The Fire, Fakery and Future of Cockroaches: Why India's Most Viral Youth Protest Was Also Its Most Misplaced

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

Hundreds of young people gathered at Jantar Mantar in cockroach masks, carrying flowers they planned to offer to policemen as a gesture of compassion and gratitude. They were there, their organisers said, to demand the resignation of the Education Minister.

Image from Jantar Mantar Protest; Via: @Cockroachisback on X

How the Cockroach Was Born

On May 15, 2026, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant — the custodian of the Constitution, the guardian of the rights of every citizen including the most wretched — sat in open court and said that there are youngsters like cockroaches, who don't get any employment or have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists, and other activists, and they start attacking everyone.

He later said he was misquoted. The internet did not agree and did not move on.

Within twenty-four hours, Abhijeet Dipke, a thirty-year-old political communications strategist, former AAP associate, and recent Boston University graduate, posted on X: "What if all cockroaches come together?" He then built a party online within a day, using AI tools to design its manifesto and aesthetic. Within five days, the Instagram account of the Cockroach Janta Party had crossed twenty million followers — more than the BJP, more than the Congress. The hashtag MainBhiCockroach swept across screens. Politicians from the Samajwadi Party and the Trinamool Congress, Mahua Moitra and Kirti Azad among them, offered endorsements. The movement had arrived, or so it seemed.

On June 6, Dipke flew home from the United States to lead the promised rally at Jantar Mantar. Police in riot gear lined the streets. Steel barricades were erected. Climate activist Sonam Wangchuk addressed the crowd. And the cockroaches came — hundreds of them, in their masks, with their flowers, in what Al Jazeera's correspondent on the ground described carefully as a crowd that "doesn't seem to fully reflect what we're seeing in terms of the scale that we've seen online over the past couple of weeks." 

Twenty-two million followers. Barely hundreds at the rally. The arithmetic itself is the story.

The Grievance Is Real. Let That Be Said Plainly.

Before this piece says what it must say about the CJP, it must first say this without qualification: the anger that produced it is entirely legitimate.

India's education system is in a condition that should produce not satire but fury. The paper leak crisis under Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has been a sustained institutional failure. NEET. CBSE. CUET. SSC. Each examination, each paper, each leak is the destruction of years of a young person's life. It is the erasure of a family's savings, a mother's prayers, a father's overtime. It is the calculated theft of a dream.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party, an online youth group that has amassed millions of followers, took to the streets for the first time to demand the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan https://t.co/m7EWGw2FYL pic.twitter.com/AvjMOHT59S

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 6, 2026

The numbers behind this dream are staggering in their cruelty. Of the 22 crore young Indians who applied for central government jobs over an eight-year period, just 7.22 lakh were actually appointed — roughly 3 in every 1,000. India's youth unemployment rate still hovers near 15 percent, and that figure conceals a more devastating truth: that 83 percent of engineering graduates finish college without a job offer or even an internship, according to the Unstop Talent Report 2025. Meanwhile, India's Gross Enrollment Ratio in higher education — officially 28.4 percent as of 2022, projected at 32.5 percent in 2025 — means that fewer than one in three young Indians between the ages of 18 and 23 is enrolled in any form of higher education. In a nation of 1.4 billion dreams, this is a devastating sentence.

The coaching hub of Patna's Musallahpur Haat is a monument to this kind of Indian desperation. Every year, thousands of young people arrive in Patna from Bihar's villages and small towns because the state cannot deliver education to their doorstep and the market has rushed in to fill the vacuum with a price tag attached. They pay for the coaching the state does not provide, prepare for examinations the state cannot conduct cleanly, and then compete for jobs the state does not have enough of. So yes. The grievance is real. The fire is real. The question is what you do with fire.

The Flop Show at Jantar Mantar

What happened on June 6 was a flop show. This is not a cruel verdict, it is a factual one, and the movement's own numbers confirm it.

Twenty-two million Instagram followers did not produce twenty-two thousand people at Jantar Mantar. They produced hundreds. This is not a small distinction. It is the definitive distinction between a political movement and a viral moment — and conflating the two is precisely the error the CJP's organisers appear to have made, and are apparently still making.

