The Cockroaches March Again: Youth Resistance, Electoral Integrity, and India’s Democratic Crisis

In this commentary for the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Amir Ali examines the resurgence of India’s student-led protests against the Modi government, linking concerns over electoral integrity, institutional independence, and democratic backsliding to the socioeconomic consequences of neoliberalism. Focusing on the Cockroach Janata Party’s mobilization, he explores growing youth disillusionment with political institutions, educational inequalities, and diminishing employment opportunities. Dr. Ali argues that India’s Generation Z must connect its democratic resistance to a broader critique of neoliberal economic policies that have deepened inequality and undermined public goods. Drawing comparative lessons from recent electoral developments in Brazil, Serbia, and the United States, he advocates reclaiming socialism and secularism as complementary foundations for India’s democratic renewal.

By Amir Ali

India’s young cockroach protesters were back on the streets of New Delhi in early October. This was just a little over two months after the late July showdown with the government that earned the rare resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, when Delhi was experiencing the late-July humidity, occasionally relieved by monsoon showers. The October reemergence of the cockroaches happened when the Delhi weather was becoming milder as the onset of winter approached.

The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) had called for a protest on October 10 and the Delhi Police, under the direct control of India’s powerful Home Minister Amit Shah, denied permission for the protests. Shah is a close associate of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has an image as a tough, uncompromising strongman. Events took a more dramatic turn when Abhijit Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janata Party, along with two of his associates, was arrested as soon as the flight on which they were traveling landed in Delhi. The videos taken on cell phones from inside the plane and then posted on social media showed Delhi police personnel entering the aircraft. This reinforced the impression, now widespread in India, that the government was panicking. As protests were disallowed at the Jantar Mantar protest site in Central Delhi, a mushrooming of protest sites took place, wherever demonstrators found themselves being prevented from moving further by the police. 

The Delhi Police’s crackdown on protesters and journalists covering these events was brutal and again reinforced the impression that the Modi government was nervous, increasingly on the back foot and resorting to desperate, knee-jerk measures.

In the previous round in July, young cockroach protesters expressed their frustration at the decrepit state of Indian entrance examinations that in turn was a larger reflection of the moribund state of public education. They targeted the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, and, as mentioned, were able to extract his resignation. In the October round of protests, they targeted the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar over discontent with the implementation of an extensive electoral roll revision exercise and an overall feeling that he was kowtowing to the Modi government. The demand for Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation has, however, fallen on deaf ears.

Election Commissions Past and Present  

The Election Commission of India, for many years before the advent of the Modi government, was a widely respected and fiercely independent institution whose autonomy was ensured through Article 324 of the Indian Constitution. It is headed by two elections commissioners and one Chief Election Commissioner. Some prominent Chief Election Commissioners became well known for their ability to stand up to the government of the day to ensure that no incumbent government had the temerity to bully the Commission. Back in the 1990s, a redoubtable Chief Election Commissioner like T. N. Seshan made his commitment to his constitutional role clear in no uncertain terms.

Less than a decade later, in 2002, the Chief Election Commissioner J. M. Lyngdoh prevented Narendra Modi, who was then Chief Minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat from holding early elections to the Gujarat provincial assembly. This was soon after the vicious communal violence that the state had experienced in the months of March and April that year. Mr. Modi had been accused of not doing enough to control the violence. Lyngdoh’s opposition to holding early elections was premised on the inability of many displaced victims living in refugee camps to vote, and who were likely to do so against Mr. Modi. This led to Mr. Modi mocking the Chief Election Commissioner for preventing the elections from taking place by emphasizing his full name, which is James Michael Lyngdoh. These insinuations invoked Lyngdoh’s Christian identity and reinforced Mr. Modi’s notorious minority baiting. The elections were held later that year, and Mr. Modi won. 

More recent Election Commissioners who have resisted the Modi regime, such as Ashok Lavasa in 2019, have found themselves at the receiving end of the government’s ire. The controversial current Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar whose resignation, as mentioned earlier, became the focal point of this round of the cockroach campaign in October, seems far more malleable—indeed, compliant. Suggestions have been made that the Election Commission under him does the Modi government’s bidding, raising a question mark over the fairness of elections. A recent controversial piece of legislation, The Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act 2023 granted effective lifelong immunity for actions that Election Commissioners took in office. The legislation also altered the appointment process. Earlier a three-member committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India selected election commissioners. This changed to replace the Chief Justice of India with a Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, giving the government of the day the decisive upper hand in selecting election commissioners. 

