a government writes about itself when it expects the audience to applaud. The resolution lists welfare delivery, highways, railway electrification, public capital expenditure, GST, digital governance and national security, and each item on that list has a real constituency behind it.
Meanwhile, on Gandhi Jayanti, of all days, Delhi Police closed entry and exit at a dozen Metro stations around Central Delhi, barricaded Jantar Mantar and imposed Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita across the New Delhi district. The target was a protest demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Internet disruptions were reported around the site, and protesters were detained as police enforced the prohibitory orders.
Jantar Mantar Protest: Delhi Metro shuts entry and exit at 12 stations | Image Source: Google
A government with a quarter century of mandates behind it has some explaining to do when it needs this much infrastructure to keep a demonstration away from a designated protest ground. French Press Global takes the invitation to audit seriously. We will read the ledger in both columns, and we will hand the government its credits before presenting the bill.
The Credits
Any honest audit begins with what the books show on the favourable side. India's economy has grown at a pace that finance ministries elsewhere envy, and official data reported 8.2 percent real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2025-26. The government also reports a 2025 unemployment rate of 3.1 percent under the usual-status measure. Roads have been laid at a speed that earlier governments only promised in manifestos, rail lines have been electrified, and digital payments now reach the vegetable seller who once dealt only in cash. Millions of households encounter the state through a welfare transfer that arrives on schedule, and that experience builds political loyalty in ways no speech can.
Image Source: Google
The headline numbers deserve scrutiny as well, because a 3.1 percent unemployment rate can sit comfortably beside a labour market full of precarious, informal and underpaid work. GDP growth says nothing about who captured it, and household purchasing power tells a different story from the one told by quarterly releases. The government is entitled to cite its figures, and citizens are entitled to ask what sits underneath them.
Gujarat, the Chapter That Never Closed
The Modi story begins in Gujarat, and the 2002 communal violence sits at its foundation. The record needs precise statement. The Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute Modi for a larger conspiracy, and the Supreme Court later dismissed a challenge to the closure report. Anyone who writes that the courts found him criminally responsible has invented a conviction that does not exist.
The legal verdict answers one question, and the question of governance remains open. Large numbers of people died, disproportionately Muslims, and Human Rights Watch documented allegations of delayed investigations, intimidation and inadequate accountability. The Gujarat administration was criticised for failing to protect citizens and for failing to deliver justice afterwards. Here lies the sharper point. Gujarat became the brand, the "model" that Modi carried to Delhi as proof of decisive governance. A leader who sells decisiveness as a credential invites the question of what that decisiveness delivered for the victims, for policing, for rehabilitation and for transparency. Legal exoneration closes a file in a courtroom, while the political and moral account stays open for as long as the country keeps asking.
The Government That Announces
Modi's governing style favours the dramatic announcement. In 2016 demonetisation invalidated 86 percent of the currency in circulation, and cash-dependent businesses and workers absorbed the damage. In March 2020 a national lockdown arrived with the lead time of a doorbell, and Azim Premji University estimated that India's migrant population ran to around 400 million, a figure that makes the absence of a relief plan hard to forgive. Workers walked home along highways because no train was running to take them. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of their miseries and directed governments to arrange food, shelter and transport.
Image Source: Google
Pause on that sequence. A government celebrated for administrative control needed judicial intervention before migrant workers received basic assistance. The model promises that concentrated authority produces faster and better governance, and the lockdown tested that promise at national scale with a result that no resolution of the Cabinet will fully rewrite.
The farm laws followed the same choreography. Legislation arrived without meaningful consultation with the communities it would reshape, a protest movement stood at the borders of Delhi for more than a year amid barricades and arrests, and the laws were repealed in 2021. If the reforms were necessary, the consultation should have come first, and if repeal was always going to be the outcome, someone owes an account of the year of confrontation in between. Electoral majorities confer the right to legislate and leave the duty to listen fully intact.
