Dr. Amir Ali examines the emergence of India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests as the country’s first distinctive Gen Z protest movement, arguing that what began as a satirical online response to an official’s derogatory remark rapidly evolved into a nationwide campaign against educational injustice, government unresponsiveness, and democratic decline. Situating the movement within the broader trajectory of Indian politics, he explores how youth mobilization, meme culture, digital activism, and street protests combined to challenge the perceived invincibility of the Modi government. The article further assesses the movement’s implications for state-society relations, media credibility, educational governance, and the future of democratic dissent, suggesting that the Cockroach protests may represent a turning point in India’s contemporary politics.
By Amir Ali
When Gen Z protests took place in Nepal and Bangladesh in India’s neighborhood, and further afield in Morocco and Madagascar, a question arose in people’s minds whether such extraordinary political events could ever happen in India. India’s Cockroach Janata Party was the country’s very own bespoke Gen Z movement. The protests were prompted by remarks made by Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant. He disparagingly suggested that unemployed youngsters gravitating towards journalism and social activism were like cockroaches. An Indian student pursuing a master’s degree in public relations in Boston University in the US, Abhijit Dipke, saw an opportunity to make a meme out of the mention of cockroaches by the Chief Justice. He created the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), parodying the nation’s formidable ruling party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The result was an internet sensation as the CJP’s social media following easily surpassed that of the ruling BJP.
From Student Anger to Political Accountability
These events played out in the middle of May of 2026 when Dipke was still in the US. A few days earlier the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) that close to two million youngsters in India had taken to gain admission to medical courses across the country, was cancelled. Dipke was set to return to India on the 6th of June. He announced that he would be going straight from the airport to a designated protest site in Central Delhi, called the Jantar Mantar, named after an 18th century astronomical observatory, that still stands. There was speculation that Dipke would be arrested on his arrival at the airport. He emerged in the glaring presence of India’s notoriously raucous media channels. He held a copy of B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography to indicate his respect for the man whose name is associated with the drafting of the Indian constitution, and who is the iconic leader of India’s historically oppressed Dalit community.
Dipke was not arrested and he proceeded to Jantar Mantar where there was an underwhelming crowd that received him. This was perhaps the slightly disappointing first day of the movement that would in less than two months’ time extract a resignation from Narendra Modi’s Cabinet in the form of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Modi’s government in the twelve years that it has been in power has become synonymous with not yielding to demands for resignation on moral grounds from the opposition and civil society. There have been some exceptions such as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, MJ Akbar, who had to resign in 2018 when allegations of sexual assault were made against him.
Pradhan is a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) which is an ultranationalist and supremacist political movement whose political front is the ruling BJP. The Cockroach Janata Party demanded Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister as it was under his authority that regular leaks of questions for entrance examinations to prestigious courses like medicine and engineering happened. The NEET for medical courses that had been cancelled in mid-May, had been rescheduled for late June and there was youth discontent that the Cockroach movement was able to very effectively channelize.
How the Cockroach Movement Gathered Momentum
The Modi government throughout June and most of July remained intransigent on the question of education minister Pradhan’s resignation. The mentality of the Modi government seems to be that resignation signals weakness on its part. This stonewalling and lack of responsiveness has become something of a character trait of the Modi regime. The earlier rare exception that underlines this intransigence was in late 2021 when the Modi government backtracked on a set of farm laws it was pushing through parliament as it had angry farmers from neighboring regions blockading major arterial roads into the capital city New Delhi, with their tractors.
The Cockroach Janata Party protests received a shot in the arm when Abhijit Dipke was joined by an educational reformer and environmental activist from a remote region in the Himalayas. This was a man called Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh. Wangchuk had recently been in jail for protests he had organized and he promptly decided to go on hunger strike to express his solidarity with the Cockroach Janata Party. One of the features of agitational Indian politics is the hunger strike undertaken as a kind of imitation of the prolonged hunger strikes that India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi was known to take recourse to. Wangchuk’s health kept deteriorating with the Modi government showing no signs of budging.
