India’s cockroach politics is no joke
The Cockroach Janta Party has crept onto the political scene at a time when Indian democracy is struggling. Two months after the Cockroach Janta Party
The Cockroach Janta Party has crept onto the political scene at a time when Indian democracy is struggling. Two months after the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) went viral in India, its followers have entered dangerous territory. Police forcefully removed educator-activist Sonam Wangchuk from the CJP’s sit-in at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar observatory, taking him to hospital against his will on the 21st day of his indefinite hunger strike. Protesters rallied at the site while CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke began his own hunger strike. The demonstrators plan to march towards the Indian Parliament on Monday to demand the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over university entrance exam leaks that caused nationwide outrage and wider failures of accountability in India’s competitive examination system. There have even been calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The CJP emerged in mid-May after remarks by Chief Justice Surya Kant in which he called unemployed youth “cockroaches”, sparking outrage across the nation. Since then, the “party” has garnered an immense online following among India’s youth and staged massive protests. Before Saturday’s escalation, the state’s response was neither open accommodation nor an all-out crackdown but calibrated containment: permit protests within narrow limits, police their reach and wait for the coalition to fragment. It now appears that the CJP has unnerved those in power. It seems it is no longer possible to treat the CJP as another viral storm in India’s crowded and volatile politics, as a satirical youth outfit born on social media, briefly visible on the street and destined to fade as quickly as it appeared. The cockroach has travelled far because it has named a widespread sentiment in society. To be called a cockroach is to be told that one is dirty, dispensable and best kept out of sight.
The cockroach is an ugly, comic, subaltern creature. It is despised, hard to kill and lives in the cracks of polite society. It survives poison, darkness and disgust. It appears when a house is not as clean as its owners claim. For many young Indians, especially those facing unemployment, exam-paper leaks and rising costs, the insult captured something they already felt. The CJP turned humiliation into visibility. If this is how power sees us, they said, then let us speak in that name. An insult became a badge worn proudly. This is not revolutionary politics. It is tragicomic, even farcical, because the cockroach stands for an India in which vast dreams of upward mobility have come to naught. “Cockroach politics” emerged at a time when Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is running a formidable electoral machine with vast resources, ideological discipline and a capacity to convert welfare, Hindu nationalism and opposition fragmentation into votes. Yet the BJP’s own mandate remains, paradoxically, that of a very large minority. In the 2024 general election, the party won the support of a little more than a third of voters nationally. Put differently, two-thirds of those who voted did not endorse the BJP’s re-election bid, led by Modi. The regime’s power rests not on an empirical majority but on aggregation: regional and caste alliances, opposition defections and splits, and the steady shrinkage of India’s third space between two national parties. The CJP appeared at a time when electoral politics looks settled from above but untrustworthy from below. The young are angry about a lack of jobs and botched exams. They are also entering politics at a time when the usual democratic channels of expressing public anger – parties, elections, media and independent institutions – look increasingly vulnerable to distortion.
The BriefWire