Who are India’s Cockroach Janta party and why are they staging protests?
How did the Cockroach Janta party emerge? The Cockroach Janta party (CJP) might have started out as an online joke, but – driven by millions
How did the Cockroach Janta party emerge? The Cockroach Janta party (CJP) might have started out as an online joke, but – driven by millions of discontented young people in India – it has swiftly grown into one of the most unexpected challenges to the powerful rightwing government of Narendra Modi. The CJP was founded in May by Abhijeet Dipke, 30, an Indian national who recently graduated from university in the US. Enraged to hear comments made by the chief justice of India, who compared the country’s unemployed youth to “parasites” and “cockroaches” during a supreme court hearing, Dipke jokingly put out a call on social media: “What if all cockroaches came together?” View image in fullscreen Supporters of the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) clash with police during Monday’s protests. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images The response was overwhelming. Dipke built a website and social media accounts for a satirical Cockroach Janta party – a poke at Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) – complete with a biting manifesto taking aim at the government and a tagline: “A political party for the people the system forgot to count.” Within two weeks, the CJP’s Instagram page had more than 22 million followers, overtaking the BJP. The Modi government, highly intolerant of criticism, attempted to block its social media accounts on national security grounds but was not successful. What are the causes championed by the CJP? As the CJP began to mobilise support, Dipke focused the movement on a burning issue for many of India’s millions of students: leaks of medical entrance exams, which have repeatedly been sold to the highest bidder.
‘This is the most stressed city in India’: the dark side of coaching capital Kota Read more The pressure on students to succeed is cripplingly high: more than 2 million students compete for just 130,000 places. Many families spend their life savings and get into high levels of debt to pay for their children to be coached for these notoriously gruelling medical exams, known by the acronym NEET. More is now spent in India on private tuition than the government’s entire higher education budget. A string of exam leaks has forced millions of students into re-takes and been linked to dozens of suicides in recent years. The NEET exams are also not the only papers to have been leaked. View image in fullscreen Students and other CJP members are demanding the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Photograph: Jagadeesh Nv/EPA The Modi government has been accused of not taking responsibility for the exams fiasco. The CJP began to rally supporters around the issue; calling for the government to be held accountable for exam leaks and for the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign. For many of India’s gen Zs and millennials, the CJP has also given voice to wider frustrations over an education system in crisis and a job market that has been systematically failing them. According to one recent study, almost 40% of India’s graduates below the age of 25 are unemployed. When did the CJP first take to the streets? The CJP’s first offline protest took place in Delhi in early June, calling for the resignation of Pradhan.
The BriefWire