--- title: "India's Cockroach Protests Shook the Government. Can Their Impact Last?" description: "Fronts video analysis of India's Cockroach Protests Shook the Government. Can Their Impact Last, with context on conflict, defense, and security." url: https://fronts.co/videos/indias-cockroach-protests-shook-the-government-can-their-impact-last.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/indias-cockroach-protests-shook-the-government-can-their-impact-last/ datePublished: 2026-08-15T20:15:04.000Z dateModified: 2026-08-15T20:15:04.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/indias-cockroach-protests-shook-the-government-can-their-impact-last-f53accd0.png" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4719 --- surprising unprecedented shocking these were some of the words used to describe the result of the recently concluded by-elections in india's bank book constituency in padma the capital of bahar state and it's easy to see why bankapur constituency has been a stronghold of india's ruling bhathia janata party or bjp since 1995. the former member of the state legislative assembly nitan nabin the bjp's national president replaced his father as mla following a by-election in 2006 and had won re-election five times before resigning earlier this year after being elected to parliament's upper house which triggered the by-elections given their historical dominance most observers expected the bjp to cruise to an easy victory but given that we chose to open this video with this vote you can probably guess what next instead prashant kishore one of india's most respected election strategists who helped engineer prime minister narendra modi's breakthrough general election victory in 2014 before falling out with the bjp won the seat under his own jan suraj party what made the victory even more stunning is the fact that just last year the jan suraj party had failed to win a single seat in the baihar state elections as kishore and his party celebrate their victory observers are still trying to piece together how it happened the answer they keep coming back to cockroaches cockroaches organizing one hell of a protest movement a nation of cockroaches now before we start we need to clarify that when we say cockroaches we don't mean the creepy crawly that is universally hated instead we're talking about a nationwide youth movement that took an insult turned into a political identity and galvanized protests large enough that they managed to secure concessions from the modi government on the third of may more than two million students sat for the national eligibility come entrance test or meet the test that decides who gets into india's prestigious medical colleges nine days later the national testing agency scrapped the whole exam after investigators discovered that an exam paper had been leaked for teenagers who had spent their entire lives and in a lot of cases their families entire life savings preparing for this day that cancellation hits like a ton of bricks it meant that they would once again have to carry the pressure that comes with preparing for a major national exam that could decide their entire future for weeks until june when replacement exams could be held and this pressure broke a lot of students the bbc reported that at least 21 students took their own lives because of the cancelled exams sadly this isn't the first time that india is dealing with exam related deaths in 2014 about 8 000 students took their own lives and by 2024 that number had risen to 14 500 with one study finding that roughly 20 of these or 1 of the total cases in the country were caused by exam failure and while 21 deaths might seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things these deaths galvanized public anger because they were seen as preventable if the government had to carry the pressure on their own lives and it was preventable if the government had to carry the pressure on their own lives hadn't allowed the exams to leak in the first place. The reason exams exert such pressure isn't hard to fathom. India has one of the youngest populations in the world, and it adds close to a million people to its workforce every month. However, the number of jobs being created is far fewer than what the country needs. Trin Yugen, a senior economist at Natixis SA, a multinational financial services firm, wrote that India will need to generate 16.5 million jobs each year, up from 12.4 million being created annually, in order to keep up with its ballooning population. Until India achieves this level of job creation, the youth will continue to compete for the few jobs available, and that can sadly turn fatal. This was something the students preparing for their NEET exams were forcibly reminded of when news broke of the deaths. In short, the mood among India's youth was already sour, when on 15 May, Chief Justice Surya Khan, hearing an unrelated case about lawyers with fake degrees, said unemployed young people who couldn't find work in their professions, were like cockroaches, and that some of them turned instead to media, social media, and activism, calling them parasites of society. He was talking, by his own later clarification, about a specific group, roughly 48,000 lawyers, he believed to hold fake degrees. But by then it was too late. Almost no one heard the comment the way Kant intended, especially not the nation's youth. What they heard, after witnessing their classmates kill themselves over an exam to get into medical school, was one of the nation's highest ranking judicial officials, comparing those who failed to get jobs, often through no fault of their own, to literal cockroaches. Abhajit Dipka, a 30-year-old public relations graduate who was looking for work in the United States at the time, was one of the many young people angry at Kant's comments. Like most people, he channeled his frustrations to social media, writing on X, and we'll quote him here, what if all cockroaches come together? To say this post went viral would be to severely underestimate its reproduction number. Dipka's post spread like measles under RFK Jr, garnering endless likes, reposts, and views with Inaz. And Dipka didn't stop there. He created a logo, a website, and social media accounts for the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a play on Modi's Bahatiya Janata Party, or BJP. In Hindi, Janta means people, so Dipka's new movement was literally the cockroach people movement. And clearly, this resonated. The party gained thousands of members