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From Our Own Correspondent
India's 'cockroach' student protests
00:29:06
Tens of thousands of students have been protesting about education and job opportunities.
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Hello. Today we're in Ukraine, where the army's ongoing recruitment drive is being met with growing hostility. In Iran, we visit the scene of a primary school destroyed by a missile strike at the start of the war and meet the parents looking for answers. We're in Alabama, where a Supreme Court decision has raised fears that hard won civil rights victories are being rolled back. And we're biohacking in Berlin, exploring the city's growing fixation for living longer. But first to India, where tens of thousands of students descended on central Delhi this week to protest about education and a lack of job opportunities. Led by the Cockroach Janta Party in reference to disparaging remarks made by a government minister earlier this year, the group's satirical online memes have quickly evolved into a real world youth movement movement demanding reforms and resignations from the government. Azadeh Mashiri has been in Delhi.
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Long live the revolution. It's a chant I would hear throughout the day inside the outdoor Jantar Mantar venue, which for years has served as a designated space for demonstrations. But this time there are way more protesters around me than this area can handle. It's heaving with thousands of mostly young Indians contained by barricades, railroads, rows of police officers and riot vans. There's a stage and I can see the leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical political movement formed only a couple of months ago after the country's chief justice described young Indians drifting towards social media or journalism as cockroaches. He insisted his words were taken out of context, but the comments went viral. They're leading chants against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and are adamant they will march towards Parliament despite a police ban on them. Doing so, I see one group sitting on the floor in front of the officers. They're wearing black face masks. Realizing they might be weary of a camera and journalists, I ask them if I can join them for a while. We're happy to talk to you, one of them tells me. We just don't want our parents to know we're here. Why not? I ask him. They wouldn't let us come, he says. He explains his parents would be too worried about the risks and keenly aware of how Indian police can react to protests. That tight control in the capital is why there haven't been protests of this scale in recent years. As we talk, none of us knows those fears will become reality just a few hours later. Education is the main reason people have shown up in such huge numbers. Everyone I speak to keeps saying they won't stop Protesting until the Education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigns after the leak of a national entrance exam to medical colleges. More than 2 million students were forced to resit the exam. And this isn't the first time there have been alleged exam leaks. I turn to a young woman wearing the same mask and a cap. The minister should resign, otherwise this will be a big failure for the country, she says. I leave the group and walk through the crowd and start talking with another woman. She tells me she's a doctor and passed the entrance exam a few years ago. It's a long process, she explains. People spend two or three years studying for that exam. Asking them to resit is a big deal, she tells me. People have lost their lives. She's referring to one of the biggest allegations the Cockroach Janta party is making, that 20 students took their own lives after learning they'd have to resit the exam. So far, the Indian government has not responded to the allegation. Unemployment is extremely high for young Indians. Nearly 40% of 15 to 25 year olds with at least a primary education are unemployed, according to one study. So in a country with so few opportunities, some families spend all their savings trying to help their children pass this exam. As the afternoon wears on, frustration begins to boil over. None of our phones can connect to the Internet, so we join a long queue to leave through the barricades. Police are only allowing people to enter and leave through a small passage that can fit two people at most, and we start worrying there will be a stampede. Students surge together, pushing past rows of officers, yet police still refuse to let all the protesters out. Once we finally leave, we realize there are thousands more people out on the nearby streets. They're restless and the mood is changing. Then explosions, the sound of tear gas being fired. People are confused, unsure what is happening. Word starts spreading that there are clashes between police and protesters near parliament. And back inside the venue, a crackdown is underway, but we don't fully grasp the scale of it until the next day, when Internet returns. Online videos show officers beating protesters with batons using water hoses and young students choking on tear gas. Police say dozens of their own officers were injured as well, and that the use of force was justified. We return to jantarmantar the following morning alongside thousands of students. It's a smaller crowd this time, but the people here are shell shocked and adamant. Their protest has become even more important. I see an older woman standing on the side watching the crowds. After seeing the scale of the crackdown, she felt she needed to Come here too. I'm here with my children, but all these protesters are my children, she tells me. The anger people feel is also directed towards the national broadcast media, whom they accuse of being pro government and portraying a false narrative of the protests. I see the crowd rush past me and catch sight of a journalist stumbling, looking terrified, his shirt completely unbuttoned. There's a lot of anger here, but amidst the fear, the exhaustion, there is also joy. People here feel they have a voice. One young student, Samar Jahan, traveled from outside Delhi to join her peers and help hand out food and drinks for the crowds. This is about democracy, she tells me.
