The Cockroaches won a resignation. Their harder test comes next

For more than a decade, Narendra Modi’s political authority rested partly on the impression that pressure flowed in only one direction.

Ministers defended the government. Party officials defended ministers. Friendly television channels, pejoratively known as “Godi Media” defended both. Protests might disrupt traffic and dominate social media or attract international attention, but the government rarely appeared to concede that the street had compelled it to change course.

The resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Saturday disturbed that cultivated order. Pradhan stepped down after weeks of demonstrations over the leakage and cancellation of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, the fiercely competitive examination that serves as the principal gateway to undergraduate medical education in India. 

Roughly two million candidates took the May 3 examination before it was scrapped and held again in June. The scandal became associated with the deaths of more than a dozen students, intensifying outrage over a system in which a single compromised examination can erase years of preparation and enormous family expenditure.

But the force that turned an education scandal into a political crisis was not an opposition party or one of the ideological organisations that have traditionally supplied India’s protest infrastructure. It was the Cockroach Janta Party.

The CJP began as an online act of reclamation after Chief Justice Surya Kant reportedly compared some unemployed young people to cockroaches during a court hearing. Abhijeet Dipke, then a student at Boston University, responded by creating a satirical political movement around the insult. 

Young Indians adopted the cockroach as a symbol of survival… a creature mocked and crushed, yet notoriously difficult to eliminate. The movement accumulated millions of social-media followers and transformed memes and mock campaign propaganda into an organising language.

Why did CJP resonate with the youth?

Its success came from recognising a political category that India’s parties have often discussed but rarely understood…the educated young citizen who has done almost everything the system demanded and received little security in return.

This is a generation raised on entrance examinations. It competes for scarce university places, government positions and professional qualifications, often spending years in coaching centres while parents drain savings or assume debt. 

NEET alone offers fewer than 150,000 medical seats to millions of candidates. Similar bottlenecks shape recruitment for teachers, police officers and civil servants, and examination-paper leaks have repeatedly undermined the credibility of those processes.

A leaked paper is therefore, to many candidates, evidence that merit itself has been rigged.The CJP gave that anger a political vocabulary without first requiring young people to subscribe to a traditional ideology. 

Its supporters arrived carrying the national flag, portraits of Bhagat Singh and BR Ambedkar, constitutional messages and handmade signs about jobs and examinations. Some chanted patriotic slogans; others attacked cronyism and institutional decay. The thing that united them was less a comprehensive political programme than the conviction that the institutions governing their futures had stopped listening.

That ideological looseness made the movement unusually expansive. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could not easily dismiss it as a Congress mobilisation, a Communist front or an agitation representing one caste or religion. 

Opposition leaders supported the demonstrations, but they did not control them. Protesters financed journeys themselves, organised through social media and received food ordered by supporters from elsewhere in India. 

Factors that initially drew hundreds to Jantar Mantar eventually brought thousands, including professionals and people attending their first political demonstration.

The movement became more difficult to contain after police used tear gas and batons against demonstrators trying to march towards Parliament as lawmakers returned for the monsoon session. The crackdown produced the opposite of its intended effect.

The images of force widened sympathy for the protesters and changed the question from whether their demands were reasonable to why the government appeared afraid to hear them.

For Modi, the danger was not simply the size of the demonstrations. India has seen larger and more organised agitations, including the farmers’ movement that forced the repeal of three agricultural laws. The more unsettling feature was that the CJP had appropriated tools the BJP had mastered…emotional symbolism, decentralised digital participation, relentless repetition and a simple identity that supporters could wear without reading a manifesto.

The cockroach was simultaneously a joke, an insult, a mascot and a political argument. It implied that the government regarded young people as disposable while depending on their votes, labour and aspirations. Attempts to ridicule the name merely reinforced its meaning.

Pradhan initially promised reforms while resisting demands that he leave office. The government said those responsible for the leaks would be punished and proposed tougher penalties and special courts. 

But protesters insisted that procedural reform without political responsibility would preserve the central defect of the system: officials could preside over failure without paying a price.

When Pradhan finally resigned, he said he respected the “aspirations, feelings, and legitimate expectations” of young Indians, while warning that “anti-national forces” should not be permitted to exploit the situation. 

At Jantar Mantar, the announcement produced celebrations and chants of victory. Dipke told supporters, “We have done it,” but warned them against turning him into a heroic, unquestionable leader. “The country has been ruined by making one person a hero,” he said.

That warning may prove more consequential than the resignation itself.

Hard way ahead

The CJP’s first political act was comparatively straightforward. It named a grievance, identified an official who could be held responsible and refused to retreat until he resigned. Its next phase will be much harder. 

A protest can remain united around a demand for removal. A political movement must decide what it stands for after the removal has occurred. On that note, CJP now faces three possible futures.

It can remain a pressure movement, mobilising when examination fraud, unemployment or police action creates another clear grievance. That would preserve its independence and prevent established parties from absorbing it. 

But episodic movements struggle to maintain organisation between crises, and algorithms that generate rapid visibility can withdraw attention just as quickly.

It can become a formal political party. The name already anticipates that possibility, and the scale of its support will encourage demands for candidates and election campaigns. Yet electoral politics would force decisions the movement has so far avoided: its economic programme, position on religious majoritarianism, approach to caste inequality, relationship with regional parties and method of selecting leaders. 

Every answer would alienate some supporters who currently see their own beliefs reflected in the movement’s ambiguity.

Or it can become a broader civic network that trains observers, tracks examinations, documents vacancies, supplies legal aid and scrutinises government recruitment. This would be less dramatic than marching on Parliament but potentially more durable. 

It could turn anger into institutional memory and make it harder for authorities to outlast individual scandals.

The BJP, meanwhile, must decide whether Pradhan’s resignation was an isolated concession or the beginning of a strategic correction.

The Modi government’s instinct has often been to classify dissent before addressing it. Protesters are described as partisan, misled, privileged, separatist or hostile to national interests. That method works when the government can separate agitators from a larger public. It becomes dangerous when citizens recognise themselves in the group being condemned.

The CJP’s strength lay precisely in making exclusion impossible. It was not one opposition constituency demanding admission to the national conversation. It was a fluid coalition of young Indians saying they had fulfilled the obligations of citizenship and wanted the state to fulfil its side of the bargain.

Modi still commands India’s most formidable political organisation. The BJP possesses a disciplined cadre, enormous financial resources, a powerful communications network and a prime minister whose personal appeal remains greater than that of any national opponent. One minister’s resignation does not dismantle those advantages.

But dominant governments are rarely weakened first by the rise of a perfect alternative. They are weakened when the public discovers that their authority is negotiable.

The protesters’ immediate victory has shown that sustained pressure can produce accountability. It has also created expectations the CJP may be unable to satisfy. If the movement fractures, becomes personality-driven or allows conventional politicians to seize its platform, the BJP may present the uprising as a temporary emotional spasm.

 If it remains organised, broadens its agenda carefully and avoids reproducing the cult of leadership it criticises, it could become something more serious…a permanent warning that India’s youngest citizens can no longer be treated merely as examination candidates and election-season voters.

So, in a way, Pradhan’s resignation essentially answered the question that brought thousands into the streets.It did not answer the question now confronting the Cockroaches: what does a generation do after discovering that the government can be made to listen?

Nor did it resolve the question facing Modi. His political project has long asked Indians to believe that only a strong leader can protect the nation from disorder. The protests have offered a competing proposition. That democratic strength sometimes begins when ordinary citizens create enough disorder to demand an answer.

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