within the first few days. Within weeks, its following on Instagram and X had grown past 25 million, and the name itself had become valuable enough that multiple parties filed applications to trademark it. Now we need to be clear that despite having a party in the name, the CJP isn't a political party in the traditional sense of the word. But it has never completed the prerequisite steps to become one, including registering with India's electoral commission. A lawyer in Hyana did file an application to formalize it as a real political party capable of contesting elections. But as things stand, it remains a satirical political party, meaning it technically has less electoral legitimacy. party, than even the Count Binface party. However, it did build the same machinery as a political party, with DIPCA as the president and an army of volunteers willing to spread its message both online and in person, all of which became extremely important as DIPCA transitioned the CJP from being an online-only movement to one with a presence in the streets. And that presence in the streets would quickly swell to capture much of the country's youth. PROTESTS, DEMANDS, AND REPRESSION On the 1st of June, about two weeks after Judge Kant made his now infamous comments, members of two youth organizations, the All India Students Association and the Krantakari Yuva Sangathan gathered outside the offices of the Ministry of Education in New Delhi to protest against the neat controversy and a host of other issues with the National Testing Agency, or NTA, the body in charge of India's national exams. The protesters demanded the resignation of the Education Minister Darmendra Pradhan and the dissolution of the NTA, saying that this was the only way to stop papers from leaking and to effectively reform the system. On the same day, the CJP announced that it would be taking its online campaign into the real world with a protest scheduled for the 6th. It would be held at Jantar Mantar, a space observatory built in the 1700s that has become the traditional site for sanctioned protest in the capital, at a short drive from where protestors from Acer and KYS had stood. And this protest would be led by Abhajit Dipka, who was flying in from the US. By that point, the government had already tried to stop the CJP, or at the very least stifle its momentum. Four days after the account was launched, X stopped it from being visible in India, because Elon Musk's hardcore commitment to free speech apparently only applies to neo-Nazis in Europe. This happened hours after the CJP gained 8.8 million followers on Instagram, surpassing the governing BJP's 8.7 million followers. An anonymous government official later told the Indian Express that the Intelligence Bureau had flagged the account as a threat to India's sovereignty because it was allegedly posting inflammatory content that could jeopardize the country's national security. Dipka's website was blocked later on the same grounds, and his personal Instagram account was hacked, and so was a backup account he set up, called Cockroaches Back. He also told reporters it had started receiving death threats, and he was worried for the safety of his family members who were back in India. The government didn't limit itself to frustrating the cockroach movement online. A senior BJP official said that the CJP was part of a cross-border influence operation meant to destabilize India, an obvious attempt to destroy the movement's credibility. These efforts were, at the very least, partially successful because, by most accounts, this first protest was anticlimactic. Only 2,000 people showed up despite the CJP having hundreds of thousands of social media followers. Despite these low numbers, Dipka still addressed the crowd in the blistering New Delhi summer heat, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister by 5pm that day. When that deadline passed, with the Minister still in office, Dipka extended it to seven days before passing out from heat exhaustion. For more than a month after that first underwhelming rally, hundreds of thousands of people could Hundreds of young people camped at Jantar Mantar, refusing to leave until Pradhan resigned. The students were joined by professionals and parents who told Dipka that they wanted the system to change before their own children faced the same exams. It was around this point that the movement picked up its most recognizable face, 59-year-old Sunam Wanchuk, an engineer who before this was best known for pioneering low-cost water conservation projects in one of the driest inhabited places on Earth. On the 28th of June, he arrived at Jantar Mantar and began an indefinite hunger strike, demanding Pradhan's resignation alongside the students. His involvement made it a lot more difficult for the government to ignore. He kept fasting for three weeks before the police forcibly removed him from the protest site on the 18th of July and took him to a hospital because of his deteriorating health on the orders of the High Court. Two days later, about 10,000 people tried to march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament. Delhi authorities cut off internet around the site, sealed off nearby metro stations and police moved in to try and de-escalate the situation. And of course, they didn't. They used tear gas and batons on the protesters. Sahil Singh, one of the protesters, told Reuters, quoting him here, "...they beat us black and blue, and they damaged our protest site." Delhi police said that nearly 180 people were hurt, 60 of them protesters. Around 70 demonstrators were detained, with the police promising that they would take legal action against them. Al Jazeera later reported that hundreds more protesters, some of them under 18, were arrested in states governed by the BJP and hit with serious charges until India's Supreme Court ordered the release of every minor who had been detained. Police also filed at least one case accusing CJP supporters of circulating defamatory content about constitutional officeholders. Amnesty International said that this incident showed how peaceful dissent was being criminalized in India. And that's a real concern. Since Modi came to power, India has become a lot more repressive. The global civil society watchdog, Civicus, rates India as repressed, the second worst category on its Global Civic Freedoms Index, indicating that there are severe restrictions on the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and association. In July, Civicus