One of the most controversial decisions that the Election Commission under Gyanesh Kumar has taken is to conduct the Special Intensive Revision of Rolls (SIR). The first state to conduct this exercise was Bihar in June 2025, just months before provincial assembly elections in that state were to be held in November 2025. The SIR has since been extended to many other parts of the country. The most disturbing aspect of the exercise is the Kafkaesque requirement of documentation where inclusion on the rolls depends on proving that a voter or the voter’s parents’ names figured in a previous electoral exercise conducted over two decades ago. This has led to people frantically looking for documents to ensure their inclusion on the current list by being ‘mapped’ on a two-decade-old list. The result, as has been widely reported, is the deletion and thereby disenfranchisement of 130 million people from the voter roll. More worryingly, the emphasis the Election Commission of India places on sanitized and ‘pure’ voter rolls is indicative of an almost ominous electoral cleansing. 

The Indian Express Reported Dissent within the Election Commission

The latest round of October youth cockroach protests was prompted by an incisive piece of investigative reporting in The Indian Express, one of India’s most influential national newspapers. Ritika Chopra, Resident Editor of the paper’s Mumbai edition, revealed that the other two election commissioners had expressed their dissent at the proceedings of the Election Commission at least 14 times over the previous 10 months. 

The Indian Express report tended to reinforce questions that had been raised over the conduct of the Election Commission. The Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, had in several widely reported press conferences claimed that he had documentary evidence to back the damning claims he was making about electoral malpractices. The Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar took great umbrage at these attacks.

The Emergence of Youth and Student Leaders

In both the July and October rounds of protests, some prominent youth leaders have emerged. From the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) have emerged its founder Abhijit Dipke, Sourav Das and Ashutosh Ranka. In the more recent round, the President of the left-wing All India Students Association (AISA) Neha Bora, a PhD candidate at New Delhi’s prominent Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), played a very significant role. While many of these protesters were detained and arrested, there were worrying reports of some violent counter protesters to whom the Delhi Police appeared to be turning a blind eye. 

With the threat of violence looming, a successful march call was given by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition and head of India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. The march saw large numbers of people participating on October 12 with no violence. It culminated in the filing of a petition at the Supreme Court of India.

Visible decline and dysfunction have taken hold in constitutional institutions in India like the Election Commission and even the judiciary, especially as the over 12 years of the Modi regime have progressed. India’s youth protests pointed towards this in a tangential sort of way. What they have achieved more centrally, through their irreverence, is to completely puncture the carefully curated image of Prime Minister Modi as a brand name spelling a strong, decisive leadership. This brand image was built up by preventing people from speaking out against him, enforced by a silencing of dissent, which youngsters have nonchalantly shrugged off.

The Future of Youngsters Shortchanged by Past Decades of Neoliberalism

What the cockroach protests have not been able to do, so far, is connect concretely to how the future of youngsters in India, and for that matter across the world, has been shortchanged by past decades of economic neoliberalism. India began resolutely on the path of economic neoliberalism in July 1991 when the finance minister Manmohan Singh, who subsequently became Prime Minister in 2004, announced these policies. These neoliberal economic policies are often referred to as LPG which is an acronym for Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization. These policies have been underway for the past 35 years and there has been a kind of consensus that has developed on them between the Congress and the currently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Between them, these two parties have ruled for the lion’s share of the past three and a half decades. The Congress was in power for 15 of these 35 years, from 1991 to 1996 and then from 2004 to 2014. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power for 18 of these 35 years and this covers the years 1998-1999, followed by 1999-2004 and 2014 to the present. The remaining two years form an interlude between 1996 and 1998 when a series of fractious coalitions tried unsuccessfully to stake out a politics that differed from the Congress and the BJP.

That two-year interlude ended in 1998 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP came to power. The subsequent six years of BJP-led rule revealed how the party accepted the orthodoxy of economic neoliberalism, despite the commitment to a broad Gandhian socialism that found its way into the party’s constitution when it was founded in 1980. The BJP government under Vajpayee combined this new commitment to economic neoliberalism and its traditional Hindu nationalism. For the purposes of running and maintaining the coalition that he led, Vajpayee, reputed for wearing an emollient ‘liberal’ mask, was willing to put the central elements of the Hindu nationalist agenda on the back burner.

Keeping in mind the BJP’s adoption of economic neoliberalism, combined with a vague background commitment to Gandhian socialism, one notes something similar in the Congress. Fifteen years prior to its announcement of the 1991 neoliberal economic policies, the Congress back in 1976 under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during the Emergency that clamped down on constitutional fundamental rights, had inserted, through the 42nd Constitutional Amendment, the word socialism into the Preamble of the Constitution alongside secularism. Both the Congress and the BJP have embraced economic neoliberalism while retaining an uneasy historical commitment to socialism—a contradictory and problematic legacy. This contradiction is more troubling in the case of the Congress. At the same time the BJP’s commitment to economic neoliberalism is far more aggressive. This article concludes by suggesting that the Congress under Rahul Gandhi will have to rescue and redeem that troubled legacy of socialism, if it wants to envision the contours of a post-Modi India.

