This article What India’s Cockroach Party won — and what’s next was originally published by Waging Nonviolence .
Thirty-six days after a joke about “cockroaches” became a youth movement, India’s education minister was gone. On July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after weeks of protests over failures in the public examination system and demands for political accountability. The Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, declared victory — “Cockroaches won. Democracy won.”
For a movement that began online in May and grown into a nationwide agitation, forcing a cabinet minister from office was an unmistakable political concession. But almost as soon as the protesters packed up, the meaning of that victory became less certain.
Three days later, the movement was already threatening to return to the streets. The CJP said over 100 protesters been arrested nationwide, with cases filed in the states of Delhi, Assam, West Bengal and Bihar, despite assurances that demonstrators would not face punitive action. CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka warned that the agitation could resume if those arrested were not released.
Bihar police announced that the protesters had been released and would face no adverse legal action. But the assurance did not hold in other states , like West Bengal and Assam, where more than a dozen are still being detained.
Removing a minister was a visible symbol of accountability; ensuring that other promises made to end the protests were actually honored would require something harder — sustained organization after the crowds had gone home.
A movement that couldn’t be decapitated
When Delhi last saw a mass youth mobilization, over the citizenship law in 2020 , the state answered by naming the organizers in a conspiracy chargesheet: Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam have now been held for more than five years under India’s 1967 anti-terror law and were refused bail again on July 4 , 16 days before the cockroaches marched on Parliament.
It began as a joke. Amidst a youth uproar over invalidated examination results, during which India’s highest judge referred to the nation’s youth as “cockroaches,” a Boston-based student from India, Abhijeet Dipke, posted on X, “What if the cockroaches marched?”
The strategic satire of India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach’ movement
The joke carried a serious message: The protesters who turned out in response, under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, saw themselves as people the political system had stopped listening to.
But the Cockroach Janta Party — a parody of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the Hindu right-wing party that has governed India since 2014 — had few of the trappings of a serious political party. There was a website where people could sign up; there was an Instagram account that had grown rapidly; and there was Dipke. By July, he was leading the sit-ins and the marches from a stage in Central Delhi — a founder the movement had acquired without ever electing one, and who insisted, along with everybody else there, that the CJP had no leader.
For five weeks, Delhi Police dealt with a protest that offered nothing conventional to target. There was no office to raid and no membership list to seize — the two things that allowed police to quell earlier movements.
So on the morning of July 18, police went for the one man everyone knew.
Sonam Wangchuk, an engineer and education reformer from the Indian Himalayas, is 59 years old and was 20 days into a hunger strike. He had lost more than 18 pounds. Police carried him from the protest site and took him to hospital.
Wangchuk had become the most recognizable face in a movement that insisted it had no leader. He runs a school in the region of Ladakh for children who struggle in India’s examination system and is a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often described as Asia’s Nobel.
Delhi Police said they acted on a High Court order and medical advice. Protesters tried to stop officers from taking Wangchuk away, leading to what police described as a “slight commotion.”
But the police statement did not end with Wangchuk’s health. It also asked the remaining protesters to leave. They did not.
Taking a man 20 days into a hunger strike to a hospital could be explained as a medical decision. Asking everyone else to clear the square was something different.
By that afternoon the square was fuller than it had been all month, with people packed under sheets of black plastic strung between trees, facing a stage with nobody on it …