“Cockroaches are Coming,” but Where are They Going?

India is witnessing one of the most significant waves of youth mobilisation in the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) tenure, and this momentum is worth supporting. This brings forth an opportunity to critically examine one of the movement’s most visible vehicles: the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Consequently, while looking at the ongoing protest, it is worth closely inspecting the CJP’s role, and how it reveals far more about the boundaries of acceptable dissent in India than it does about the possibilities of resistance. What follows is a critique of the CJP, its founding politics, and the role it has played in assembling this movement.

The CJP’s first protest kicked off in Delhi on Saturday, 6th June 2026, and the footfall was massive—which is no surprise given its strategic neutrality. By positioning itself as “politically neutral and solely focused on educational reform,” scrupulously avoiding any reference to caste, communalism or identity, the CJP has tapped into one of the rare grievances in India that cuts across social cleavages: education. By failing to take a position on the issues that actually divide India’s youth along ideological lines, the CJP has managed to assemble a crowd that no explicit political formation could have. 

But neutrality, especially in a landscape as unequal as India’s, is never actually neutral. Former spokesperson, Vijeta Dahiya, has faced backlash for making transphobic and sexist remarks. In a response to backlash over the transphobic post, Dahiya clarified that it had come from “a sense of empathy,” and asserted his support for the transgender community. However, he did not address the substance of the original post, wherein he had dismissed non-binary and gender-fluid identities as a rich person’s indulgence. Furthermore, during the 20 July protest, videos surfaced of Dahiya roaming in Delhi while eating a burger. He later stated, “I am not accountable for protests and to protestors as it is not my job, neither I have been elected for this.” Following this incident, Dahiya was removed as spokesperson, but this raises a larger question: can a movement that lacks intersectionality still call itself a youth movement, let alone claim to speak for Gen Z across India’s diversity? At that point, neutrality starts looking like a confession of which elite this movement was built by, and who it was always going to serve. 

In response to these incidents, some have argued that individual controversies don’t matter if the movement as a whole is mobilising India’s youth toward a shared cause. An argument like this is inherently vacuous because it treats unity as an end goal rather than a starting point. It refuses to address the question of what happens after the unity. What happens once the youth is united, and the education minister resigns? A unity built on such precarious grounds does not have an ideological spine to fall back on once the immediate demand is met.  For a movement to sustain itself one must confront the fact that a shared grievance dissolves the moment it is redressed. However, a shared ideology survives to confront the questions that arise beyond the initial demand. 

The demands put forth by the CJP are also remarkably low-stakes for the government. The central demand, the resignation of the education minister, is the kind of demand a government can absorb without restructuring anything. Ministers are replaceable, after all. The problems that the CJP is addressing are structural problems and not the problems of one individual politician. The education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan can easily be offered up as a scapegoat and the underlying failures of educational policy, the unemployment crisis and the examination system that produces the despair the CJP is actually responding to, remain entirely untouched.

This arrangement is particularly effective because it aligns neatly with the movement’s understanding of itself. The CJP spokespersons have returned repeatedly to the language of maturity. Tweeting about the Delhi protest, founder Abhijeet Dipke told protestors to show gratitude and give flowers to the police, and that the movement must be led with “love and peace.” In any other context, this would be called optics. This framing collapsed on 20 July when the CJP’s “Chalo Sansad (March to Parliament)” march toward the Parliament was met with tear gas and lathi charges; Saurav Das claimed that Dipke himself was detained, a statement that was later retracted. The march forced the CJP to reckon with the fact that the police at a government protest is not a bystander but the enforcement arm of the very state being challenged, and no amount of goodwill gestures can insulate a movement from that reality. 

In another tweet responding to comparisons with the youth protests in Nepal and Bangladesh, Dipke was unambiguous: “...The youth of this country are far more mature, aware, and politically conscious…They understand their constitutional rights and will express their dissent through peaceful and democratic means.”  To invoke “maturity” as the distinguishing quality of Indian youth, in contrast to Nepali and Bangladeshi protesters who upended their governments, is itself reflective of a movement that prioritises respectability over the stakes of the fight. The youth of Nepal and Bangladesh did not fail some test of political sophistication. They succeeded, at significant personal cost, in forcing structural change. Framing that as immaturity, something the CJP is proud to have risen above, clearly reveals the movement’s ceiling. This is dissent that is calibrated to be safe, which flatters itself for never going too far.

However, what is more dangerous is the standard it sets. When marginalised groups are systematically excluded from legal and political channels, violent resistance becomes one of the few remaining avenues left to force attention and change. If the CJP’s carefully designed protests become the benchmark for legitimate dissent, then the tactics that marginalised communities have always relied on—the ungainly, disruptive and sometimes desperate measures—suddenly get recast as the “violent” and unreasonable ones. Furthermore, by restraining its own protestors, the CJP refuses to bring into conversation the realities of police brutality and forgoes any examination of state response to the protest. 

The Indian youth has suffered at the hands of a broken education system for years. The CJP proved that India’s youth can be mobilised at scale, and that the anger building up around these issues has more reach than anyone gave it credit for. Potential of this scale does not come around often. A movement this large could have been a coherent political project had it been built on a clearer political ideology willing to confront questions of caste, religion, and gender, and to tackle the structural injustice and failures of the education system.

None of this means that the potential has expired. Cockroaches are among the most resilient insects, capable of surviving almost anything thrown at them. Resilience has gotten the cockroach this far, but surviving a system and changing one have never been the same thing. India’s youth deserves a movement bold enough to attempt the second.

(Edited by Suryansh Jalan and Avika Mantri)