When the Modi government finally moved on Saturday 18th July, exactly a week before Pradhan’s resignation on the next Saturday, it was to remove Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site by policemen who took him to a government hospital to monitor his health condition. Wangchuk demanded that the matter of examination paper leaks be taken up in the upcoming session of parliament, before breaking his hunger strike in the presence of senior government ministers. Meanwhile, the young ‘cockroach’ protesters at the Jantar Mantar protest site kept growing and the protests seemed to have graduated far beyond Sonam Wangchuk.
When Youth Protest Shook the Modi Government
On the first day of the new parliament session on Monday July 20 when the protesters marched to Parliament, they were met by very heavy-handed police measures. Not only were they tear gassed and baton charged by the Delhi Police, but there were also allegations of pellet guns being fired. Protests were also happening across the country and in major provincial capitals like Patna and Kolkata, where provincial assembly elections had very recently returned governments from Mr. Modi’s BJP, consolidating his formidable political grip over the country. And yet, just as electorally his political grip was being strengthened in provinces which for many years had not yielded to the BJP’s political dominance, Mr. Modi was being challenged by impudent youngsters right under his nose in New Delhi.
The week beginning from Monday 20 July when the Delhi Police brutally responded to protesters, up to Saturday 25 July, when Education Minister Pradhan resigned, progressed in a politically feverish sort of way. There was speculation that there would be a cabinet reshuffle to respond to the situation, but not a resignation.
A veritable meme revolution started as youngsters mercilessly mocked the carefully cultivated media image of Modi as a great and strong leader. Modi seemed to desperately respond with a midnight Instagram post with his haggard face far too close to the camera, eyes appearing like slits. Modi appealed to youngsters with a supposed Gen Z style of addressing them as ‘friends,’ instead of the trademark nasalized Hindi word mitron that he frequently uses. This Instagram post was interpreted and ridiculed as a sign of Modi being nervous and ruffled.
The Cockroach protests made very clear demands in addition to the resignation of the education minister, like dropping all police charges on protesting students. Soon after the resignation announcement, the protests at Jantar Mantar were a little hastily withdrawn. After yielding on the resignation, the Modi regime is unrepentantly doubling down, evident in the choice of Mr. Pradhan’s successor as Education Minister, another RSS member, which means the same educational agenda.
What Did the Cockroach Protests Achieve?
There is no doubt, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, that these were India’s unique and indeed idiosyncratic Gen Z protests. Further, the Cockroach protests are very different from the India Against Corruption movement that happened 15 years earlier in 2011, the same year as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements took place in different parts of the world. The India Against Corruption Movement did not share the global concerns of those significant protests, democracy in the case of the Arab Spring and inequality in the case of Occupy Wall Street.
The India Against Corruption movement was backed by the ultranationalist RSS. It contributed significantly to the catapulting of Modi to power three years later in 2014. On the contrary, the Cockroach protests have targeted the RSS and BJP’s polarizing politics of sowing division between majority Hindus and minority Muslims. Some of the slogans at this year’s Cockroach protests emphasized unity between the two religious communities. That way the Cockroach protests can be seen as extending the Shaheen Bagh protests initiated by Muslim women in a locality in Southeast Delhi to protest the Citizen’s Amendment Bill that was passed by the Modi Government in December 2019 and that threatened the citizenship status, especially of Muslims. Right wing media commentators supportive of the BJP argued that the Cockroach protests need to be suppressed.
Continuing with the contrast between the India Against Corruption Movement of 2011 and the Cockroach protest of 2026, the differing role of the mainstream media is glaring. The 2011 India Against Corruption Movement was supported by and virtually a creation of the mainstream electronic media. Large sections excitedly beamed visuals of protestors holding candles, waving flags, and singing the national anthem to ward off corruption, in what Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) political scientist Ajay Gudavarthy called a television soap opera. That very same mainstream media became the infamous lapdog Godi media as they are called now in India (Godi means lap in Hindi) that has thrown all journalistic standards to the wind by never questioning the Modi government. It has also injected large doses of communal animosity into the Indian body politic by organizing inflammatory prime time debates, many blatantly Islamophobic. With the Cockroach protests, the same lapdog Godi media has met its comeuppance with Gen Z protesters chasing them away and ridiculing them for their biased and skewed coverage.