Dissent, Handled as a Security Matter
The Citizenship Amendment Act protests tested whether equality before the law applies to citizenship itself, since critics argued that the law's religious classification excluded Muslims. They were met with arrests, internet restrictions and extensive police action. In Jammu and Kashmir, the 2019 constitutional changes arrived with communications curbs and preventive detention that lasted far longer than anyone would call temporary. The government defends these measures as essential to national security and integration, and that defence deserves a hearing. It also deserves the follow-up question about why "security" so reliably expands to cover journalists, students and civil society organisations.
Image Source: Google
External assessors have noticed the pattern. Freedom House has reported rising pressure on journalists, NGOs and critics, and V-Dem's 2025 report classified India as an "electoral autocracy." These are the judgments of outside organisations rather than courts, and the government disputes them. A mature democracy answers such a classification with evidence of independent institutions at work, and a defensive shrug has never persuaded a sceptic.
Then comes Manipur, where displacement, deaths and the destruction of homes and places of worship unfolded over a prolonged period. In 2023 the Supreme Court described an "absolute breakdown of law and order" and raised the possibility of ineptness or complicity within the law-enforcement machinery. Manipur was governed by the BJP, and the Union government's public distance from a conflict inside its own political territory remains one of the stranger silences of the era. A government that claims credit for national security owns the security of citizens during a conflict that unfolded on its political watch.
The Institutions, Audited
Power measured over twenty-five years leaves a mark on the bodies meant to check it. In February 2024 the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bond scheme as unconstitutional, holding that voters have a right to information about who funds political parties. The scheme had allowed anonymous donations, and disclosure arrived through a court order, because neither the executive nor Parliament volunteered it. Calling the scheme a "scam" outruns the legal record. Calling it an opaque funding system that the country's highest court struck down describes it accurately, and that description already damns it.
The investigative agencies present a harder case, because some of their targets undoubtedly deserve investigation. The test is consistency, and the questions are simple. Do raids and arrests reach ruling-party figures with the same energy they bring to the opposition? Do investigations conclude within a reasonable time? Do arrests lead to convictions? Can journalists examine powerful business and political actors without paying for it? The government is free to answer yes to each of these, provided it shows the data.
Gyanesh Kumar and the Roll Call
This brings us to the Election Commission, the institution that certifies every victory Modi has won since 2014, and to the controversy now fixed on its chief. The protesters allege that the Special Intensive Revision of the voter rolls has removed millions of names or placed barriers in front of legitimate voters. The Commission denies wrongdoing and says the exercise exists to identify duplicates, deceased voters and ineligible entries. It has also directed a special enrolment drive for people left off the rolls, which counts as a point in its favour.
Gyanesh Kumar | Image Source: Google
The controversy sharpened after The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had repeatedly objected to decisions linked to the revision and the Commission's systems. The Supreme Court has sought responses from the Centre, the Election Commission and Kumar himself. It has made no final finding that manipulation occurred, and this publication will not manufacture one.
The reasoning that matters sits one level higher. The Commission operates under the shadow of the government that appoints its members, so its independence has to be demonstrated through disclosure, visible internal disagreement, accessible correction procedures and equal treatment of every voter. A body that asks for trust while declining to open its workings has the arrangement backwards. The burden of proof here sits with the institution, and it grows heavier with every name that disappears from a list.
The Street, and the Police Who Policed It
Which brings us back to the barricades. On September 25 and again on October 2, Delhi Police met the Gyanesh Kumar protests with force of numbers. Reports on the October 2 crackdown put the detentions at more than 500, including AAP leaders Saurabh Bharadwaj, Atishi, Sanjeev Jha and Sanjay Singh, and CPM leader MA Baby. Other outlets reported about 700 detained, and a further account put the figure for SFI and DYFI activists alone above 1,000. The numbers vary from outlet to outlet, and every version of them describes a very large detention of citizens in the capital. Visuals from the spot showed police personnel carrying and dragging protesters into vehicles. One report put roughly 4,000 police personnel on the ground, and described clashes as groups arrived and attempted to cross barricades.
