It was Saturday 25 July, shortly after noon, and all along Sansad Marg, a wide thoroughfare in central New Delhi, protesters turned up the music and danced on the street beneath the trees as if they had found the answer to an impossible question. They were celebrating the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. It was on his watch that the central government’s entrance exam paper for medical colleges had been leaked. When the allegations emerged in the days after two million students sat the exam, all the results were cancelled.

The test is viewed as one of few certain paths to middle class security; millions take it each year. People reorganise their lives and sell their assets to invest time and money in preparing for it. More than 20 students killed themselves after the cancellation.

The protests had lasted over a month. Thousands turned up each day. As their numbers grew, they began to imagine removing more than just one minister. In the days before Pradhan’s resignation, it looked like a battle of wills between the protesting youth and Narendra Modi – the 75-year-old prime minister who permits no challenge to his authority. Rarely in his 12-year reign has he appeared not in control. Not once has a senior minister resigned under public pressure. The courts seem to fall in line with his government’s preferences, and the closest election results tend to favour his party. Rarely, if ever, does he explain his actions, or apologise, or express remorse.

So when Pradhan finally quit, the protesters danced with unrestrained glee. Never before had one of Modi’s men been held accountable for their failures or incompetence, let alone their corruption or their anti-Muslim bigotry or their casteism; because not once had Modi’s hold weakened this way. A feeling flowed through the crowd around me like a current: if they could force Modi’s hand, they could see a future without him.

But the days before were full of uncertainty. It was unclear how he and his home minister, Amit Shah, would respond to the calls for action emanating from Jantar Mantar, the 18th century observatory that had become the main protest site. In those uncertain hours, people waited, and talked, and hoped. As we chatted, I had the sensation that something about this protest would be different; that its objectives were bigger than one minister.

It came through the crowd, which was democratic and happy to see itself here, like the original dream of India, in which everyone came down to play – a thing that now happened so rarely. It was in the kindness of people who silently fanned complete strangers. It was in the transient comradeship formed over a slogan or around a student beating a drum with closed eyes, in the way happy elders passed around water and food in the stifling heat, in the songs of insult and rebellion that made listeners laugh at Modi, in the circles of young students cackling as they sat on the ground and wrote slogans that narrowly missed their mark, but chipped away at the edifice anyway. It was in the calls for resignation and agitation, in the swaying and jiving, in the collective intonation of “J-J-J-J-Jai Bhim Jai Bhim Jai Bhim” and “Lal salaam”.

People came from all over India. There was a boy who ran away from home in Bihar, found a train and headed straight to the protest site, and a happy old couple from Gujarat who were off to one side of the protest, marveling at the sight of collective disobedience. Anyone who wandered within their range was handed a water bottle and a word of gratitude. Leftist organisations came, organisations for the dispossessed and forgotten came, the Sikhs watched for trouble, vast numbers of dalits came. Sweepers came, truck loaders came, chartered accountants came, children came, men resigned from the police and joined the protest, school teachers were there. People of every denomination arrived and showed an eagerness to be useful.

At the edge of the protest site were clusters of yellow metal Delhi police barriers bent with frustration; behind them were hundreds of police, armed with their loose interpretation of the law and then the riot police. The government tried to silence the protests by shutting down mobile internet towers around the site; groups of violent Hindu nationalists threatened to attack the gathering. But everything that was done to stop the protests only added to the sense of urgency about it, giving it further momentum.

The call for accountability was a call for a style of governance that did not see the governed as incidental. It was a call for admission and correction. But there had been no sign of personal responsibility, only a vow to bring the unknown people responsible for the exam paper leaks to justice. That was why their troubles appeared to lead back to Modi. Around the protest site, in the days before the resignation on 25 July, people I spoke with hoped that the agitation would continue until the prime minister was forced out of office.

The protest, which was really many protests, and many ways of speaking, had a whiff of a different time: not nostalgia, exactly, but a memory of loose mouths and loose limbs, like a summer day on campus. It was hard to not be giddied by the posters and the flags and the drumming and the insults, and the large picture of Shah, the home minister, with an SS emblazoned on his forehead.