Cockroaches have lost their minds. 😂😂

“It’s very easy to hack EVMs. I just need to change 3 codes. I can do it easily”

The Election Commission recently gave an open challenge to the entire country to come and hack an EVM.

Why didn’t this cockroach go then? 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/qcjUzooGjz

— Political Kida (@PoliticalKida) June 6, 2026

The demand on the table was the resignation of the Education Minister. As a gesture, one understands its appeal. As a strategy, it collapses on examination. Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation would not restore a single leaked paper. It would not create a single new university seat. It would not generate a single government job. It would not reduce by one the hundreds of thousands of young Indians who will appear next year for competitive examinations in which lakhs compete for dozens of vacancies. The precedent argument — that it sets an example — would carry weight only if there were a movement with the institutional depth to enforce its precedents. The CJP, at this point in its brief and chaotic existence, does not have that depth.

It has memes. It has cockroach masks. It has flowers for the police. These are not instruments of structural change in the world's largest and most complex democracy. They are the vocabulary of a protest culture that has mistaken visibility for power.

The Vested Interest Question

Two things can be true simultaneously, and in Indian public life it is particularly important to hold them together rather than allow partisanship to collapse them into one.

It is true that the regime's supporters have sought to discredit the CJP and its protesters. This is what regime supporters do, in India and everywhere else. It is also true that the regime's opponents have done precisely what they always do in the presence of any popular upswell — rushed to channel it, brand it, and convert it into anti-Modi sentiment. Akhilesh Yadav's endorsement. Mahua Moitra's amplification. The Opposition's sudden discovery of CJP as a vehicle for pre-election positioning.

WATCH: India’s Cockroach Janta Party, an online youth group that has amassed millions of followers, took to the streets for the first time to demand the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan https://t.co/tKrh5dLb7Y pic.twitter.com/c01v5NFmtt

— Reuters Asia (@ReutersAsia) June 6, 2026

This is not, in itself, wrong. This is how democracies function. The supporters of a government defend it; its opponents seek every crack in its edifice. Both are exercising democratic voice and we need not pretend otherwise. But let us also not pretend that these endorsements were motivated by a deep intellectual engagement with India's examination infrastructure. The Opposition did not discover the paper leak crisis on May 16, 2026. It was there before. It will be there after. What they discovered on May 16 was a trending hashtag.

The students crowding into Jantar Mantar in cockroach masks deserve to understand what they are participating in. They arrived believing they were protesting the education system. They were also, whether they chose it or not, participating in a larger political theatre whose primary audience is not the Education Minister but the next election cycle. The founder's history with AAP is not a disqualification, people are allowed to have political pasts, but it is context that twenty-two million followers deserved to have before they clicked follow.

Thousands of students descended on New Delhi's Jantar Mantar under the banner of the "Cockroach Janta Party", a satirical youth movement that reclaimed a term India's Chief Justice reportedly used to dismiss unemployed young people, and turned it into a rallying cry against the…

— Clash Report (@clashreport) June 6, 2026

Everytime the genuine anger of young Indians is hijacked by vested interest groups, from either side of the aisle, India obliterates yet another collective opportunity to raise the harder questions and seek change on those grounds. That cost is borne by the student in the coaching centre, not the politician on the stage.

The Complexity They Do Not Know

Now, here is what the organisers of the Cockroach Janta Party appear not to understand, or not to have reckoned with, about the Indian state and its education crisis. The problem is not the Education Minister. The problem is the architecture.

India does not have enough public university seats. It does not have enough government jobs. These are demographic facts of staggering scale. Every year, hundreds of thousands of students pass their Class XII examinations — CBSE, ICSE, the state boards of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bengal — and emerge into a system that cannot absorb them. India has a little over 52,538 colleges serving approximately 46.5 million students, but its Gross Enrollment Ratio still sits far below even comparable developing nations. The stampede for Delhi University's limited seats is a literally recurring event, an annual reminder that the Indian state's investment in higher education has catastrophically failed to keep pace with its population.

The IITs are exceptional institutions and their exceptionalism is a product of their scarcity. That should be preserved and is not the question. The question is what happens to the hundreds of thousands who will never see the inside of an IIT, who passed their board examinations creditably, who have genuine ability and genuine ambition, and for whom the Indian state has built almost nothing. 