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Azadei Mushiri Next to Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decision to replace the popular Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov this week triggered an outburst of anger from civil society and protests by MPs. But the appointment of a new army commander in chief has been met with some approval. As someone who's well respected by troops and is also well placed to take on the growing challenge of army recruitment, Ukraine's military is finding it increasingly difficult to sign up new soldiers, as Sarah Rainsford has found.
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When Volodymyr Zelenskyy sacked his Defence Minister last week, he must have thought he was solving a problem. But he underestimated Mikhailo Fedorov and the depth of his public support. The minister was at loggerheads with Ukraine's commander in Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The President had to choose and he plumped for Syrsky. Fedorov's fans then protested in several cities for several days, waving cardboard signs calling the President an idiot. They slammed Syrsky as Soviet and they praised the 35 year old defence Minister for his high tech hands on approach. Zelenskyy could have ignored them. He might have warned that such open division was a gift to Russia, dangerous in the middle of a war. Instead, he sacked Syrsky too. The political turmoil isn't over, which isn't ideal. Mid war. It is a reminder that Ukraine is a democracy, though unlike Russia, and that's what people are fighting to protect. But the power struggle has laid bare problems within Ukraine's military that can no longer be ignored. Among the worst is the struggle to recruit new soldiers. In Kyiv, I went to the funeral of Maxim, a friend's son killed by a Russian FPV drone, just months after he was conscripted in the cemetery where Max was buried. The area set aside for soldiers is already full of young men like him. So he lies in a new alley of heroes that gets bigger every week. It is not surprising that the flow of volunteers to fight has almost dried up. But it means the hunt to find those avoiding conscription has intensified. And lately it's turned violent. In April, several military recruiters were stabbed. One was even killed. Then this month in Lviv, a crowd surrounded a military patrol car, smashed it with bricks and overturned it. Police have recorded more than 600 attacks on recruiters so far. The aggression isn't only fuelled by fear of the frontline. Many Ukrainians think it's a response to violence by the draft patrols themselves, who now swoop and grab men in the streets and then bundle them into buses. A university teacher I met called Kyrilo told me how he was scooped up in a raid, even though he's exempt from conscription because of his job. He was beaten. And when he protested, another punch broke his nose. The draft squads are often formed of veterans who've been through hell on the front lines themselves, and then are sent to hunt for those desperate to avoid the same fate. One recruiter called Vasile told me he still has nightmares about the battles he's survived and the friends he's lost. But as long as Russia continues its invasion, Vasil sees no alternative to forcing others to fight. Nobody wants to die. He was blunt, but the country needs defending. The conscription crisis is one reason Ukraine is pushing harder than ever on the battlefield and in the war in the skies. Kyiv wants to force the Kremlin into peace negotiations, but not on the surrender terms that Moscow first proposed. The talk these days is of peace through strength. So Ukrainian drones have been turning Russian oil refineries into giant balls of fire in Moscow itself and as far away as Siberia, causing major fuel shortages. They've been targeting sites in Crimea, too, the peninsula Vladimir Putin stole, and that is so dear to him. They're also hitting Russia. Shadow tankers that evade sanctions. And now drones are targeting the warehouses of Wildberries, the Russian online marketplace. It stocks items used by the Russian military. Yes, but as people in Kyiv, and they stress the economic and the psychological impact of this tactic on Russian civilians, like the oil refinery strikes. It's about taking the war back to Russia and to those who've managed to ignore it until now. Mykhailo Fedorov, the Defence Minister Zelenskyy sacked, was closely linked to that campaign. His task was making sure the troops got all the drones they needed to do their job. His future role is still uncertain, as it's where all this extra pressure on Moscow might lead. But in Kyiv right now, there is a sense that Russia is not invincible, and that's new. What's not new is the response. While I was there, Russian ballistic missiles killed almost 60 people in the city in just two nights. Those missiles smashed directly into blocks of flats, as they have for almost four and a half years now.
