The Modi-Shah regime is coercing activists to sign so-called 'peace bonds' and give up their constitutional right to express democratic dissent and organise peaceful protests. Leaders of the CJP were tricked into signing this bond and now the bond is being invoked to stop them from exercising their right to protest. A similar order to sign a peace bond has also been served by a Special Executive Magistrate to Comrade Neha. It has been duly challenged in the legal arena, but this 'peace bond’ ploy against peaceful protests must be exposed and rejected in the court of the people.
An Assistant Commissioner of Police issuing a notice on the basis of reports received from a constable itself violates the very principle of separation of powers. What is even more hypocritical is that when Comrade Neha and her lawyer appeared before the concerned ACP turned Special Executive Magistrate at the Mandir Marg Police Station, they found a noisy violent group of slogan-shouting middle-aged Sanghi men at the gate. The ACP-turned-SEM did not consider this violent assembly a 'breach of peace'! In fact, it may not at all be a surprise if the crowd had gathered with the help of inside information from the police station.
This synchronisation of state-led persecution and state-sponsored street violence is a defining feature of fascism. The Modi-Shah regime has been deploying this strategy to counter every popular agitation for the last decade. Demonisation of JNU and assault on Kanhaiya Kumar in 2016, violent attacks on equal citizenship campaign protesters in 2019-20, vilification of the historic farmers' movement and the mowing down of protesting farmers in Lakhimpur, UP in 2020-21, brutal attacks on paper leak protesters in Delhi in July this year and subsequent attacks on CJP activists in various parts of the country and now this ongoing campaign of hate and violence against 'right to vote' campaigners across the country, all conform to the textbook pattern of fascist terror.
The organised mob at the Mandir Marg Police Station gate gives us a glimpse of the kind of violent mass hysteria the Sangh brigade is planning to whip up across the country in the name of its 'crush anarchy' campaign. By disrupting public transport, blocking roads and turning the whole of central Delhi into a veritable war zone, it was the Modi government which sought to push the capital into a state of anarchy. The burning of books and bulldozing of book stalls during the puja festive season in Kolkata gave us another glimpse of the Sangh brigade's campaign of violence and anarchy. The idea is to derail the 'right to vote' movement by creating chaos and unleashing widespread mob violence.
Stopping peaceful protests by weaponising so-called 'peace bonds', spreading anarchy by giving a call for ‘abolishing anarchy’, stealing elections and manufacturing mandates and yet accusing the opposition of subverting democracy - the state of the Indian republic in 2026 very much resembles the dystopian order sketched by George Orwell in his classic last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Orwell's surveillance state, under the constant watch of Big Brother, the ministry of propaganda becomes the ministry of truth, the war ministry becomes the ministry of peace, the interior or home affairs ministry christens itself as the ministry of love and the economy is administered by the ministry of plenty. The official language Newspeak turns every word upside down - war becomes peace, freedom turns into slavery and ignorance celebrated as strength - and the thought police (Thinkpol in Newspeak) works overtime to uncover and punish thoughtcrime! Compare the lexicon of Modi's India - from the Jumla of Achchhe Din to the nomenclature of ‘peace bonds’ and ‘Dimagi Naxals’ and we will find the Indian version of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the land of Orwell's birth (Orwell was born in Motihari of Bihar as Eric Arthur Blair in 1903).
Today, once again we see a renewed rise of far-right fascists across the world, and also a renewed intensification of anti-fascist resistance spearheaded by a whole range of Left, progressive and anti-imperialist forces. Hungary witnessed the defeat of the far-right Viktor Orban regime in April 2026, and now Lula has won the presidential election for a record fourth time defeating his US-backed far-right challenger Flavio Bolsonaro, and in Serbia a two-year-old student upsurge has ended the twelve-year-old authoritarian reign of Aleksandar Vucic.
In France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Albania and beyond, popular student and working class struggles and progressive political streams are challenging neoliberal policies of privatisation and austerity, far-right aggression, and their governments’ support for the US-Israel axis on the streets. The famous 1968 chant "Paris, London, Rome, Berlin - We shall fight, we shall win" has come back as a renewed roar and this time, with the children of migrants from the ex-colonies at the forefront, it is not only anti-war but explicitly anti-imperialist. A rattled Trump has rushed to his favourite Islamophobic and xenophobic scare mongering rant to stop the echo of Europe in his beleaguered home ground. He has suddenly become worried about the future of France and its culture, raising the bogey of an Islamic takeover of Paris. Mohan Bhagwat and Narendra Modi have as ever parroted the same line, hoping to paint India's own growing Gen Z disillusionment, anger and passionate desire for change as a 'foreign conspiracy'. But the people of India know their turn is coming soon to give a long awaited rebuff to India's own fascists.