The art on the walls showed anger: “Just because you don’t have a wife, you’ll screw us”, a dog taking a leak on Modi’s name, and, to encapsulate the general feeling at the protest site, “Modi madarchod” (“Modi motherfucker”). But there were also signs that took issue with injustice and unseriousness: “There are rapists in parliament. Why do students get a beating?” One slogan in particular, referring to Modi’s macho boast of his 56-inch chest during a campaign in 2014, had such bite that passersby stopped and laughed and joined in, and students did cover versions of it: “Chappan inch ka chota bandar! Bhag Narendar, bhag Narendar!” (“The small monkey with the 56-inch chest! Run Narendra, run Narendra!”) It had the hallmark of an anthem.

In the decade since Modi first came to power – promising national advancement, the return of looted Indian wealth, and an end to corruption – the unchecked authority voters had granted him had produced something different. The country rose in the ranks of economies, but it was an advancement that justified itself through numbers and the external validation of rankings and polls. At home, roads and bridges crumbled, the names of familiar avenues changed from Mughal ones to Hindu royalty. When dignitaries visited, roads along their path were cleared and washed, shrouds were thrown over whatever lay beyond the sidewalks, and the persistent industrial haze over its cities lifted briefly. Speaking up meant losing sleep, a job, a family member, a friend. Citizens became a people under constant surveillance, alert to words or deeds that might be deemed insulting or disrespectful of leaders and the Hindu nationalist movement. Blacklists and registers multiplied to record deviations from the norm; dissenters were silenced; careers were ended; activists were jailed. Repression and self-censorship, under threat of violence and police action, were so common they became invisible.

There had been big protests before, perhaps even larger ones, against the imposition of laws that would leave Muslims stateless and farmers weakened. But there, victory was located in reversal and a return to the status quo. The farmers resisted laws that would have left them vulnerable, and Muslims bore the burden of resisting old tropes while proving their patriotism. The protest at Jantar Mantar was marked by the desire for something new. The fear of consequences and authority was supplanted by the drive to speak openly. It was as if the place had become a special intellectual zone, like the Special Economic Zones the government carves out with their own rules and tax systems for the enrichment of well-connected industrialists and their favoured conglomerates. Here, in this intellectual zone, it was possible to finally speak freely again.

More than two million students sit the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) each year, seeking admission to undergraduate medical programmes across India. Preparation takes up to two years; tuition can cost anywhere from $400 to $5,000. Roughly half of all applicants qualify, but fewer than one in 10 find a place in the country’s 800-odd medical colleges. To be granted admission means something. The poorest 10% of India’s households earn approximately $500 a year. A monthly salary of $200 is compelling enough for young women to migrate from India’s north-east to the south. Work is hard to come by, and much of it is in agriculture, construction, small shops and factories. Many simply give up. In June, India’s labour force participation rate fell to 54.6%, which means that almost half the working-age population neither worked, nor were thinking about it.

Barely two weeks after the exam was cancelled, Surya Kant, the chief justice of India, was hearing a petition filed by an advocate against the Delhi High Court, and he upbraided the lawyer for joining cause with “parasites of society who attack the system”. The judge’s annoyance was “over the repeated litigation initiated by the petitioner,” a Livelaw, a legal news website, reported. But his words, read in their entirety, seemed like an attack on the unemployed and activism. He likened them to insects. “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don't get any employment and don't have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become [freedom of information] activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone.”

Out of these events, a group called the Cockroach Janata Party was born on social media – in pique, as satire, out of frustration. It attracted the young, the forgotten, the dispossessed, the politically empathetic. In four days, its Instagram account had over two million followers. They knew social media, they demanded information, and went on the attack. All the while, their posts were deleted and accounts restricted.

The movement quickly moved offline to sit-ins and awareness campaigns, and then to Jantar Mantar. Along the way, it was joined by a prominent activist from Ladakh, Sonam Wangchuk, who had spent six months in jail on charges of inciting violence, and who declared he would not eat until the education minister resigned. His hunger strike lasted 26 days, and simultaneous strikes were held by student leaders and others. With each passing day, the sight of the protesters growing more frail brought forth greater sympathy and more people to the protest site.

Their most immediate aim was to remove the education minister for his mishandling of the exam. He had to go, said the protesters. They went on hunger strikes and took over the streets in Delhi and in other cities.