Before arriving at that conclusion, it is important to do a quick assessment of how the past decades of neoliberalism have shortchanged the future of India’s youth who are potentially at the forefront of political change today. These past three decades of economic neoliberalism have yielded, for at least two decades, a considerable degree of economic growth. Throughout the decade of the 2000s with the BJP coalition under Vajpayee, succeeded by the Congress-led coalition, the Indian economy did grow at significant rates. Such growth over the 2000s also led to an uptick in employment and this was a significant reason for the Congress Party coming back to power in 2009 with an even more comfortable majority. 

This is where the story of India’s economic growth under neoliberalism becomes complicated. The world economy was being roiled by the headwinds of the 2008 global financial crisis, just as the Congress was returned to power in 2009. From 2010 onwards, a series of exaggerated corruption allegations were made against the Congress government that were understandably amplified by the opposition BJP that was eager to come back to power. The BJP did come to power in 2014 with a hefty majority under Narendra Modi that ended almost two and a half decades of coalition era politics in India. 

India’s growth story continued in the first years of the Modi government, but sceptics started pointing to the jobless nature of this growth. The most infamous aspect of the ending of India’s growth story was the controversial decision to demonetize high value currency notes that PM Modi surprisingly and shockingly announced on November 8, 2016, almost exactly ten years ago. The compliant electronic media, that has become notorious for never asking questions of the Modi government, sycophantically hailed it as a master stroke. The economist Jean Drèze offered a more sobering assessment that this was like shooting at and deflating the tires of a racing car. The outcome of this would be an economy that would careen out of control and, in doing so, jeopardize the careers of India’s Gen Z who were growing up and about to enter a job market that would prove to be non-existent for them.  

India’s Gen Z protesters were born between the years 1997 and 2012. In other words, they were born between those years when India’s liberalization polices were being consolidated and then yielding whatever returns they had to, in terms of growth clocked throughout the decade of the 2000s. As Gen Z has grown up and increasingly entered the job market, the very same economic neoliberalism that was unfolding against the backdrop of their childhoods has condemned them to a bleak future of little or no prospects. India’s economic neoliberalism that was toasted and celebrated in India and across the world during their childhoods has mortgaged, foreclosed and shortchanged their future. 

This is where the creative potential of Gen Z protests needs to be harnessed. These protests, if they are to have a meaningful impact, on the future of Indian politics and its redemption from the vagaries of the neoliberal market, must connect the dots of the orthodoxy of economic neoliberalism to the precarity of their future. 

There is no reason why these obvious dots cannot be connected. A few weeks after the October cockroach protests, election results in Serbia showed how two years of student protests could topple the twelve-year-old government of Aleksandar Vucic. Very shortly after that, the US midterm elections revealed a rout of Trump’s Republicans. The Democrats’ blue tsunami was facilitated by a clear movement of the democrats to the left and the success of numerous Democratic Socialist and progressive candidates like Abdul el Sayed who ran for the senate seat from Michigan. El-Sayed has called for universal health care and health as a public good rather than the commoditized private good that it has been for so many years with the pervasive private health insurance market in the US. 

In India health care and the role of the private sector is a ticking time bomb. It has not impacted the Gen Z youngsters, who may, however, be perceptive enough to see its impact on their parents and certainly grandparents. Indian youngsters between age 15-29 constitute a whopping 371 million and were once lauded by PM Modi as a ‘demographic dividend.’ They now look almost certainly poised to turn against him.

Conclusion: Redeeming Socialism, Secularism and Democracy

In US politics it seems that the word socialism has suddenly stopped being the unspeakable blasphemy it once was. Future politics in India, the US and many countries across the world may have to be built upon a viable socialism that combines itself with a meaningful democracy. The only way democracy can prevent itself from being hollowed out is to move away from the congruence that has been maliciously created between democracy and the free market. 

The global backsliding of democracy is connected to the extension of neoliberal markets for goods like healthcare, education and housing. Gen Z protests will have to foster the overlap between democracy and socialist policies that will create public goods in healthcare, housing and education and most importantly, create employment. The redistributive presence of public goods can reduce widening inequality and sustain flourishing democracies in the 21^st century, the opposite of democratic backsliding witnessed over the last decade. The election results in Brazil, where Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, as well as those in Serbia and the US midterms are promising as they halt far-right populism. However, democratic waves can be notoriously fickle. 

As far as India is concerned, one way of consolidating democracy is to go back to the year 1976, much before the current Gen Z was born and when some of their parents may have been toddlers and indeed may not even have been born. That year the Indira Gandhi regime during the Emergency wrote into the constitution’s Preamble the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular,’ as mentioned earlier, a sordid legacy. India’s socialism has never been secular enough, as its socialist leaders, notably Jay Prakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and George Fernandes ushered in right-wing Hindutva nationalism in the name of claiming some notion of authentic Indian indigeneity

India’s secularists, many of them urbane liberals enthusiastically welcomed the role of neoliberal ‘free’ markets. The future of India’s young population may depend on whether its political institutions can reclaim and reinvigorate the principles of socialism and secularism. That would have to begin by realizing that India’s socialism was never secular enough and that her secularism was never socialist enough.