As protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar spread through Delhi this month, some of India’s most-watched channels are offering viewers a convenient comparison: “Look at France.” They argue India’s government is managing the protests a lot better than France. This is a misleading and mischievous argument.
On October 10, the day of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) rally, Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami hosted a primetime debate asking whether the CJP threatened “France-like anarchy” in India. Republic TV has been presenting the CJP’s earlier Jantar Mantar protest as a foreign-sponsored plot, and Goswami has been urging the government to arrest and charge those behind it.
NDTV is also jumping in. After France’s violent weekend of October 17–18, NDTV, once regarded as an independent voice, aired a segment headlined “France Riots Echo in India?” In it, BJP leader Shazia Ilmi presented France’s unrest as a cautionary tale for India and suggested a larger agenda behind the youth protests could not be ruled out. The RSS-affiliated Organiser made the same argument in an editorial.
Their message is simple: France burns because it is permissive; India is calm because it is firm. Facts do not support this argument.
1. The comparison is flawed. Some 550,000 people marched across France. Rioters looted shops, attacked police and set fire to municipal buildings, and nearly 1,000 police officers and firefighters were injured. Delhi saw nothing on that scale.
2. Yet India detained far more people. France arrested nearly 2,400 people over the weekend. Delhi detained at least 7,000 people in a single day of a largely peaceful protest, most of them held without any suspected offense. That is roughly three times as many detentions for a fraction of the disorder.
3. France arrested after violence; India detained before it. French arrests largely followed actual rioting. In Delhi, protest leaders, opposition lawmakers and student activists were detained before they reached the protest site. CJP’s founder and senior leaders were picked up as their flight from Mumbai landed. Mobile internet was suspended within a four-kilometer radius of Raisina Hill.
4. India’s own Supreme Court is raising objections. On October 11, the Court ordered that peaceful protesters must not be illegally detained. Police kept detaining protesters even after the Court order, including John Brittas, a CPI(M) member of Parliament. The same day, the Court issued contempt notices to the Union Home Secretary, the Delhi Police Commissioner and the head of the Delhi Metro for violating its October 9 order against a full shutdown of transport. The Commissioner has since offered the Court an “unconditional and unqualified apology.”
5. In India, journalists were swept up too. Police detained more than a dozen journalists covering the protests on October 10. Republic TV declared the protest a “flop show” and did not mention the detentions.
6. “India prevented anarchy” cannot be proven. The claim that detentions spared India French-style chaos is an untestable counterfactual. Indian police say they acted on intelligence inputs and point to earlier incidents: some protesters reportedly attacked officers at the July Chalo Sansad march, and there was unrest in central Delhi on October 6–8. Those concerns deserve weight. But isolated clashes justify targeted arrests, not the preventive detention of thousands, and the police account is now being tested in court.
7. The historical benchmark is misused. India’s deadliest street violence has been communal, not protest against the state: Partition, the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres, and repeated Hindu-Muslim and linguistic riots. Against that history, these protests have been tame. Against earlier protest movements, from the Anna Hazare agitation to the farmers’ protest, the combination of mass preventive detention, internet cuts and defiance of a Supreme Court order stands out.
8. Street protest is not anarchy. France has lived through 1968, the 2005 riots, the gilets jaunes (“Yellow Vests” movement) and the 2023 Nahel riots, and its institutions have remained stable. Frequent protest, even violent protest, does not mean a democracy is collapsing.
The bottom line. France’s weekend was far more violent than anything Delhi saw, yet the French state responded mainly by arresting people for what they had done. India, however, detained thousands for what officials feared they might do. Suppressing peaceful protest is against democratic values. Presenting India’s preventive detentions as better governance than France’s response is false equivalence.
— John Laxmi