The night before the government’s capitulation on 25 July, when the streets outside the protest site were charged with anxiety and masculine energy, I noticed a thin man who seemed out of place there. He watched the people hooting and being fools around him quietly, with interest, as if he was examining specimens. He prepared for his teaching exam in the mornings, and spent his nights on the streets outside the protest. All he did was stand, witness and feel. The boys around him were raucous, and smelled of drink.

“Ambitions?” He was from Bihar, the son of a labourer, and could not recall possessing any ambitions, as I understood the word, in all his 31 years. “When you don’t have anything, you can only dream of the thing you need just then. When you have security, then you can dream.” He observed the young boys, the way they moved, their unfocused energies. “If we were free, we wouldn’t get to see this today. If he thought about India, it wouldn’t be this way.

“If you are so loved, what’s the problem with standing up in front of people?” he reasoned. I asked him what he hoped the protests would bring, and he said: “I want to see change. Whether a poor man’s child, or Ambani’s child, they should have the same opportunities. Why does a poor man’s child become a labourer? Because at the very last stage, money becomes a problem.”

As is often the case, the discussion turned philosophical and oblique. I scribbled down what he was saying in Hindi: “These times are no longer about how the poor live, but about how they die.”

As we spoke, there was a commotion on the road to Jantar Mantar, about a kilometre from the main protest site. It quickly turned into a roar as a crowd of listless young men identified two television reporters they regarded as mouthpieces for the government. Perhaps years of impunity had made the two women numb to danger, because they walked on leisurely, smiling and waving at the men massing alongside them, when they should have been running for their lives. “Beat them!” someone shouted. “Die!” someone wished. There were shouts of “godi media” – godi means ‘lap’, as in lapdog – and a crowd arrived to see which lapdogs were being referred to. A stream of water sailed through the air in the reporters’ direction, and then water bottles followed. Boys at the edge broke away with bright eyes and big smiles, satisfied at their upper hand in this encounter with what they saw as an arm of the state. More men rushed past me to join in. I stood to the side and braced for the first blow. It would give the others permission to take out years of frustration.

The “godi media” cries were justification for other impulses – a dark mirror of the fanatical devotion that Modi inspired in 2014, when his supporters used the pejorative “presstitutes” to describe any journalists who questioned their leader’s claims. These journalists, and what they represented, were soon displaced by a new generation of slick opportunists – careerists, the ideologically inclined, husks with anglicised accents – who thrived by showing malign initiative in a new media environment that rewarded loyalists and punished doubters. Their news programs had six and eight and ten panels of shouting spokesmen, no shortage of elegant apologies for pogroms, just-asking-questions about victims of violence, sly insinuations about the treason and corruption of government critics, and straight-up lies that spread a blaze before an objection could be made.

They invented jihads of different kinds in order to demonise Muslims (land jihad, corona jihad and so on), misreported events and propagated false narratives. All this was justified by recourse to public opinion: but now the public had begun to shift its views, and the chants of “godi media” suggested that the spell might finally be breaking.

Within a few minutes, an even bigger crowd converged on another couple of journalists. They ducked into a building that housed, of all things, an office belonging to the Adani group, a billionaire’s conglomerate so close to Modi that it has been buying up media companies and turning them into the very lapdogs the crowd was angry about. An elderly labourer with grey boots sitting on the curb nearby was entertained by all the drama. He cackled at the possibility of change, and said that the country would “see out all of us”, along with our dreams and ideologies. He could not afford public transportation, and walked everywhere. His job was to lift things, and his children had progressed: they assembled pens and did other “small work”.

It required insistence and spirit to create a space bereft of judgement. Within it, people said what was on their minds, in whatever way they wished. There were no cops to file police reports on the basis of someone’s hurt feelings, there were no raging mobs to beat people expressing uncommon thoughts, there were no event managers afraid of scrutiny. The rules of the land and our time were in abeyance. The outside fell away, taking its hesitations and its cowardice. All those things were gone, all the microplastics of tyranny that are now in our blood and in our veins: the newspapers that print official perspectives but not what happened, the writers of economic reports who choose their data carefully, the forced patriotism, the leader who does not take questions, the pretence that cow piss is a miracle tonic, the fraud godmen, the judge transferred after ordering the police to behave themselves during anti-Muslim violence, the men in jail for six years for nothing more than peaceful protest, the minister rewarded for encouraging mobs to shoot protesters on sight.

