Why are protesters looking at 1942 to explain 2026?

On October 17, a group of women gathered outside the Delhi Police headquarters to protest against the brutality and allegations of sexual assault by police personnel during the demonstrations against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in the national capital last week.

“Delhi Police, sharam karo,” they shouted. Delhi Police, you should be ashamed.

Among them was Devyani Sarkar, a master’s student at Delhi University. In between the slogans, she told me that the more effort the authorities expend in trying to suppress people’s voices, the greater will be the anger that will spill into the streets.

To describe the ferocity of the police actions against young protesters, Sarkar invoked a line she had heard attributed to freedom fighter Bhagat Singh: “Gore angrez chale jaayenge, kaale angrez aa jaayenge.”

Independence would mean little, Singh had said, if the British exploiters were merely replaced by Indian ones.

For Sarkar, this quote captured the continued “daman”, or repression, by the Delhi Police and the Narendra Modi government – which, she contended, was comparable to the actions of the colonial administration.

Sarkar is not the only one reaching to the past to try to describe the current situation.

On October 9, ahead of a protest in central Delhi against Kumar for alleged irregularities in the special intensive...

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