The cockroach protests have made a significant dent on the impregnable character of Modi’s government. They have done so by removing a pervasive fear across the country about criticizing the government and expressing dissent. The Cockroach protests forebode the inevitable end of the Modi regime at some point in the future. Mr. Modi’s powerful Home Minister, Amit Shah has arrogantly claimed that his party will be in power for at least another fifty years. If that were to happen, then today’s Cockroach protesters would have advanced from middle age to become elderly citizens in their sixties. The BJP’s regular electoral victories in provincial assembly elections, and especially its recent success in crucial provinces like West Bengal and Bihar, have led some to believe that it is electorally invincible. This invincibility arises in the view of its critics from a combination of massive party funds, the Election Commission of India forfeiting its constitutional neutrality by favoring the BJP, and a controversial electoral roll revision exercise called the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) that seems designed to disenfranchise some sections of the electorate.
The Cockroach protests have laid bare India’s education crisis that twelve years of BJP rule have exacerbated. Those years have intensified the desperate situation of India’s Gen Z who would have been children when Mr. Modi came to power in 2014. Prior to the Modi regime, India’s educational system showed severe structural infirmities like unemployable graduates, and school children whose literacy and numeracy skills were way below desired levels. The BJP through its parent organization the RSS has foisted an educational policy that is uncritical, unscientific and chauvinistic in terms of claimed civilizational achievements. Rewritten textbooks are full of errors, spelling a lost generation. This is compounded by doubts about Mr. Modi’s claimed educational qualifications. Multiple Right to Information requests seeking details of his degrees have been routinely turned down.
Cockroach Coda
The Chief Justice of India’s choice of word to characterize India’s youngsters was extremely unfortunate. In 2022 the Editors Guild of India noted a dangerous plunging of the media discourse when it compared India’s mainstream television media with Radio Rwanda, a reference to Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines that during the 1994 Rwanda genocide conveyed the chilling message to kill the cockroaches. The embrace of the word cockroach by India’s youngsters is the most significant challenge to Modi’s populist regime, jaded and clueless about how to handle India’s restive youngsters and their demands for a good education and proper employment.
India’s Gen Z Cockroach Protests: Youth Mobilization, Democratic Dissent, and the Limits of Modi’s Populism
Dr. Amir Ali examines the emergence of India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests as the country’s first distinctive Gen Z protest movement, arguing that what began as a satirical online response to an official’s derogatory remark rapidly evolved into a nationwide campaign against educational injustice, government unresponsiveness, and democratic decline. Situating the movement within the broader trajectory of Indian politics, he explores how youth mobilization, meme culture, digital activism, and street protests combined to challenge the perceived invincibility of the Modi government. The article further assesses the movement’s implications for state-society relations, media credibility, educational governance, and the future of democratic dissent, suggesting that the Cockroach protests may represent a turning point in India’s contemporary politics.
By Amir Ali
When Gen Z protests took place in Nepal and Bangladesh in India’s neighborhood, and further afield in Morocco and Madagascar, a question arose in people’s minds whether such extraordinary political events could ever happen in India. India’s Cockroach Janata Party was the country’s very own bespoke Gen Z movement. The protests were prompted by remarks made by Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant. He disparagingly suggested that unemployed youngsters gravitating towards journalism and social activism were like cockroaches. An Indian student pursuing a master’s degree in public relations in Boston University in the US, Abhijit Dipke, saw an opportunity to make a meme out of the mention of cockroaches by the Chief Justice. He created the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), parodying the nation’s formidable ruling party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The result was an internet sensation as the CJP’s social media following easily surpassed that of the ruling BJP.
From Student Anger to Political Accountability
These events played out in the middle of May of 2026 when Dipke was still in the US. A few days earlier the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) that close to two million youngsters in India had taken to gain admission to medical courses across the country, was cancelled. Dipke was set to return to India on the 6th of June. He announced that he would be going straight from the airport to a designated protest site in Central Delhi, called the Jantar Mantar, named after an 18th century astronomical observatory, that still stands. There was speculation that Dipke would be arrested on his arrival at the airport. He emerged in the glaring presence of India’s notoriously raucous media channels. He held a copy of B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography to indicate his respect for the man whose name is associated with the drafting of the Indian constitution, and who is the iconic leader of India’s historically oppressed Dalit community.