The police position rests on the absence of permission and the prohibitory orders, and the organisers dispute the premise. Bharadwaj said AAP had applied for permission six days earlier and asked why a designated protest site requires one. A legal order that is technically valid still invites scrutiny when its effect is to empty a protest ground, close a dozen Metro stations and darken internet service in the centre of the national capital. Neither fact settles the argument, and together they make a picture that Delhi Police ought to explain in public.
Protesters supplied their own commentary in the idiom of the street. The chant that carried through the crowd was "Gali gali mein shor hai, Modi-Gyanesh vote chor hai", a slogan that states an allegation as fact, which journalism must not do. SFI's Aishe Ghosh made the sharper institutional point when she observed that the same police who struggle to prevent crime in the capital appear in vast numbers to protect one official. A line circulating from the day, reported by The Quint, put the grievance in the plainest terms available: the job of the police is to detain criminals. Whether or not one accepts the implication, the sentence names the question every Delhi resident is entitled to ask about how the force chooses where to stand.
The Close
Twenty-five years of electoral success is an extraordinary political achievement, and nobody serious disputes it. Modi has won three Gujarat mandates and three Lok Sabha victories, and he has built a political system organised around his authority with a thoroughness that few democratic leaders ever manage.
The anniversary asks a different question from the one the Cabinet resolution answers. It asks whether the institutions that surround that authority can still investigate power, protect minorities, absorb dissent and administer elections without first requiring citizens to risk arrest, livelihood or exclusion. The pattern across these years has been consistent: the government responds when anger becomes impossible to ignore, and protest has ended up standing in for the oversight mechanisms that should have worked earlier.
The Gyanesh Kumar protests belong at the centre of this anniversary because the Election Commission is the institution that converts votes into legitimacy. If its independence can be demonstrated, the Commission has every reason to open its books, answer its own commissioners and restore every eligible voter to the roll. If it cannot, the government that appointed it inherits the doubt. A leader confident in twenty-five years of mandates should welcome that audit, and the country is entitled to watch how he answers it.
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On October 7, 2001, Narendra Modi was sworn in as chief minister of Gujarat. Twenty-five years later, the Union Cabinet has adopted a resolution celebrating the achievements of those years, which is the sort of document a government writes about itself when it expects the audience to applaud. The resolution lists welfare delivery, highways, railway electrification, public capital expenditure, GST, digital governance and national security, and each item on that list has a real constituency behind it.
Meanwhile, on Gandhi Jayanti, of all days, Delhi Police closed entry and exit at a dozen Metro stations around Central Delhi, barricaded Jantar Mantar and imposed Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita across the New Delhi district. The target was a protest demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Internet disruptions were reported around the site, and protesters were detained as police enforced the prohibitory orders.
Jantar Mantar Protest: Delhi Metro shuts entry and exit at 12 stations | Image Source: Google
A government with a quarter century of mandates behind it has some explaining to do when it needs this much infrastructure to keep a demonstration away from a designated protest ground. French Press Global takes the invitation to audit seriously. We will read the ledger in both columns, and we will hand the government its credits before presenting the bill.
The Credits
Any honest audit begins with what the books show on the favourable side. India's economy has grown at a pace that finance ministries elsewhere envy, and official data reported 8.2 percent real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2025-26. The government also reports a 2025 unemployment rate of 3.1 percent under the usual-status measure. Roads have been laid at a speed that earlier governments only promised in manifestos, rail lines have been electrified, and digital payments now reach the vegetable seller who once dealt only in cash. Millions of households encounter the state through a welfare transfer that arrives on schedule, and that experience builds political loyalty in ways no speech can.
Image Source: Google
The headline numbers deserve scrutiny as well, because a 3.1 percent unemployment rate can sit comfortably beside a labour market full of precarious, informal and underpaid work. GDP growth says nothing about who captured it, and household purchasing power tells a different story from the one told by quarterly releases. The government is entitled to cite its figures, and citizens are entitled to ask what sits underneath them.
