The Bigger Picture: SIR, the Anti-Modi Coalition, and What India's Youth Isn't Being Told

There is a specific kind of confusion that only happens to people who are genuinely paying attention. You follow a protest, you agree with its stated demand, you share the video — and then, weeks later, something shifts and you realise the cause you were amplifying was sitting inside a much larger frame you hadn’t been shown. This piece is for people who are in that position right now, watching the anti-SIR protests unfold and trying to figure out what is actually happening and why.

The short version is this: the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, the process everyone is currently calling SIR, is an election-commission exercise designed to clean up voter lists. The opposition to it — led by names like Abhijeet Dipke, supported by Dhruv Rathi and Prakash Raj, amplified across social media by a youth audience that got recruited during the NEET protests — is framed as a democratic rights issue. Whether it actually is one, or whether it is something else being sold as one, is what this piece is going to try to work through.

What SIR actually is, and why it was needed

The Special Intensive Revision is a process run by the Election Commission of India to verify and update electoral rolls — the official lists of registered voters. The exercise goes door-to-door in targeted areas, checks that registered individuals actually reside at their listed addresses, and flags entries that cannot be verified. People who cannot be verified as Indian citizens eligible to vote can have their names removed from the rolls; people who are eligible and not yet registered can be added.

This is not a new or novel mechanism — the ECI has conducted forms of this exercise periodically for decades. What makes this particular round of SIR politically charged is the context it sits in.

For years, credible reports have documented that a significant number of individuals who are not Indian citizens — primarily Bangladeshi migrants, but also others who crossed into India through porous border zones — have managed to get their names onto electoral rolls in border states and certain urban constituencies with large migrant populations. This is not a conspiracy theory; it has been confirmed by investigation reports, NRC-linked surveys in Assam, and sporadic court proceedings. The presence of ineligible voters on electoral rolls is a real problem for the integrity of any election, regardless of which party benefits or suffers from it in any given cycle.

SIR, in its current form, is at least partly aimed at this problem. The argument for it is straightforward: if you believe elections should be decided by Indian citizens, then the voter list should contain Indian citizens. Cleaning the list is a prerequisite for that.

The argument against it — the one Dipke, Dhruv Rathi, and others are now making — is that the verification process can be used to disenfranchise legitimate voters who lack certain documents, particularly marginalised communities, the elderly, and the very poor. That is a real concern about implementation, and it deserves to be addressed seriously in the design of the process.

But there is a significant difference between “this process needs safeguards to protect legitimate voters” and “this process should not happen at all.” The anti-SIR protest framing has largely collapsed that distinction. The demand is not for better implementation; the demand is for SIR to be stopped. That demands an explanation for why, because “stop verifying the voter list” is a very strange position for anyone who claims to care about democratic integrity to hold.

The sequence that explains why this moment matters

To understand why the timing of SIR feels significant, you have to run the timeline backward by about a year.

The sequence goes like this. Following the 2024 general election — which the BJP won — Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party made repeated public statements questioning the integrity of the electronic voting machines. This was not a new line of attack; Congress and its allies have challenged EVM reliability for years. But the 2024 version was more sustained and more public than previous rounds, including international press interactions in which Gandhi raised the issue in ways that generated overseas coverage.

The government’s response to this sustained challenge to electoral credibility was, among other things, to push for more rigorous verification of the voter lists themselves. If opponents of the government were going to argue that elections were being manipulated, the logical counter was to demonstrate that the underlying data — who is actually eligible to vote — was itself clean and verifiable. SIR is at least partly a response to that credibility challenge.

The irony is almost too neat to be accidental: Congress and its allies spent the post-2024 period arguing that elections couldn’t be trusted, and then when the government moved to strengthen the foundations of the electoral process, the same voices turned out to be against that too. If the EVMs are rigged, the voter list is compromised, and the verification process should be stopped — there is no version of this logic that results in a clean election. What it results in is permanent delegitimisation, which is a different goal than electoral reform.

Why Dhruv Rathi and Prakash Raj joining this protest is worth thinking about

Dhruv Rathi is one of the most-watched Indian YouTubers, with an audience that is overwhelmingly young, educated, and convinced that he gives them the “real” version of news that mainstream media won’t. Prakash Raj is a veteran actor who has become a fixture at anti-government events and is frequently photographed at protest sites alongside Congress-aligned politicians.