Dipke was not arrested and he proceeded to Jantar Mantar where there was an underwhelming crowd that received him. This was perhaps the slightly disappointing first day of the movement that would in less than two months’ time extract a resignation from Narendra Modi’s Cabinet in the form of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Modi’s government in the twelve years that it has been in power has become synonymous with not yielding to demands for resignation on moral grounds from the opposition and civil society. There have been some exceptions such as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, MJ Akbar, who had to resign in 2018 when allegations of sexual assault were made against him.
Pradhan is a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) which is an ultranationalist and supremacist political movement whose political front is the ruling BJP. The Cockroach Janata Party demanded Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister as it was under his authority that regular leaks of questions for entrance examinations to prestigious courses like medicine and engineering happened. The NEET for medical courses that had been cancelled in mid-May, had been rescheduled for late June and there was youth discontent that the Cockroach movement was able to very effectively channelize.
How the Cockroach Movement Gathered Momentum
The Modi government throughout June and most of July remained intransigent on the question of education minister Pradhan’s resignation. The mentality of the Modi government seems to be that resignation signals weakness on its part. This stonewalling and lack of responsiveness has become something of a character trait of the Modi regime. The earlier rare exception that underlines this intransigence was in late 2021 when the Modi government backtracked on a set of farm laws it was pushing through parliament as it had angry farmers from neighboring regions blockading major arterial roads into the capital city New Delhi, with their tractors.
The Cockroach Janata Party protests received a shot in the arm when Abhijit Dipke was joined by an educational reformer and environmental activist from a remote region in the Himalayas. This was a man called Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh. Wangchuk had recently been in jail for protests he had organized and he promptly decided to go on hunger strike to express his solidarity with the Cockroach Janata Party. One of the features of agitational Indian politics is the hunger strike undertaken as a kind of imitation of the prolonged hunger strikes that India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi was known to take recourse to. Wangchuk’s health kept deteriorating with the Modi government showing no signs of budging.
When the Modi government finally moved on Saturday 18th July, exactly a week before Pradhan’s resignation on the next Saturday, it was to remove Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site by policemen who took him to a government hospital to monitor his health condition. Wangchuk demanded that the matter of examination paper leaks be taken up in the upcoming session of parliament, before breaking his hunger strike in the presence of senior government ministers. Meanwhile, the young ‘cockroach’ protesters at the Jantar Mantar protest site kept growing and the protests seemed to have graduated far beyond Sonam Wangchuk.
When Youth Protest Shook the Modi Government
On the first day of the new parliament session on Monday July 20 when the protesters marched to Parliament, they were met by very heavy-handed police measures. Not only were they tear gassed and baton charged by the Delhi Police, but there were also allegations of pellet guns being fired. Protests were also happening across the country and in major provincial capitals like Patna and Kolkata, where provincial assembly elections had very recently returned governments from Mr. Modi’s BJP, consolidating his formidable political grip over the country. And yet, just as electorally his political grip was being strengthened in provinces which for many years had not yielded to the BJP’s political dominance, Mr. Modi was being challenged by impudent youngsters right under his nose in New Delhi.
The week beginning from Monday 20 July when the Delhi Police brutally responded to protesters, up to Saturday 25 July, when Education Minister Pradhan resigned, progressed in a politically feverish sort of way. There was speculation that there would be a cabinet reshuffle to respond to the situation, but not a resignation.
A veritable meme revolution started as youngsters mercilessly mocked the carefully cultivated media image of Modi as a great and strong leader. Modi seemed to desperately respond with a midnight Instagram post with his haggard face far too close to the camera, eyes appearing like slits. Modi appealed to youngsters with a supposed Gen Z style of addressing them as ‘friends,’ instead of the trademark nasalized Hindi word mitron that he frequently uses. This Instagram post was interpreted and ridiculed as a sign of Modi being nervous and ruffled.
The Cockroach protests made very clear demands in addition to the resignation of the education minister, like dropping all police charges on protesting students. Soon after the resignation announcement, the protests at Jantar Mantar were a little hastily withdrawn. After yielding on the resignation, the Modi regime is unrepentantly doubling down, evident in the choice of Mr. Pradhan’s successor as Education Minister, another RSS member, which means the same educational agenda.