That such a place existed at all, despite everything, seemed miraculous. Protests had occurred over the past 12 years, but they hadn’t seemed to catch on. Now, the formation of a broad coalition based on common social interests had occurred quickly and spread far. It had seen through the advertising and imagery and promises. To respond to their skepticism, Modi had altered his behaviour. This was not a small thing, and the protesters understood its significance.

In hindsight, the dozen years that have passed since Modi rode in on the desire for a benevolent and efficient strongman were marked by a contraction of time. Tyranny has a way of slowing you down, focusing your mind on the immediate, creating muddy conditions that bend your sense of time and self. It’s the tyrant’s manual: you are moved from emergency to emergency, too wired to properly understand what is happening, too occupied to reflect on the journey so far. Before you know it, 2014 has become 2026, and the highlights of this period are a showreel of insanities: the lynchings that presented Dalit and Muslim victims into criminals, the hundreds of millions waiting in queues to withdraw their money from banks after a surprise decision to withdraw high-value notes, the sudden official argument that the matter of citizenship is not a settled one and that new means of proof are required, the elevation of homeopathic doctors Democracy and press freedom indexes cannot convey the psychic damage caused by a national commitment to hurtling backward.

The gathering at Jantar Mantar had the opposite effect. Trust was implicit, and things were stated plainly. Protesters did not just say that the police excesses committed outside the protest site would be remembered – “Sab yaad rakha jayega” (“Everything will be remembered”) – they took the stage and demanded to know who was responsible for the order that resulted in the swung batons pierced with nails, and for the faces pocked with pellets fired from a government gun. They spoke of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempts to polarise people, to turn them against one another, and located these efforts in a political economy that seemed to have little room for ordinary wishes. It was a meeting of skeptics to skewer the ridiculous. After years of stifling control, of heightened misinformation that made people question the evidence of their eyes, and repression so extreme that an individual had neither the words to describe nor the platform to broadcast that their misfortunes were the result of a systemic deficiency – years during which personal testimony and lived experience rarely survived first contact with the government’s official account of things – Jantar Mantar offered a recalibration of reality.

Modi’s power is not simply about the manipulation of his image, but his image and its careful management are central to his power. Earlier this year, before a crucial set of state elections, I watched Modi address a rally in Pondicherry, a south Indian territory that was absolutely coated in posters of him raising his hand and looking decisive, or caressing an animal and looking tender.

The event was held under a set of enormous tents that together resembled a hangar. Fans with elongated blades had been calibrated to avoid aural interference, and the seats were filled with people brought in on buses from distant parts of the territory. Much of the audience spoke Tamil, but Modi addressed them in English. He read out a list of his government’s achievements lifelessly, like there was nobody to win over. The words he uttered had little relation to his expression and tone. His eyes did not soften, and his lips worked in service only of sound. He seemed a character in an airlock, fearful of leakages and malfunctions that would bring him in contact with the full range of his life’s terrors: questions and scorn. As he spoke, the chairs under the tents began to empty, until only a few rows of supporters wearing orange scarves remained at the front.

I learned that day that black clothes are seen as a sign of protest and therefore not permitted at the prime minister’s rallies, which are also threatened by handbags and shopping bags, car keys, earphones and caps. I watched part of his speech from just outside the security gate, while standing near mounds of confiscated objects. Eventually, an edited version of the event would be broadcast on the news, and clips would be made for social convenience. In these versions, the venue would be packed with the prime minister’s supporters, with not an empty chair in sight, and some of them would delight him with an unexpected gift. Everyone watching would assume that this time, too, Modi was inevitable, and that to bet against such a popular man was recklessness.

Now, at the Delhi protests, everyone could see Modi clearly for what he was; they needed no videos for inspiration. One young man arrived at the protest site, spread out a bedsheet, and sat down along with his mother and sister. They barely moved, and did not participate in the rituals of the protest. They issued no slogans, and sang no songs. Instead, they sat and watched the people all around. At some point our eyes met, and he smiled and rose to chat. They had come four days before, to feel the air. He had sorely missed being part of something larger. Six years ago, when he was 25, the three of them had attended the Shaheen Bagh protests against the new citizenship act that would disenfranchise Muslims, and it was nice, but this felt bigger to him. “Everyone is here,” he said, meaning every denomination. I asked him what he hoped for from the protests, and he said: “I want to put my arm around someone and not have them wonder if I’m Muslim.” He touched his scraggly beard and said that he could pass off as Hindu if he wanted, but he enjoyed watching people trying to interpret his facial hair and decide how to behave.