Neither of them is a policy researcher. Neither of them has, in any public interaction I am aware of, walked through the mechanics of SIR in enough detail to demonstrate that they have read the process documentation rather than the protest flyer.

Rathi’s presence at anti-government events follows a pattern: a new cause gets traction on social media, he produces a video or appears at the event, his large young audience interprets his presence as an endorsement from someone who has done the research. The problem is that the authority his audience grants him is not built on policy expertise — it is built on the fact that he speaks English fluently, edits his videos confidently, and has accumulated enough subscribers that appearing at his events is now a form of political legitimacy in itself.

This is not an argument that Rathi is wrong about everything, or that he is cynically lying. It is an argument that his audience should apply to him the same standard it would apply to anyone else: has he made a substantive case on the policy merits, or has he used his platform to amplify a cause whose framing he has accepted at face value?

The anti-SIR position he and others have promoted has a clear political beneficiary — the parties and interests that want the electoral roll to remain unverified. That doesn’t make the position wrong. But it is a reason to look more carefully at who is actually driving the narrative, and what they stand to gain from it.

Abhijeet Dipke: from NEET to FCRA to SIR

For readers who followed the CJP protests earlier this year, Abhijeet Dipke needs no introduction. For those who didn’t: Dipke emerged from the Jantar Mantar student protests as one of CJP’s most visible faces, built a significant following among students who were genuinely angry about NEET paper leaks and education ministry failures, and has since become the primary public figure associated with CJP’s expanding agenda.

The NEET protest had real merit. Two successive paper leaks at a national medical entrance exam, after a law was specifically passed to prevent them, is a genuine institutional failure, and the students who were demanding accountability deserved to be taken seriously. A lot of the anger that fuelled the Jantar Mantar protests was legitimate anger at a real problem.

What has happened since is worth examining carefully, because Dipke’s conduct has followed a pattern that should give his followers reason to pause.

On the FCRA. When the FCRA amendment was delayed (the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act governs how organisations in India can receive foreign funding — see the companion piece on this blog for the full background), Dipke claimed a share of the credit and immediately pivoted CJP’s energy toward opposing the Act’s return to Parliament. The original single-issue demand — exam accountability — had been at least partially addressed: the Supreme Court’s oversight of NTA was running, PM Modi had committed to fast-track courts for paper-leak prosecutions. Rather than holding that accountability track and demanding it produce results, Dipke moved to the next issue.

Why would an organisation whose stated purpose is educational accountability pivot to fighting legislation that governs foreign funding of civil society organisations? The question of who funds CJP’s own operations, which has been publicly raised by reporters and which Dipke has consistently declined to answer directly, is relevant context here.

On the detention incident. Following his detention at an airport, Dipke publicly claimed that police denied him phone access — an account that placed the emotional weight of a family member’s death during his custody on the police’s alleged failure of basic care. The police have since stated they have recordings covering the period of his detention that contradict the phone-access claim. Dipke has not engaged with the documentation question. He has repeated his account; he has not challenged the recordings’ existence, completeness, or accuracy. A person who was genuinely denied a phone call during the death of a family member, and who then discovers that the detaining authority claims to have documentation disproving that, has an obvious path available: go to court, demand the recordings be disclosed, let an independent authority adjudicate. That path has not been taken.

On reporter questions. When journalists who have covered CJP with sustained attention have pressed Dipke on his intentions, funding sources, and the movement’s relationship with political parties that are lending it visibility, he does not answer. Not “answers carefully to protect the coalition” — which is a legitimate communications strategy, and which CJP’s own Saurav Das has done transparently. He simply does not engage the substance of questions he finds inconvenient.

Taken together: a leader who moves from cause to cause as each issue’s accountability window closes, who makes public claims about his treatment that documented evidence appears to contradict, and who cannot or will not answer the basic transparency questions that any public figure with a national platform owes their audience. Youth who were drawn to CJP’s NEET cause for good reasons deserve to know this about the person who is now asking them to show up for SIR as well.