What Did the Cockroach Protests Achieve?
There is no doubt, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, that these were India’s unique and indeed idiosyncratic Gen Z protests. Further, the Cockroach protests are very different from the India Against Corruption movement that happened 15 years earlier in 2011, the same year as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements took place in different parts of the world. The India Against Corruption Movement did not share the global concerns of those significant protests, democracy in the case of the Arab Spring and inequality in the case of Occupy Wall Street.
The India Against Corruption movement was backed by the ultranationalist RSS. It contributed significantly to the catapulting of Modi to power three years later in 2014. On the contrary, the Cockroach protests have targeted the RSS and BJP’s polarizing politics of sowing division between majority Hindus and minority Muslims. Some of the slogans at this year’s Cockroach protests emphasized unity between the two religious communities. That way the Cockroach protests can be seen as extending the Shaheen Bagh protests initiated by Muslim women in a locality in Southeast Delhi to protest the Citizen’s Amendment Bill that was passed by the Modi Government in December 2019 and that threatened the citizenship status, especially of Muslims. Right wing media commentators supportive of the BJP argued that the Cockroach protests need to be suppressed.
Continuing with the contrast between the India Against Corruption Movement of 2011 and the Cockroach protest of 2026, the differing role of the mainstream media is glaring. The 2011 India Against Corruption Movement was supported by and virtually a creation of the mainstream electronic media. Large sections excitedly beamed visuals of protestors holding candles, waving flags, and singing the national anthem to ward off corruption, in what Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) political scientist Ajay Gudavarthy called a television soap opera. That very same mainstream media became the infamous lapdog Godi media as they are called now in India (Godi means lap in Hindi) that has thrown all journalistic standards to the wind by never questioning the Modi government. It has also injected large doses of communal animosity into the Indian body politic by organizing inflammatory prime time debates, many blatantly Islamophobic. With the Cockroach protests, the same lapdog Godi media has met its comeuppance with Gen Z protesters chasing them away and ridiculing them for their biased and skewed coverage.
The cockroach protests have made a significant dent on the impregnable character of Modi’s government. They have done so by removing a pervasive fear across the country about criticizing the government and expressing dissent. The Cockroach protests forebode the inevitable end of the Modi regime at some point in the future. Mr. Modi’s powerful Home Minister, Amit Shah has arrogantly claimed that his party will be in power for at least another fifty years. If that were to happen, then today’s Cockroach protesters would have advanced from middle age to become elderly citizens in their sixties. The BJP’s regular electoral victories in provincial assembly elections, and especially its recent success in crucial provinces like West Bengal and Bihar, have led some to believe that it is electorally invincible. This invincibility arises in the view of its critics from a combination of massive party funds, the Election Commission of India forfeiting its constitutional neutrality by favoring the BJP, and a controversial electoral roll revision exercise called the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) that seems designed to disenfranchise some sections of the electorate.
The Cockroach protests have laid bare India’s education crisis that twelve years of BJP rule have exacerbated. Those years have intensified the desperate situation of India’s Gen Z who would have been children when Mr. Modi came to power in 2014. Prior to the Modi regime, India’s educational system showed severe structural infirmities like unemployable graduates, and school children whose literacy and numeracy skills were way below desired levels. The BJP through its parent organization the RSS has foisted an educational policy that is uncritical, unscientific and chauvinistic in terms of claimed civilizational achievements. Rewritten textbooks are full of errors, spelling a lost generation. This is compounded by doubts about Mr. Modi’s claimed educational qualifications. Multiple Right to Information requests seeking details of his degrees have been routinely turned down.
Cockroach Coda
The Chief Justice of India’s choice of word to characterize India’s youngsters was extremely unfortunate. In 2022 the Editors Guild of India noted a dangerous plunging of the media discourse when it compared India’s mainstream television media with Radio Rwanda, a reference to Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines that during the 1994 Rwanda genocide conveyed the chilling message to kill the cockroaches. The embrace of the word cockroach by India’s youngsters is the most significant challenge to Modi’s populist regime, jaded and clueless about how to handle India’s restive youngsters and their demands for a good education and proper employment.
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