Gujarat, the Chapter That Never Closed
The Modi story begins in Gujarat, and the 2002 communal violence sits at its foundation. The record needs precise statement. The Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute Modi for a larger conspiracy, and the Supreme Court later dismissed a challenge to the closure report. Anyone who writes that the courts found him criminally responsible has invented a conviction that does not exist.
The legal verdict answers one question, and the question of governance remains open. Large numbers of people died, disproportionately Muslims, and Human Rights Watch documented allegations of delayed investigations, intimidation and inadequate accountability. The Gujarat administration was criticised for failing to protect citizens and for failing to deliver justice afterwards. Here lies the sharper point. Gujarat became the brand, the "model" that Modi carried to Delhi as proof of decisive governance. A leader who sells decisiveness as a credential invites the question of what that decisiveness delivered for the victims, for policing, for rehabilitation and for transparency. Legal exoneration closes a file in a courtroom, while the political and moral account stays open for as long as the country keeps asking.
The Government That Announces
Modi's governing style favours the dramatic announcement. In 2016 demonetisation invalidated 86 percent of the currency in circulation, and cash-dependent businesses and workers absorbed the damage. In March 2020 a national lockdown arrived with the lead time of a doorbell, and Azim Premji University estimated that India's migrant population ran to around 400 million, a figure that makes the absence of a relief plan hard to forgive. Workers walked home along highways because no train was running to take them. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of their miseries and directed governments to arrange food, shelter and transport.
Image Source: Google
Pause on that sequence. A government celebrated for administrative control needed judicial intervention before migrant workers received basic assistance. The model promises that concentrated authority produces faster and better governance, and the lockdown tested that promise at national scale with a result that no resolution of the Cabinet will fully rewrite.
The farm laws followed the same choreography. Legislation arrived without meaningful consultation with the communities it would reshape, a protest movement stood at the borders of Delhi for more than a year amid barricades and arrests, and the laws were repealed in 2021. If the reforms were necessary, the consultation should have come first, and if repeal was always going to be the outcome, someone owes an account of the year of confrontation in between. Electoral majorities confer the right to legislate and leave the duty to listen fully intact.
Dissent, Handled as a Security Matter
The Citizenship Amendment Act protests tested whether equality before the law applies to citizenship itself, since critics argued that the law's religious classification excluded Muslims. They were met with arrests, internet restrictions and extensive police action. In Jammu and Kashmir, the 2019 constitutional changes arrived with communications curbs and preventive detention that lasted far longer than anyone would call temporary. The government defends these measures as essential to national security and integration, and that defence deserves a hearing. It also deserves the follow-up question about why "security" so reliably expands to cover journalists, students and civil society organisations.
Image Source: Google
External assessors have noticed the pattern. Freedom House has reported rising pressure on journalists, NGOs and critics, and V-Dem's 2025 report classified India as an "electoral autocracy." These are the judgments of outside organisations rather than courts, and the government disputes them. A mature democracy answers such a classification with evidence of independent institutions at work, and a defensive shrug has never persuaded a sceptic.
Then comes Manipur, where displacement, deaths and the destruction of homes and places of worship unfolded over a prolonged period. In 2023 the Supreme Court described an "absolute breakdown of law and order" and raised the possibility of ineptness or complicity within the law-enforcement machinery. Manipur was governed by the BJP, and the Union government's public distance from a conflict inside its own political territory remains one of the stranger silences of the era. A government that claims credit for national security owns the security of citizens during a conflict that unfolded on its political watch.
The Institutions, Audited
Power measured over twenty-five years leaves a mark on the bodies meant to check it. In February 2024 the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bond scheme as unconstitutional, holding that voters have a right to information about who funds political parties. The scheme had allowed anonymous donations, and disclosure arrived through a court order, because neither the executive nor Parliament volunteered it. Calling the scheme a "scam" outruns the legal record. Calling it an opaque funding system that the country's highest court struck down describes it accurately, and that description already damns it.
The investigative agencies present a harder case, because some of their targets undoubtedly deserve investigation. The test is consistency, and the questions are simple. Do raids and arrests reach ruling-party figures with the same energy they bring to the opposition? Do investigations conclude within a reasonable time? Do arrests lead to convictions? Can journalists examine powerful business and political actors without paying for it? The government is free to answer yes to each of these, provided it shows the data.