A court reader, a man who handled paperwork for a judge, had been listening as we spoke. He finally said: “I don’t think we’re going back after his resignation. Because we now have a taste of it.” On the stage, a speaker assured everyone that it would not be as simple as the minister resigning and everyone going home. He assured them that a committee would be formed to ensure that every one of their demands was met. Meanwhile, the crowd chanted about the dictatorship not working, about social cohesion, and heaped further abuse upon Modi. Even Voldemort was defeated by a bunch of students, a sign said.

On the afternoon of Saturday 25 July, the police fired tear gas at protesters. I was a few kilometers away, but on receiving the news I left for the protest site. It ended as quickly as it started. During the ride there, news about Pradhan’s resignation came from everywhere at once. As I drew closer to the site, traffic thickened as more people arrived from across the city to experience the moment. The streets were full of people chatting, holding their phones up and showing their posters proudly. Flags waved in the distance, and a large group sang the composer A. R. Rahman’s rendition of the anthem. Protesters climbed onto the roof of police vans. The minister had resigned, “to ensure that anti-national forces do not exploit the situation”. In keeping with the prevailing style of governance, the explanations were vague, the culprits were shadowy and inefficiency was garbed in sacrifice. But he was gone, and the effect of the departure was immediate. Revolutionary songs were replaced by Bollywood music, and people danced.

Abhijeet Dipke, the Boston University student who became one of the protest’s leaders, said as much when he took the stage one last time. He looked exhausted and ready to go home. When he talked, the crowd silenced itself in anticipation. Barely two months and ten days before, the day after the chief justice’s comments, Dipke had tweeted a question: “What if all cockroaches came together?” A movement built around him faster than he could comprehend, and he found himself reaching for communication practices he picked up at Boston University. He chose satire to break through people’s weariness, but understood its limits; something tangible had to lie beyond the tone of communication. He focused on “freedom of expression, accountability, youth frustration, and the growing disconnect between those in power and ordinary citizens.”

The crowd waited to hear from Dipke about what would come after Pradhan’s resignation. “You have made history,” he said, to loud cheers. “If they had educated people in their cabinet, we wouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t have taken so long in a democracy.” It was a rousing speech about the fading order, about accountability, and India’s young, hungry to claim their birthright. And with that, the protest ended. It was a quiet and unsatisfying conclusion, because the enormous energy expended to come that far required more than a single scalp to justify it all. Caught up in the moment, I had hoped for more. But he was tired, and so were the others.

Unwillingly, the crowd began to disperse. It was evident that they did not want to leave at all. People kept wandering back and forth aimlessly, smiling at each other, bumping into each other in the airless afternoon, feeling the heat come off other people. A group of men were exhausted from dancing, but they summoned smaller and smaller reserves to raise their hands and jump. Students sat under tents at the edge with their eyes closed. Some did not want to let go of the glow of victory, the freedom that they had unexpectedly discovered. Some knew that the intensity of feeling would be followed by low days of readjustment as regular concerns took over. Still others felt that going home was an admission of defeat: “Is this a victory? Are you happy?” a lean young man from Bihar asked me as a conversation opener. His mirthless smile was a mask over rage at how little the protest had achieved. He was shirtless and on his stomach in a tent that belonged to the Krantikari Yuva Sangathan, an organisation that advocates for India’s marginalised – its farmers and sewer cleaners and other poor.

The man had been silently painting an illustration of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh until a well-heeled woman gifted him a damaged zheshan hand fan she had been using. The tear in its plastic fabric was not large, but he took the flaw as a class insult. “Would you have given this to anyone else?” he said to her. She was alarmed, and began to respond, but wisdom dawned. He watched her skitter away and answered his own question. “No, she would not have given this to anyone else, only me.” He said out loud that she was of the same class as the protest’s organisers. In fact, he said, there was no difference between them at all, and that was why the protest ended early, and that was why she gave him a broken fan: that class’s objectives had been satisfied, whether an assertion of power, or the feeling of selflessness. “But our time will come,” he said. “One day I will be on that stage, and we will get everything that we want.” Then he showed me his sweat-drenched shirt, and said it was the only one he owned.