The Trump and Musk angle: what Starlink’s India situation actually tells you

An unusual feature of the current moment is that some of the international pressure on the Indian government comes from an unlikely direction: Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Musk has been publicly vocal about his frustration that Starlink — his satellite internet service — has not been granted operating licenses in India. The government’s position, broadly, has been that satellite spectrum allocation should go through a regulated auction rather than administrative assignment, and that Jio (Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance subsidiary) and other Indian operators have made the same argument through normal regulatory channels.

Musk’s framing has positioned this as the Indian government protecting Ambani’s interests against foreign competition. That framing has circulated widely, including in American media, and has been picked up by people critical of the Modi government as evidence of crony capitalism.

The part of this story that gets less attention is the reciprocal question: does the Indian government’s treatment of Starlink mirror, more or less, how the United States government treats Indian telecom companies seeking to operate in the US market? The answer is that American telecommunications markets are substantially restricted to domestic operators through a combination of regulatory, national-security, and spectrum-licensing requirements that make it extremely difficult for a foreign-headquartered telecom to operate freely in the US. The conditions that India is applying to Starlink are, in many respects, similar in kind to the conditions American regulators apply to foreign entrants in their own market.

This is not a defence of every specific decision the Indian government has made on spectrum allocation. It is an observation that when Musk criticises India for protecting its domestic telecom operators, while operating in a country whose own telecom market is substantially protected from foreign competition, the criticism carries the weight of a double standard that should be visible before it’s amplified. The question “why won’t India let Starlink in” deserves the follow-up question “and on what terms does the US allow Indian telecoms to operate in America.”

That context doesn’t appear in the clips.

The coalition that is forming, whether intentionally or not

Here is what the current political landscape looks like when you step back far enough to see the full frame.

Domestically, you have:

• The Indian National Congress and Rahul Gandhi, who have spent two years delegitimising the electoral process and are now opposing the mechanism designed to clean up the voter list
• The Aam Aadmi Party, which has its own governance track record to defend and has found more political mileage in opposition posture than in running its own affairs
• The Cockroach Janta Party and Abhijeet Dipke, who moved from NEET accountability to FCRA opposition to anti-SIR protest in the space of a year, with funding sources that have not been publicly disclosed
• Dhruv Rathi and other content creators and public figures who have lent credibility to each of these causes in turn, carrying a young audience with them
• Prakash Raj and others from the film and cultural space who add a visible face to events

Internationally, you have:

• Donald Trump’s administration, which has expressed displeasure with the Indian government on several fronts including trade terms, tariffs, and the broader geopolitical positioning of India as a non-aligned rather than fully US-aligned power
• Elon Musk, who has a specific commercial grievance about Starlink licensing and has chosen to prosecute it publicly in ways that feed the “India is captured by crony capital” narrative

None of these actors are coordinating with each other in any formal sense that can be documented — at least not publicly. What they share is a set of incentives that, in the current moment, happen to all point in the same direction: pressure on the Indian government, in ways that generate domestic opposition noise and international credibility problems simultaneously.

A government that is generating this range and diversity of opposition is not necessarily doing everything right. But it is worth asking: when the people opposing it include a domestic opposition that has consistently failed to produce an alternative programme, content creators whose funding and incentives are not fully transparent, foreign business interests with specific commercial grievances, and a protest movement whose leader cannot answer basic accountability questions — what exactly is the opposition for, and who benefits most if it succeeds?

What the youth audience is not being told

A significant part of the reason this all works is because a very large number of young Indians are getting their political information from short-form video, YouTube, and social media, and the format of those platforms selects heavily for emotional resonance over contextual complexity.

A two-minute clip of Abhijeet Dipke speaking at a protest will always outperform a fifteen-minute analysis of what SIR actually does, how it interacts with the NRC process in specific states, what the documented history of non-citizen voters on electoral rolls looks like, and what the legitimate implementation concerns look like versus what “stop the whole process” means in practice.

A video of Dhruv Rathi explaining why he joined an anti-government protest will circulate much wider than the question of whether he has read the process documentation or whether he is lending credibility to a position he hasn’t independently verified.

Emotional clarity travels faster than factual complexity. That is not a character flaw unique to young Indians — it is a feature of the information environment everyone is living in. But it means that the responsibility to apply a slower, harder kind of scrutiny has to come from somewhere, and right now it is not coming from the platforms, the content creators, or the protest leadership.

