What the Cockroach movement revealed about Modi's India

The Chief Justice of India likely never imagined that a fleeting, derogatory remark comparing frustrated young people to "cockroaches" would give birth to one of the country's largest youth-led protest movements in recent years.

In May 2026, activists reclaimed the slur by launching the satirical Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). Founded by Abhijeet Dipke, who serves as its president, the movement emerged amid widespread anger over the cancellation of India's national medical entrance examination, known as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). Medical student aspirants studied for long periods, took the notoriously tough exam, only to be forced to resit it following news that the questions had been leaked.

Multiple students committed suicide following all the distress that they had endured.

Relying extensively on generative AI to produce its public-facing campaign material, the movement rapidly gained traction online. By the time of writing, CJP's Instagram page amassed over 26 million followers, surpassing even the BJP's official Instagram account, which has over 9 million followers.

Following the mass mobilisations that provided the movement with leverage, the CJP leadership put forward a list of principal demands: the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and the equivalent of around $105,000 (One crore Indian Rupees) in compensation for the families of NEET aspirants who died by suicide.

But the anger that brought people to the streets was wider than these demands. It reflected growing unemployment, an increasingly commercialised education system serving the interests of the ruling class, and a broader frustration with the shrinking space for dissent under Modi's government. For many, the CJP became a vehicle through which these anxieties could converge.

Indeed, in many ways the CJP became a telling story less about the protests themselves than about the political homelessness of sections of India's liberal middle class. After 12 years of BJP rule, institutional collapse and a weakened opposition, many were desperately looking for something that felt like politics again.

The movement became a container for that hope. But hope can also become a political blind spot, making us less willing to ask whether a movement's demands can transform the structures it seeks to challenge.

However, the question was never simply whether the CJP succeeded. It was what success should look like under the Modi regime’s authoritarianism. And the CJP made its biggest mistake the moment it believed a fascist state could be trusted.

On 20 July, while students in the heart of India's capital were being met with tear gas, electric batons, pellet guns, lathi charges and mass detentions, the CJP leadership was negotiating on their behalf inside the residence of J.P. Nadda, the Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, alongside Jitendra Singh, the Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office.

Five days later, the same leaders appeared beside those ministers at a joint press conference to announce that the protests would be called off with immediate effect.

Almost overnight, the protest site at Delhi's Jantar Mantar, which had drawn thousands of students and supporters for over a month, was dismantled.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, only to be replaced by Pralhad Joshi, a five-time Member of Parliament and one of Modi's longest-serving cabinet ministers. Joshi had previously defended the release of the men convicted of the gang rape of Bilkis Bano during the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat. The change therefore offered a symbolic concession without altering the political architecture surrounding the crisis.

Additionally, the very institution that was responsible for the NEET exam issues remained structurally intact, as did the broader architecture that produced it.

For whom was democracy restored?

The most revealing aspect of the CJP movement was also the language that surrounded it. On the day of the 20 July negotiations, arguably the movement's defining moment, the CJP leadership declared that "democracy had died" after the brutal police crackdown on students. Then just five days later, following negotiations with the government, Chief Spokesperson Saurav Das declared that "democracy has been restored."

But what do such declarations mean when the institutions that keep producing the crisis remain intact?

Even the resignation was quickly reframed by the BJP, with Dharmendra Pradhan presenting himself as a martyr who had stepped down to prevent the exploitation of "anti-national elements". This allowed the government to absorb the least possible accountability while conceding the greatest symbolic victory.

Ultimately, the problem that developed within the protest movement was not simply the result of poor negotiation; it was also the result of a single-issue-based political strategy.

The CJP's greatest missed opportunity came from the scale of the moment itself. For perhaps the first time in years, a large and politically diverse group of young people had mobilised against the government's handling of education and were confronting the coercive power of the state.

That created an opportunity to connect their demands to struggles that had long existed outside their immediate political world: farmers fighting for their livelihoods, workers confronting precarity, communities resisting displacement, people fighting against the suppression of dissent, and movements confronting rising unemployment, poverty and the climate crisis.

The question was not whether the CJP could take up every struggle at once, but whether it could recognise that these struggles were connected and use its unprecedented visibility to build something larger.

In contrast to some within the protest movement, politics has never been optional for large sections of Indian society. Adivasi communities resisting land acquisition, Muslim communities confronting the violence of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), Kashmiris living under militarisation, workers fighting precarity, and political prisoners incarcerated for dissent have long experienced the violence of the state as a daily reality.

The CJP resonated most deeply with an urban liberal constituency for whom that inevitability arrived much later. As India's education system entered crisis, many encountered the coercive power of the state in ways they had not before, including through violence. But recognising this as a beginning risks obscuring the much longer histories of resistance that made this moment legible in the first place.

The contrast was visible throughout the weeks of protest. While the CJP occupied the national imagination, activist Amit Bhatnagar and Adivasi communities were also on an indefinite hunger strike against the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, which threatens widespread displacement and ecological destruction.

Their protest site was dismantled by police before dawn with little national attention or public outcry.

This is not an argument against the protesters, nor is it a competition over suffering. Clearly, some struggles become nationally legible only when they enter the social and emotional universe of those with greater cultural visibility, while others continue for years at the margins of public attention.

For many, the CJP was the beginning of political awakening. For others, it was another chapter in a struggle that had never paused.

How the CJP will be remembered

The CJP had reached a rare moment of political power. Thousands of young people had mobilised, the protests had captured national attention, and the state had been forced to negotiate. This should have led to a refusal to allow the government to define the limits of what the movement could demand.

Instead, the protests were called off at the government's behest, and an unusual opening for broader political challenge came to an end.

The CJP may eventually be remembered not only for what it achieved, but for what it revealed. It reminded us that people are still willing to organise, still willing to occupy the streets, still willing to risk police violence for a different future. But it also revealed how desperately India's opposition has come to mistake moments for movements, symbolism for strategy and hope for organisation.

The RSS did not spend a century building Hindutva through isolated protests or reactionary demands; it patiently established institutions, ideology and cadre. The opposition cannot afford to respond only when another crisis erupts, or another movement captures public imagination. It must do the slower, less glamorous work of building an alternative political imagination, one rooted in ideology, organisation and solidarity.

Hope may bring people to the streets. But organisation determines what it leaves behind.

Shrishti Khanna is a political activist, writer and former mental health worker based in Mumbai, India. Having worked in government psychiatric wards and as a teacher, her work focuses on India-Israel relations, authoritarianism, digital surveillance, Palestine and Chronic Illness/disability. She has been published in The Wire and Azad Essa's Hostile Homelands newsletter, and writes her own newsletter on Substack. Her activism and writing have been featured in publications including Middle East Eye, Maktoob Media, Article 14 and Free Speech Collective, among others.

Prashant Pundir is a political activist and published poet based in Mumbai, India. His work focuses on anti-fascist organising, Palestine, anti-caste justice and Trans Queer rights. Together with Shrishti Khanna, his activism and writing have been featured in publications including Middle East Eye, Maktoob Media, Article 14 and Free Speech Collective, among others. They also maintain an active social media presence documenting political developments in India and Palestine. 

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