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Sarah Rainsford now to Iran, where we return to an event from the beginning of the war. In the opening hours of the conflict back in February, a strike on an Iranian school transformed an ordinary Saturday morning into one of the war's defining tragedies and its deadliest single incident for civilians. Nawal Al Mahafi has returned to the scene of the strike in Minab, a small city in southern Iran. Her reporting from Iran is on condition that none of her material is used on the BBC's Persian service. These restrictions apply to all international media organizations operating in the country.
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As a journalist, there are some stories that are difficult to leave behind. Weeks after I left Iran, I still find myself thinking about the Shajr Al Tayyiba Primary School in the southern city of Minab. The brightly colored classroom walls that were somehow still standing, the children's art on the walls, drawings of balloons and flowers now covered in dust, schoolbooks scattered beneath broken concrete and the drilling which shattered the eerie silence as the search for one little boy's body continued. I spoke to one of the teachers who survived, the 33 year old Amina Nadimi. She walked us through what was left of the school. Here was the prayer room, she told me. Here was the head teacher's office. Here was my classroom. You can't call it a school anymore, she said, her voice almost breaking only walls that smell of death, grief and the blood that was shed here. On 28 February, in the opening hours of the US Israeli war with Iran, this primary school was hit during a series of strikes. 156 people, including 120 children, were killed. Independent experts who reviewed video satellite imagery for the BBC said the available evidence indicates the school was struck by US Forces during attacks on an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound next door. President Trump initially claimed without evidence that Iran was responsible. Then, in June, he said nobody purposefully attacked the school, stressing that an inquiry was ongoing and he would accept its results. US Media have reported that a preliminary inquiry they've seen says US Military investigators believe US Forces carried out the strike unintentionally. Families in Minab, however, are still trying to understand how an ordinary school morning ended like this. Eminah told me the children had gathered to recite Quran before lessons began. As reports of attacks elsewhere in Iran started coming in, teachers were told to call parents and send the children home early. Some children had already left. Others were still waiting to be collected when the missile struck. She remembers smoke so thick she couldn't see the children she was holding. When she finally made it outside, she thought everyone else had escaped. Only later did she realize most of the school and the children were still beneath the rubble. A short distance away is the cemetery where many of the children are now buried. Dozens of small graves in neat rows. Every evening, families gather there. Mothers wipe dust from photographs. Brothers and sisters play between the headstones of siblings who should still be alive. I met Missoume, whose nine year old daughter Seteash was killed in the strike. She told me she ran to school as soon as she heard what had happened. There was no school, she said, only smoke. Her daughter wasn't identified until the early hours of the next morning. Buy her socks, she told me quietly. Cream coloured socks. Sateish herself had wanted to become a teacher. At home, her mother said she would line up her dolls and pretend to teach them. Iranian officials were keen for Western media to visit Minab. The government has made the school one of the defining symbols of the war. There are billboards with photos of the dead children plastered across the country. Politicians invoke Minab in speeches. One aircraft carrying Iranian negotiators was even named Minab168. After the death toll initially announced by officials. The message is clear. A campaign presented by Washington as targeting Iran's military instead killed children. It's easy to dismiss that as propaganda. But although the attack has served the government's narrative, it did happen those children were killed. But spending time in Iran, I realized the picture is more complicated. Before the war, many Iranians had told me they wanted change. Some had taken part in protests. Others quietly hoped outside military pressure might weaken the Islamic Republic after years of repression. Then Minabe happened. Several people who opposed the government told us they found themselves feeling conflicted. They still wanted political change. They still blamed the authorities for years of crackdowns. But they also feared the human cost this war brought. The strike hadn't erased the deep anger many people still feel towards their government. Nor had it suddenly united the country behind its leaders. What it did was unite many people in grief for the government. That grief has become politically powerful for the families I met. They've suffered a profound loss. Before we left, I asked Masumi what she wanted people outside Iran to understand. She looked towards the rows of children's graves what was their crime? She asked. They carried pencils, books, school bags. They only came here to learn.
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Nawal Al Mahafi In November, the US Will hold midterm elections, which will determine which party has the upper hand in Congress. Momentum was thrust behind Republicans in April after a ruling by the U.S. supreme Court against the Voting Rights Act. The court's decision limits the ability of lawmakers to take the racial makeup of a state into account when drawing voting maps. In a ruling that that could reshape politics across the American south, where Republicans dominate, Brandon Drennon has been speaking to voters.
