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The writer is a non-resident research fellow in the research and analysis department of IPRI and an Assistant Professor at DHA Suffa University Karachi
A new youth-led political movement, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), has emerged in India. The group is currently protesting repeated examination paper leaks and demanding accountability for what it calls systemic failures in the country’s education system. Specifically, the CJP is calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Delhi’s Jantar Mantar became the focal point of the CJP protests over the past month. However, the demonstrations took a chaotic turn when protesters decided to march toward the Indian Parliament. Delhi Police responded by erecting barricades, firing tear gas, and baton-charging the crowd. The government also shut down internet services in the area. Tragically, young girls and boys were beaten, prompting opposition leader Rahul Gandhi to demand Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation. Gandhi himself was dragged by the police, taken into custody, and detained before eventually being released.
Should the Indian government’s response to the Cockroach Movement be considered an act of securitisation?
According to the Copenhagen School of International Relations, securitisation is the process by which political actors frame a politicised issue as an existential threat. This shifts the issue from normal politics into the realm of emergency measures, justifying extraordinary responses. Is the BJP government justifying its actions under this exact pretext? Such a response contradicts democratic expectations; while securitisation can occur in any political system, it typically faces greater institutional constraints in established liberal democracies than in hybrid or authoritarian systems where the boundary between civilian and security authority is blurred.
Modi’s BJP government has a history of relying on securitising narratives. This pattern was evident during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the farmers’ movements, and the response in Kashmir following the abrogation of Article 370. In each instance, the government framed political disagreements not simply as dissent, but as existential threats to national unity and sovereignty.
Securitisation, however, faces a high probability of failure in India. Such strategies are most successful in emerging or non-democratic societies where security forces play a central role in national politics. It seems Modi is securitising normal political issues only to strengthen his grip on power. As the world’s largest democracy, India’s political challenges must remain within the realm of normal politics, where issues can be transparently debated, addressed, and protected against the abuse of authority.
The Frankenstein’s Monster analogy perfectly illustrates how powerful a securitising actor can become, and how damaging the process can be to civil liberties. The immediate danger facing Indian democracy lies in the persistent, unchecked securitisation by the Modi government. Left unaddressed, this trend risks creating conditions that accelerate democratic backsliding.
The BJP government treats this educational movement as a security issue rather than a political one, thereby attempting to legitimise unwarranted police action as a necessity for maintaining order. However, the Copenhagen School notes that a police crackdown does not inherently constitute securitisation; governments are legally entitled to enforce laws regulating demonstrations, particularly in the face of violence or credible threats to public safety. The critical threshold for Indian democracy will be crossed if the BJP government successfully transforms the Cockroach Movement from an educational grievance into a national security threat through strategic securitising discourse. Yet, given the current public mood, especially among the youth, it remains highly unlikely that Indian society will accept such a framing.
Many emerging democracies and autocracies have used securitisation as a political strategy intended to protect the state or preserve order. However, once an issue was successfully framed as a security threat, these states increasingly relied on exceptional powers to curb civil liberties in the name of national security and stability. What followed in such states was expanded policing, surveillance, preventive detention, restrictions on assembly, internet shutdowns or broader limitations on civil liberties. History tells us that measures taken and justified as temporary responses to an emergency later became institutionalised. Examples are the USA after 9/11, Turkey after the 2016 coup attempt, and Egypt after 2013. The BJP government’s action in Kashmir also reflects how once emergency powers become embedded in governance, reversing them becomes a political and administrative nightmare.
Applying this Frankenstein analogy, the monster is not the protesters, but the process of securitisation itself. Constructing a security narrative to manage dissent inevitably empowers bureaucratic security apparatuses at the expense of democratic politics. Ultimately, the creator – Modi’s government – risks being consumed by its own creation, as the repeated use of emergency logic can permanently turn emergency powers into the normal mode of governance.
David Runciman, in his book, How Democracy Ends, argues that contemporary democracies are more likely to erode gradually through the accumulation of executive power than through sudden coups. Securitisation is a mechanism that contributes to democratic erosion because it lowers the political and legal barriers to expanding executive power. The repeated securitisation of political dissent risks normalising exceptional governance. As emergency measures become institutionalised, executive authority expands at the expense of judicial oversight, legislative scrutiny and civil liberties. Over time, this process can contribute to democratic backsliding and, in the case of India, may facilitate a gradual transition toward competitive authoritarianism or autocratic governance.
The future of Indian democracy will ultimately be determined not by whether governments confront political dissent, but by how they choose to confront it. Democracies are tested less by the presence of protest than by their capacity to manage disagreement without transforming political opposition into matters of national security. The true Frankenstein lesson is that extraordinary powers, once created, rarely remain confined to their original purpose. If the logic of securitisation becomes normalised, today’s emergency may quietly become tomorrow’s ordinary politics. That is the outcome India’s democratic institutions should strive to avoid.
