Why India's cockroach protesters are still on the streets in over 40C heat
Delhi's Jantar Mantar - an 18th century astronomical observatory and the Indian capital's best-known protest site - is heaving with hundreds of students, young professionals
Delhi's Jantar Mantar - an 18th century astronomical observatory and the Indian capital's best-known protest site - is heaving with hundreds of students, young professionals and activists who have camped here day and night for the past 10 days. A harsh sun beats overhead and temperatures hover above 40C. Young men and women stand around in groups; some sit, while others even sleep on the baking-hot road, hemmed in by heavy, yellow, metal barricades erected by Delhi police to contain the crowd.
As protest leaders take turns at the microphone, the crowd chants slogans and sings Bollywood songs of rebellion under the watchful gaze of police and paramilitary personnel. The protesters, who call themselves "cockroaches", belong to an online satirical movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). They are demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan after a key entrance exam for aspiring doctors - called the Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET-UG - was cancelled in early May following a paper leak.
They say he must take moral responsibility for the leak and quit. On Sunday, the protests intensified after Sonam Wangchuk, a well-known climate activist from a remote Himalayan region, joined the protesters and began an indefinite hunger-strike. CJP emerged in mid-May after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant triggered outrage by likening some unemployed young people turning to journalism and activism to "cockroaches" and "parasites". The judge later said he was referring to people with "fake and bogus degrees", not young people in general, but the backlash had already spread.
The man at the centre of this movement is CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke - a 30-year-old postgraduate student of public policy at Boston University in the US. "I had just come back from the gym and was playing FIFA on my PS5 when I saw the chief justice's comment," he told the BBC at the protest ground. "A bit disappointed and baffled" by it, he shared in a one-line post on
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