As Crowds at Jantar Mantar Multiply, Police Rough Up Rahul Gandhi, Others; Institutions Enforce Restrictions on Protesting Students; Delhi Police Violence Makes Global News
Farmers Protesting Against Indo-US Trade Deal Not Allowed to Reach Delhi; Judge Castigates Persisting ‘Bulldozer Justice’, India Summons Russian Diplomat After Missile Attack Kills Four Indian Sailors
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK
If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.
Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.
Snapshot of the day
July 21, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
What’s The Fear.
It has been an unprecedented day.
As Prime Minister Modi might put it, ‘70 saal mein pehli baar’: government sources claimed that no Leader of the Opposition had ever protested outside the PM’s official residence before. That, apparently, made a peaceful protest a “security threat”. In the ‘mother of democracy’, the threat was not Delhi Police’s violence against students, nor a broken examination system, nor a government refusing accountability. It was Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi – alongside two sitting chief ministers, MPs and several political party leaders – standing outside the PM’s house and asking questions about the “brutality” inflicted on young protesters during their peaceful march to Parliament yesterday by the mighty state.
Delhi Police, which operates under the direct authority of the Union home minister Amit Shah, forcibly evicted and detained several opposition leaders who had been protesting at Lok Kalyan Marg. Some of them were brought to Mandir Marg police station a short while later, where Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi also arrived. Dramatic visuals from the evening showed Congress leaders holding on to one another as police tried to prise them apart, including by pulling at Gandhi’s legs, even as he emphasised: “Democracy in India is happening right now”. Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was also taken away in a police bus, resisting as police forced her into the van.
But this image of Rahul Gandhi bleeding from nose would be yet another nightmare for the Modi regime as history is a testament to how the bleeding pictures of Indira Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee have done before.
Back at the protest site in Jantar Mantar, where Delhi Police had brutally dismantled the protest stage yesterday, the crowd reportedly has multiplied in tens of thousands within hours this evening as India Cable goes to press.
One thing is clear: the tens of thousands who took to the streets have punctured Modi’s carefully varnished aura of invulnerability. The teflon reputation, polished for years by message managers and obedient media, met the one thing it cannot fully control – a citizenry that is no longer afraid.
Meanwhile, Modi himself,
