Cockroach Janta Party: From Satire to a Serious Youth Movement in India

The trigger for the current outrage is a series of leaks of exam questions that, according to local media reports, affected more than two million aspiring medical students in India competing for a handful of places at medical colleges. The government ordered a retest. "I sat the retest last month, but I can no longer trust the process to be fair," said 20-year-old Mohammad Arshad. Some of his friends had no choice but to study medicine abroad, "even in Russia." Local media reported at the time that at least a dozen students had taken their own lives after news of the retest broke.

Trigger: Leaks in a Nationwide Exam

Demonstrators are camped at the Jantar Mantar protest site in central New Delhi. Kajal Singh, 22, says she travelled nearly three hours with her friend to join the protest. Another young woman wears a white mask "because I haven't told my parents yet" and says she wants government accountability. On Instagram, Dipke recently posted a montage of photos of Education Minister Pradhan set to the lyric "It's me, hi, I'm the problem" from Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero." "Cockroaches don't die," the group wrote after the government suspended their first account on X citing threats to national security.

Economic data underpins the frustration. Rosa Abraham, an economist at the Azim Premji Centre for Sustainable Employment, says: "We are sitting with a generation of the best-educated young adults we have ever had in this country." Around 40 percent of university graduates under 25 are unemployed — "one of the highest rates in decades," according to Abraham. Even those who find jobs have to make do with entry-level wages that, adjusted for inflation, are lower than a decade ago. "We are not creating enough jobs for the number of graduates we are producing," she adds. India's economy has grown by more than 7 percent for most of the past ten years.

Economic Background

Tensions between demonstrators and security forces escalated on Monday. Local media reported that police once again entered the protest site, dismantling the stage and tents and evacuating the protesters. Many demonstrators held out on the streets of New Delhi into the evening, singing and chanting slogans and waving the Indian tricolor. Reports said around 50 police officers were injured in clashes after demonstrators threw stones at security forces. One eyewitness said: "I saw three or four officers kick a woman in the stomach." Asked about another scene, he said: "She couldn't get up off the street afterward."

Escalation at Jantar Mantar

The Cockroach movement joins a series of similar protests that have shaken India for years. Critics say the BJP under Modi has been marked by a twelve-year tenure characterized by a weakening of civil society and the imprisonment of political opponents. Nitin Nabhi said in a speech the previous month: "These are people who want to hollow out the country." In an NDTV interview, he called the protesters "a B-team of terrorists" seeking to divide the country — a characterization that Dipke rejected. "We are not anti-nationals," said a spokesperson, referring to the label the ruling party uses for its critics.

Politically, alongside Pradhan's resignation, the movement is demanding, among other things, the release of jailed activist Sonam Wangchuk — known for climate-friendly "ice stupas" and unconventional education projects in the Himalayas — as well as compensation for the families of people who have taken their own lives. Ashutosh Ranka, another spokesperson, said the health minister had asked for time to discuss the demands; a meeting with Nadda lasted ten minutes. Before the start of the parliamentary monsoon session, Prime Minister Modi honored the "courage and perseverance of India's youth" with a Sanskrit saying.

The Movement's Demands

The background is inseparable from a broader crisis of youth employment and questions of equal opportunity. "If you are poor, no one will be there for you," says Dipke. His extended family in a village in central India spent hours during droughts hauling water from wells by oxcart. Many protesters now come with children of primary-school age. "They tell me they want the system to be fairer by the time their children sit the medical entrance exams," Dipke reports. Political observers such as Bhanu Joshi, co-founder of the Data Action Lab for Emerging Societies, see the root cause in a structural weakness: governments have failed for years to create sufficient employment for young Indians.

Looking to other South Asian neighbors, coverage points to the fall of the government in Nepal last September in the course of the "Gen-Z protests" — a reference the demonstrators in New Delhi know only too well. Their tone, too, resorts to drastic imagery. "Let's find out how much room you have in your prisons," one group chanted. "Let's test the limits of your repression," others chanted, while a dozen police officers stood nearby. The term "Janta" simply means "people" in Hindi — a mocking nod to the abbreviation BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

If the government does not respond to the core demands, observers warn, the protests are likely to continue beyond the parliamentary monsoon session. The combination of rampant youth unemployment, demographic pressure and the growing influence of social media, economic analysts write, makes India vulnerable to a degree that goes beyond previous governments. "If they are not given the means to use that education and fulfill at least some of their hopes, it will result in frustration that can express itself in various forms of discontent," warns economist Abraham.

Meanwhile, many demonstrators continued to resort to satirical tactics: one evening they invited passers-by to sign diapers and send them to Education Minister Pradhan in order to "seal up" the exam leaks. On other days they danced and clapped with cooking utensils while demanding the minister's resignation. The government has so far responded with sharp rhetoric, clearances and social-media bans — not with substantive concessions.