And yet, in the aftermath of a victory of this nature – not against legislation or plans, but against the idea of impunity and unquestioned authority – I wondered what shape the reassertion of power would take. There was a familiar toolkit of repressive coercion: threats to media organisations and civil society groups, tax raids on their premises, the public demonisation of protestors with the full force of the state, the confiscation of devices and possible planting of evidence, the appearance of Israeli spyware on phones, the mysterious thing that made some of its most vehement public opponents disappear from public life and resurface as enthusiastic supporters. These methods had been deployed often enough to lose their initial novelty, and might explain why the protesters had not scattered in fear. But the coercive approach was unlikely to be enough this time, the political scientist Yamini Aiyar told me. In the past, she said, the BJP had enforced its will by controlling the electoral process: millions of voters were deleted from electoral lists, the election authority ignored provocative slogans, police chased Muslims away from voting booths, powerful regional opposition parties were split and absorbed into the BJP’s coalition. Seeing the size and mood of the opposition, and experiencing such clear rejection, they would seek other ways to entrench their power – including changing the Constitution itself.

During the last days of the protest, and then after it, there were clear signs of the vengeance that would follow. Over in Okhla, in South East Delhi, police detained Muslim students returning from the protest. Police in the BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh detained and interrogated the family of a Muslim volunteer who distributed food and water at the protest, and kept their identification and bank documents. The police dug through delivery containers of food meant for the agitators, and rushed away with bags of meals; then they harassed the restaurants that had been delivering to them. It all felt outdated, as if we were witnessing an empire’s descent into sniping, minor irritation and petty criminality. Right-wing groups also identified teenage girls from the protests and made them apologise on video for abusing Modi. Women received rape threats and private videos were shared publicly. Some groups filmed themselves cornering and intimidating the agitation’s participants. A representative of a right-wing news website holding a mic turned up at a protest organiser’s home, showed himself into the compound, and discussed the high rent – how could he afford to pay so much? The Delhi police detained people under section 65 of the Delhi Police Act, which took them off the streets for an hour short of a full day, Bharat Chugh, an advocate in the supreme court, told me. But he was full of admiration for the protesters. “The police beat them so much that their fear disappeared.”

A few days before Pradhan resigned, when he was still trying to hold on to his minister, Modi had posted his first-ever Instagram reel. To his advisors, the reasoning was immaculate. To keep it real with Gen Z, one must talk to Gen Z on Insta. Modi’s usual strongman aesthetic was missing: he looked like an awkward colleague on a Zoom call. A new, more intimate image of the prime minister was being deployed to manage the crisis. He talked about what his government had done about the theft of the exam paper, and the guilty parties who had been caught. He promised fast-track courts. Once more he had appeared as a projection that declared what was being done, when all the while, the demand was for him to do something else.

On 1 August, Modi dropped a new video. He forgave his abusers, no matter that they swore at his mother too. He thought they were misguided children, and had to be shown the light. His daughters – and women in general – used such words that it was a culture shock. Punishing them, sending them to court, and harassing them would change nothing. He wanted to forgive them.

After listening to his televised words, I watched a 15-year-old student apologise on national television. She had been recorded swearing at the prime minister at Jantar Mantar, and ended her invective-laden speech with an appeal to Modi: “Get the fuck out.” She explained it by saying that she had been led astray. Her face was blurred, and her mother’s face was shrouded. The mic on camera belonged to one of the government’s chosen news channels. We were among shadows and intimidation once more, where a child could be coerced by the government’s arms into seeking national forgiveness.

And then, almost immediately – like a reminder that while the protest was over, its spirit lived on – people spoke up about the cruelty of the apology; and schoolchildren in Uttar Pradesh marched to the district magistrate’s office to demand a paved road to school; and a reporter in Gujarat skewered a principal for the decrepit state of his school; and students at two universities ensured the chief justice felt unwelcome on campus; and Shah, Modi’s aide, who commands the Delhi police that wreaked violence on student protesters with nail-studded batons and pellet guns, decided to sit out the 18 days of the monsoon session of parliament, where there were certain to be questions about his orders to the police; and outside parliament the opposition sang a joyful song about a little monkey with a 56-inch chest.