Some questions worth carrying into every political cause you are asked to support:

Who benefits if this demand succeeds? The stated beneficiary of a political campaign is rarely the only beneficiary. Who else gains if SIR is stopped? Who gains if the FCRA is not amended? Ask the second-order question.

What is the track record of the person asking for your support? Abhijeet Dipke led a NEET protest with real merit. He has since made documented public claims that appear to contradict the police’s own recordings of his detention, and he has declined to engage the documentation. That is relevant information about whether his subsequent claims deserve to be trusted at face value.

What is not being asked on the stage? A political event is a curated environment. The questions that don’t get asked from the microphone — who funds this, what is the relationship with the political parties sitting in the front row, what happens to this movement if its specific demand fails — are often more revealing than what does get asked.

Is the person speaking able to engage with the strongest version of the opposing argument? Dipke, Rathi, and others opposing SIR have not, in public interactions, demonstrated that they understand the strongest case for clean electoral rolls. They have engaged with the weakest version: “the government wants to disenfranchise poor people.” The stronger version is: “ineligible voters on electoral rolls undermine the legitimacy of every election, and if you oppose verification, you need to explain how you propose to address that problem instead.” Until you hear the stronger version engaged with honestly, you have not heard the full argument.

Where India is actually heading, if you zoom out

India under Narendra Modi is not a perfect government. Taxes are a legitimate grievance — the GST complexity, the income-tax burden on the salaried middle class, the way inflation has eroded real wages in specific sectors — these are real problems that real people are living with, and dismissing the opposition on the grounds that “Modi is doing a good job” is not the same as engaging those problems seriously.

But zooming out: India’s infrastructure buildout over the last decade has been among the most rapid in its post-independence history. The digital public infrastructure — UPI, Aadhaar, the Direct Benefit Transfer system — has reduced leakage from welfare programmes and extended financial access to populations that were excluded from the banking system for generations. India’s GDP trajectory, its manufacturing push as global supply chains diversify away from exclusive China dependence, its role in international forums, and its diplomatic balance between the US, Russia, and the Global South are all pointing in a direction of genuine, if complicated, national confidence.

The question of whether the opposition coalition — Congress’s dynastic politics, AAP’s governance record in Delhi, CJP’s unexplained funding, Rathi’s surface-level analysis, Musk’s commercial grievance — would produce a better trajectory is one that deserves to be asked plainly. Based on available evidence, the answer is not obvious in their favour.

That does not mean every Modi government decision is correct, or that the people raising concerns are automatically acting in bad faith. It means that the alternative to scrutinising the government is not automatically better governance — it may be a return to the kind of diffuse, leaky, coalition politics that kept India growing at a slower pace, in a less deliberate direction, for the better part of two decades.

The honest ask to India’s youth

If you marched for NEET accountability, you were right to. The paper leaks were real, the student casualties were real, the demand for institutional accountability was legitimate. You were not wrong.

But now you are being asked to march against voter-list verification, against foreign-funding regulation, and alongside a set of political parties whose track record you would scrutinise much harder if they were in power. That shift deserves more than your trust in the person who recruited you the first time.

Look at what SIR actually does. Read the process documentation, not the protest flyer. Ask who benefits from stopping it. Ask who funds the people asking you to stop it. Ask what Abhijeet Dipke said about his detention, and then look at what the police have said they have on record.

You are old enough and smart enough to hold two things at the same time: the government gets things wrong and should be criticised for specific things it gets wrong, and the people asking you to oppose the government are not automatically acting in your interest.

The bigger picture is more complex than a two-minute clip can hold. That is not a reason to tune out — it is a reason to go slower, look harder, and save your energy for the causes where the evidence is actually there.

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This is an opinion and analysis piece reflecting the author’s assessment of publicly available information as of October 2026. Readers are encouraged to verify specific claims independently and to follow the sourced companion piece on CJP and the NEET protests for the documented background on the Jantar Mantar movement. This is not a claim that every action of the current government is correct, or that every person named here is acting in bad faith — it is an argument that the full context matters, and that the full context is not what most social-media coverage of these events is providing.