Can the state accommodate them all in public universities? Is the state even aspiring to do that? Are there enough jobs in the public sector? Is the state marching in a direction where at least one job per family in this nation of 1.4 billion dreams is a realistic horizon?

These are the questions that a serious education movement would be asking. The CJP's manifesto gestures at disenfranchisement and press freedom. It does not interrogate the National Education Policy in any detail. It does not address the structural relationship between public sector expansion and the reduction of examination-driven desperation. It does not grapple with the fact that the scarcity of government jobs — not merely the leaking of the papers that test for them — is the root condition producing the crisis it claims to address.

Sacking Dharmendra Pradhan might make for a satisfying headline on a Monday morning. It will not, on the Tuesday that follows, open a single new seat in a public university. It will not build the government hospital that needs doctors trained in those seats. It will not create the engineering workforce that a genuinely developing India requires. It will not put a single rupee in the pocket of the student who drove twelve hours to Patna from a district town in Bihar to sit in a coaching class for an examination whose paper was already in someone else's hands.

A Fool's Paradise of Digital Solidarity

The Cockroach Janta Party's leadership appears to believe that because its Instagram account speaks to twenty-two million people, it speaks for twenty-two million people. This is a fundamental misreading of how digital solidarity works and how thoroughly it dissolves at the first contact with ground reality.

India's Gen Z is not a monolith. The student who followed CJP's Instagram from a government school in Muzaffarpur is not the same person as the one who did so from a private college in Bengaluru. The aspirant sitting in Patna's Musallahpur Haat does not share the same political vocabulary as the chronically-online urban youth for whom the CJP's manifesto was effectively written. The idea that a movement crafted in the language of Boston University seminars and AAP press conferences will resonate uniformly across the staggering social, linguistic, caste, and economic diversity of Indian youth experience is not optimism. It is a polished, well-intentioned urban blindness.

The CJP cannot win a gram panchayat election. This is not an insult. It is a constitutional and organisational reality. To imagine that a party built in twenty-four hours using AI tools, led by a man who flew in from the United States to address it, has any meaningful claim on reshaping a national education system of India's complexity, without the local knowledge, the multilingual reach, the caste literacy, the state-by-state understanding, the years of ground presence that genuine reform has always required in this country, is to confuse virality with vision. 

Bangladesh's student movement toppled a government because it had years of accumulated institutional grievance, cadre presence, and a specific, proximate target with apparent foreign involvement. India's CJP had a meme, a Google Form, and twenty-two million Instagram followers who mostly stayed home. And here, the national security and intelligence apparatus is not blind to the possibility of an unrest through foreign meddling in India's domestic affairs, whether by design, financing or covert backing. 

The tragedy is that their trying, however sincere parts of it may have been, consumed the energy of a generation's anger and returned it as a spectacle instead of a strategy. Every protest that ends without a plan, every movement that dissolves after the trending cycle ends, every genuine crisis that is subsumed into electoral positioning, makes the next attempt harder. It raises the threshold of cynicism that the next serious organiser will have to overcome.

What the Cockroaches Actually Need

The young Indians who wore those masks at Jantar Mantar, and the far greater number who watched from their phones, deserve something more serious than what they were offered on June 6.

They deserve leaders who understand why Patna's coaching economy exists — not as a quirk of entrepreneurship but as the scar tissue of a public education system that was systematically starved and a public sector that was systematically shrunk. They deserve a politics capable of holding two demands together. The immediate, non-negotiable demand for clean examinations and accountability in examination administration, and the longer, harder, less Instagram-friendly demand for structural expansion of public education and public employment.

They deserve, above all, a movement that does not mistake their frustration for solidarity. Frustration is available in unlimited supply in a country where 22 crore people applied for government jobs and 3 in 1,000 got one. Solidarity requires a shared analysis, a shared language, a shared understanding of the machine that is grinding them down and what it would actually take to stop it.

(Saket Suman is the author of The Psychology of a Patriot. Among other roles, he was a Special Correspondent at The Times of India and the head of Arts/Books/Culture verticals at what was India's largest independent newswire.) 

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