Gyanesh Kumar and the Roll Call
This brings us to the Election Commission, the institution that certifies every victory Modi has won since 2014, and to the controversy now fixed on its chief. The protesters allege that the Special Intensive Revision of the voter rolls has removed millions of names or placed barriers in front of legitimate voters. The Commission denies wrongdoing and says the exercise exists to identify duplicates, deceased voters and ineligible entries. It has also directed a special enrolment drive for people left off the rolls, which counts as a point in its favour.
Gyanesh Kumar | Image Source: Google
The controversy sharpened after The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had repeatedly objected to decisions linked to the revision and the Commission's systems. The Supreme Court has sought responses from the Centre, the Election Commission and Kumar himself. It has made no final finding that manipulation occurred, and this publication will not manufacture one.
The reasoning that matters sits one level higher. The Commission operates under the shadow of the government that appoints its members, so its independence has to be demonstrated through disclosure, visible internal disagreement, accessible correction procedures and equal treatment of every voter. A body that asks for trust while declining to open its workings has the arrangement backwards. The burden of proof here sits with the institution, and it grows heavier with every name that disappears from a list.
The Street, and the Police Who Policed It
Which brings us back to the barricades. On September 25 and again on October 2, Delhi Police met the Gyanesh Kumar protests with force of numbers. Reports on the October 2 crackdown put the detentions at more than 500, including AAP leaders Saurabh Bharadwaj, Atishi, Sanjeev Jha and Sanjay Singh, and CPM leader MA Baby. Other outlets reported about 700 detained, and a further account put the figure for SFI and DYFI activists alone above 1,000. The numbers vary from outlet to outlet, and every version of them describes a very large detention of citizens in the capital. Visuals from the spot showed police personnel carrying and dragging protesters into vehicles. One report put roughly 4,000 police personnel on the ground, and described clashes as groups arrived and attempted to cross barricades.
The police position rests on the absence of permission and the prohibitory orders, and the organisers dispute the premise. Bharadwaj said AAP had applied for permission six days earlier and asked why a designated protest site requires one. A legal order that is technically valid still invites scrutiny when its effect is to empty a protest ground, close a dozen Metro stations and darken internet service in the centre of the national capital. Neither fact settles the argument, and together they make a picture that Delhi Police ought to explain in public.
Protesters supplied their own commentary in the idiom of the street. The chant that carried through the crowd was "Gali gali mein shor hai, Modi-Gyanesh vote chor hai", a slogan that states an allegation as fact, which journalism must not do. SFI's Aishe Ghosh made the sharper institutional point when she observed that the same police who struggle to prevent crime in the capital appear in vast numbers to protect one official. A line circulating from the day, reported by The Quint, put the grievance in the plainest terms available: the job of the police is to detain criminals. Whether or not one accepts the implication, the sentence names the question every Delhi resident is entitled to ask about how the force chooses where to stand.
The Close
Twenty-five years of electoral success is an extraordinary political achievement, and nobody serious disputes it. Modi has won three Gujarat mandates and three Lok Sabha victories, and he has built a political system organised around his authority with a thoroughness that few democratic leaders ever manage.
The anniversary asks a different question from the one the Cabinet resolution answers. It asks whether the institutions that surround that authority can still investigate power, protect minorities, absorb dissent and administer elections without first requiring citizens to risk arrest, livelihood or exclusion. The pattern across these years has been consistent: the government responds when anger becomes impossible to ignore, and protest has ended up standing in for the oversight mechanisms that should have worked earlier.
The Gyanesh Kumar protests belong at the centre of this anniversary because the Election Commission is the institution that converts votes into legitimacy. If its independence can be demonstrated, the Commission has every reason to open its books, answer its own commissioners and restore every eligible voter to the roll. If it cannot, the government that appointed it inherits the doubt. A leader confident in twenty-five years of mandates should welcome that audit, and the country is entitled to watch how he answers it.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.