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Fear, frustration, fatigue. They are heavy burdens to carry right now. Their collective weight bears down on the hearts of a number of voters in Alabama. This much was evident the moment I arrived in Tuskegee, a rural, impoverished, majority black town on the state's east side in June. One morning I visited Butler Chapel a.m.E. zion Church, a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This church was once the heartbeat of a major voting rights movement in the 1950s. Alabama lawmakers at the time were attempting to rig the election map by dividing black voters across so many districts that they'd never be able to elect their preferred candidate. It was a voter suppression tactic that would be repeatedly deployed and repeatedly fought against. A placard erected on the lawn commemorates that moment. The 3,000 plus residents who had mobilized to resist the years long battle against state redistricting efforts. The victory in the end Parishioners at the church today not only remember that fight, some even lived through it. It hurts, 73 year old Gail Brown tells me. My father was a part of that. I never thought that I would see this happen in my lifetime. She's talking about the current moment when black voters appear to be targeted again. The US Supreme Court struck a blow to a part of the Voting Rights act that had helped give minority voters more representation in Congress and was a vital tool for Alabama's black residents. This time the fight had been lost. Gayle Brown and others will vote in the midterm elections this November. Feeling that their collective voting power has been severely weakened. Lines on their congressional map will have been drawn to favor the state's Republicans, a mostly white voting bloc. Alabama's first term black congressional leader Shamari figures a Democrat will likely lose his seat as a result. Having just taken office in 2025, the attention that figures had just begun to give to neglected communities like Tuskegee could soon disappear. Nearly one in three people here live in poverty. Demands outweigh public resources. There's no General Hospital no 24 hour emergency care clinic, forcing the fire department to fill the void. Congressman figures has helped secure roughly $1 million in federal funding that Tuskegee will use for a new community building, delivering urgently needed upgrades. Another voter I met at Butler Chapel was Damari Benham. The 18 year old had a gaping wound in his right arm covered by a small bandage. Tuskegee's fire department had treated him after a glass door shattered, cutting him. They encouraged him to visit the hospital in a town miles away, but he never did. He said it was too far and too costly. In November, he'll be voting in his first midterm election and is among those here who are resolved to carry the torch. I'm not letting their fight go to an end, he said of the civil rights campaigners of decades past. I want to continue their work, even if that means just by showing up and placing a vote. Alabama's landscape is drenched in civil rights history in Tuskegee and beyond. The movement's landmark legislation, the Voting Rights act that made it illegal to discriminate against race in voting practices was passed in large part because of blood spilled in the city of Selma in 1965. Back then, hundreds of people attempted to march for voting rights but were stopped and brutally beaten by police. It was called Bloody Sunday. Two hours drive east of Selma is Eufaula, where I met Eliza Franklin as she was unveiling a historical marker honoring her great grandfather, killed here during another act of racial violence in 1922. You know why I'm up in arms? Because I'm the descendant of a lynching victim, she said. These things that seem like they were within the history books and far removed have become a reality. I met Eufaula's four term mayor, Jack Tibbs. He votes Republican but is nonpartisan in his role and praised Congressman Figure's impact on the community. I've seen him four times since he went into office, tibbs said. I can't say that about the previous guy. Eufaula's previous representative was Barry Moore, a staunch conservative and Trump loyalist who is now running for the Senate. His office did not respond to the BBC's request for comment, but after the Supreme Court's ruling, Moore celebrated telling local media that elections should be determined by Alabama's values and candidates ideas, not the color of anyone's skin. For Eliza Franklin and others, Alabama's voting map change was not just a political procedure. It was a familiar move out of an old playbook. Things never change for us, she said wearily.
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Fear, frustration, fatigue Brandon Drennan and finally, so called biohacking using science and data to optimize one's health and mental performance is being embraced by startups across Europe with new clinics keen to seize the opportunity to help us live longer. Simon Busch has been finding out more in Berlin.
