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The Indian "Cockroaches" Recently Beat their Government

In May, India's Chief Justice compared a generation of unemployed young people to cockroaches. By August, those same young people had built a movement that marched by the thousands on Parliament and pushed a sitting cabinet minister out of his job.

The remark came from Surya Kant, sworn in as Chief Justice of India the previous November. During a Supreme Court hearing on May 15, while discussing lawyers who'd used fake degrees, Kant said some of the country's unemployed youth were, in his words, "like cockroaches" who don't get jobs and instead turn to journalism or activism.¹ He later said he'd been misquoted and was only talking about credential fraud.² Nobody much cared. A day after the hearing, 30-year-old political communications strategist Abhijeet Dipke, who studied at Boston University, registered a website and made some social accounts for something called the Cockroach Janta Party.¹ Within a week, it had more Instagram followers than the Prime Minister's actual party.³

It began as a joke, satire on Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party built around reclaiming an insult.⁴ It didn't stay a joke for long. Weeks earlier, officials had cancelled India's National Eligibility Entrance Test, the exam more than two million students take each year for a shot at medical school, after finding that the questions had leaked and circulated before the test even started.⁵ Students who'd spent years and their families' savings preparing for one morning had to do it all again. At least 21 of them killed themselves in the weeks that followed.⁶ CJP gave that grief somewhere to go.

By June, protesters were camped out at Jantar Mantar, a New Delhi park with a long history as a protest site, demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign.⁷ Late that month, 59-year-old activist Sonam Wangchuk joined them and began a hunger strike that ran 26 days before police hospitalized him against his wishes.⁸ That's what tipped the standoff into its worst week. On July 20, more than 10,000 protesters tried to march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament. Delhi Police, who'd refused the march a permit, met them with tear gas and batons.⁹ Police reported nearly 180 injuries, 60 protesters and 118 of their own officers.¹⁰

Within days, the government folded. Pradhan resigned on July 25. Officials promised compensation for the families of students who'd died by suicide and agreed to drop charges tied to the protests, though arrests have continued in party-run states, including Assam and West Bengal, disproportionately targeting Muslims.¹¹ Modi's new education minister, Pralhad Joshi, has spent decades in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist group widely described as the BJP's ideological parent.¹² So the underlying fight over who runs India's exam system, and toward what end, is nowhere close to finished.

What's strange is what CJP chose to do with its win. Earlier this month, its leadership met in Maharashtra and voted against turning into an actual political party, opting instead to stay a "pressure group" focused on jobs, education, and government accountability.¹³ By mid-August, the movement had climbed to nearly 27 million Instagram followers, more than double the BJP's.¹⁴

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Header Photo: Sudipta Maulik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Indian "Cockroaches" Recently Beat their Government

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