added India to its watch list of rapidly deteriorating countries, pointing specifically to the police response of the CJP's July 20th March as one of the incidents behind that call. The violence had a chilling effect on the youth, with Dipka telling the press that they would not march again because of how the police had acted. But that isn't to say that the protests weren't successful. While visiting Wangchuk in hospital on July 23rd, J.P. Nader, the nation's health minister, reiterated the government's position that they wouldn't file cases against those who protested peacefully at Jantar Mantar or marched on parliament. He added the parliament was planning to discuss the neat scandal and would be considering reforms to the education sector, specifically around how exams were carried out. And perhaps most importantly, the government would be considering compensating the families of those who lost their lives because of the exams. Two days later, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned in what is widely seen as the CJP's most significant victory to date. The CJP announced that it would end its protests in good faith. I'll see you next time. because the government had agreed to its demands, and had also agreed to meet with CJP officials to review the party's five-point exam reform plan. However, at the time of recording, the government has yet to pay compensation to the families of those who died. It's an open question whether they will, or whether that was a promise made to appease the protesters. As India grapples with these unknowns, we have to ask one final question. What's next for the CJP, and the nation's youth more broadly? What's next? Many youth movements around the world often burn out as quickly as they began. Take Hong Kong's Occupy Central, for example. The demonstrators occupied Hong Kong's central business district for 79 days, demanding open elections for the city's leader. While there was a lot of excitement when the protests were ongoing, with the demonstrators believing that they could bring about actual change, a year later some of them told the Associated Press that the movement hadn't achieved anything. This usually happens for two reasons. First, like in Hong Kong's case, it happens because the government stuck to its position and refused to compromise. This, coupled with escalating violence from the police, wore the protesters down, and they chose to go home rather than fighting a losing battle. The second reason most youth movements don't do well is because governments around the world have mastered the art of doing just about enough to placate the youth's demands, but not enough to bring about real change. Take Kenya, for example. In 2024, there were massive protests ignited by the introduction of the Finance Bill 2024, a piece of legislation which introduced extremely punitive taxes at a time when most Kenyans were struggling to make ends meet. This, coupled with the lavish, ostentatious lifestyles that most government officials were living, sparked one of the biggest protests in the country's history. Nairobi responded by pulling the Finance Bill and reshuffling the Cabinet to remove the figures whose actions had triggered public anger. However, barely a year later, the leader of the majority in the National Assembly was openly bragging that they had quietly passed all the provisions of the Finance Bill that the public had rejected. Additionally, the government had also brought back many of the ministers that it had let go, and those who weren't brought back to cabinet got cushy jobs in the diplomatic corps. There is a fear among observers that this is what's happening in India, that with the resignation of the Education Minister and the government agreeing to consider many of the CJP's demands, the government is merely trying to appease the youth long enough to get the public to focus on something else and to reduce the chances of another mass protest. In Kenya's case, this worked. None of the subsequent protests have been as large as the one in 2024. It might be a lot more devastating for the CJP, because even at their peak, their protests were only drawing about 10,000 people, despite the vast social media following. Again, we should clarify that this doesn't mean the protests were unsuccessful. Apart from forcing the Education Minister to resign, they might have cost the BJP the Bankerpore by-election. What we didn't mention about Bankerpore in our introduction is the fact that it is one of the youngest constituencies in the country. It's home to a host of colleges and universities, and about 125,000 of the registered voters, roughly a third of the electorate, are between 18 and 29 years old. This is important because the BJP lost by about 20,000 votes. While we can't say for sure that the youth... voted en masse for Prash and Keyshaw, it's hard not to imagine that they did since these elections were held so close to the protests. If the youth continue to vote against the BJP, then the party has a major issue on its hands. India has about 991 million registered voters, 217 million of them who are between the ages of 18 and 29. At about 20% of the electorate, they can't single-handedly decide the outcome of an election, but they can be the deciding factor in a close race, which could be the difference between one block of parties having a majority in government and being forced into difficult coalitions. However, India's youth will only be a formidable political voice if they can rally behind a common issue, a difficult task given how large the country is and how different the issues facing the youth are. The concerns of a 23-year-old in New Delhi are a lot different from the concerns of a 23-year-old in Goa Velha. Those disparate issues, alongside other challenges such as India's caste system, means it would be very difficult for the country's youth to rally behind a common cause. Difficult, but not impossible. The CJP got people behind it because it harnessed the youth's anger at the national exam system, something that cuts across caste, religion, region, and income in a way that almost nothing else in Indian politics does. If the CJP, or any other youth movement for that matter, wants to have lasting political influence in the country, it will need to find another similar issue to rally around. If it can't, then the cockroach movement will likely fade into the history books as another interesting group in India's history that had a loud voice, but didn't really do much with it.