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It's a shame there were no mice, I thought, at the Berlin Longevity Conference, because mice seem to be the main beneficiaries of the latest experiments to extend the human lifespan. Then again, perhaps all those experiments were a good reason for the mice, of which we'll hear more later, to stay well away. For anyone with lingering nostalgia for the Bohemian edgy Berlin of squats or all nightclubs and general nihilism, it's time to get with the program. Specifically the body optimization program, with the aim of living to around 120 or at the very least still being able to do handstands when you're 80. Popping up around the city are drop in wellness centres, the term as ever, somewhat presumptuous, where for a price you can have an IV vitamin infusion or red light exposure session before suitably rejuvenated, it's hoped going about the rest of your day. This city is becoming a European nexus for those saying 9 to the idea of a strictly limited lifespan. Where the old Berlin prized freedom from bourgeois discipline, longevity culture seems to have sneaked it back in. With its new regime of sleep scores, fasting windows and maximum hydration, Berlin is marrying the startup ethos with a quest for immortality, which of course is not something startups are generally known for themselves. I visit one in a residential building in the former East Berlin neighbourhood of Lichtenburg, the tiny name tag next to the buzzer lending it a clandestine air. The startup's founder begins by assessing my biohacking vital signs. Apparently my heart rate variability belongs to someone 10 years younger. All that running seems to have paid off, but my grip strength is mediocre. My left hand aches for days after testing it. As I lie next beneath a body length panel of red lights, a kind of jazzed up sunbed, I reflect that longevity seems to appeal to people who must be unused to being told no. Most of the world's biggest tech bros have invested in anti aging outfits like Mark Zuckerberg's Biohub, which, with the slightly childlike bombast typical of the sector, says its aim is to prevent all disease. Back at the Berlin startup, the red light therapy session is meant to kick start my cellular repair. Next I pop into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in what looks like someone's bedroom. It's the same kit that divers use to fight off the bends. Here it's supposed to fight those biohacking baddies zombie cells. Beyond startups, Berlin is even home to the Party for Rejuvenation Research, a single issue group that advocates for unlimited long and healthy lives. But in Berlin, in what could be a signal to the world, biohacking is shedding its underground and crankish connotations. At the conference at a glitzy convention center downtown, it goes by the more genteel longevity. The great and good of the longevity world are here, many of them trying to sell earthy sounding supplements or various beeping and flashing gadgets on the expo floor. Was it here, amid the lanyards and promotional brochures that the secret to immortality would finally be revealed? I wondered. Quite possibly. According to one speaker recognizable by his Methuselah like waist long beard, the gerontologist and prominent longevity advocate or Aubrey debray argues that aging is partly a semantic problem. We don't recognise it as a disease and so don't devote enough money to finding a cure. But curable it is, according to the geneticist David Sinclair. Find a way to clear up that accumulated cellular damage and living to 150 and beyond will be standard. I cool off in the experience hall with some ice water immersion, another much touted longevity technique. Longevity science, I ponder as I quite literally chill out, has already made great strides in extending lifespan among mice. The trouble is that mice are studied precisely because their short lifespan makes it easy to observe the effect of longevity treatments. As even anti aging enthusiasts admit, nothing. No pill, light wave or temperature shock has been conclusively proven to extend the maximum possible human lifespan by one second. Which makes the two days I spent at the conference feel rather long. Luckily, tomorrow bio is at hand. This Berlin cryogenics company has one of its souped up ambulances on display. It uses them to whiz its departed clients to liquid nitrogen storage at a facility in Switzerland until medical science has advanced enough to revive them. Now that sounds like a business with longevity.
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Simon Bush and that's all for this week from our own Correspondent was produced by Serena Tarling and Polly Hope. The editor was Richard Fenton Smith. I'm Kate Ady and you can hear more stories from around the world on from our own correspondent on BBC Sounds, including a tribute to the BBC's long serving Rome correspondent David Willey, featuring his dispatches from Vietnam to the Vatican. We'll be back with a new episode next Saturday.
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Christmas 1988 A plane takes off from Heathrow Airport. 38 minutes later, everyone on board is dead. A Libyan man, Abdul Basa Al Megrahi, is convicted of murdering 270 people. But that's not the end of the story. Almost four decades on fresh evidence and a new trial. I'm Miles Bonar. In this podcast, I'm delving into a world of extremist groups, mysterious intelligence agents and global Politics. From Radio 4, this is Intrigue Lockerbay. Listen first on BBC Sounds.