In mid-May, a judge at the Indian Supreme Court compared unemployed young people to cockroaches.
They took that word and turned it into a political movement.
Since then, India has been witnessing the largest youth protest of the Modi era, with tear gas, truncheons, a 26-day hunger strike and even Rahul Gandhi being loaded onto a police van.

A cockroach, by definition, gets squashed

There’s a reason why the cockroach is the insect that, in the collective imagination, is associated more than any other with the idea of being trampled underfoot. Small, a pest, considered dirty, good only for being squashed with a shoe or a can of insecticide: no one ever thinks of the cockroach as something capable of rebelling.

This is precisely the image that the Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court, Surya Kant, chose — perhaps without considering the consequences — to describe his country’s unemployed young people. On 15 May 2026, during a hearing on a matter of legal ethics, he used these words: “There are young people like cockroaches, who cannot find work and have no place in the profession. Some of them turn to the media, some to social media, become right-to-information campaigners or other kinds of activists, and start attacking everyone.”

A remark made ‘en passant’ in a courtroom by one of India’s most senior judges. The following day, a 33-year-old political communications consultant, Abhijeet Dipke, set up an X account with a simple yet striking name: Cockroach Janta Party, the People’s Cockroach Party. Within a few weeks, he had amassed over twenty million followers.

From satire to a national movement

The project began as pure irony. The CJP website states this openly: “To build a party for young people who continue to be labelled as lazy, internet-addicted and, ultimately, cockroaches. That’s it. That’s the mission. The rest is satire.”

The membership criteria, written in the same tone, require applicants to be unemployed, lazy, constantly online and capable of complaining professionally.

But the satire struck a nerve of genuine anger that was just waiting for a cause to rally behind.
In May, the national entrance exam for medical schools, the NEET, had been cancelled following the discovery of a leak of the exam paper: around two million students were affected, months of preparation had been wasted, and the Ministry of Education had failed to take any real responsibility.

It was at this point that the cockroach ceased to be a joke and became a political symbol.
The young people accused of being parasites on society — lazy, unambitious, incapable of finding their place in the world — are also those who have had their future stolen from them, yet again, by an education system they consider to be corrupt to the core.

Since June, hundreds of protesters have been camped at Jantar Mantar, the historic protest site in colonial-era Delhi, calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Students, professionals, families with young children. On 28 June, the activist Sonam Wangchuk — who had previously been arrested for his environmental and social activism — began a hunger strike in solidarity, which lasted twenty-six days and ended only on the night of 23–24 July, when a court ordered his urgent transfer to hospital.

From then on, it would be just over a day before Minister Pradhan threw in the towel, marking the cockroaches’ victory.

Repression, and why it didn’t work

The Modi government responded in its usual way: first by ignoring the protests, then by cracking down on them.
On 20 July, when tens of thousands of supporters of the movement marched towards Parliament, the Delhi police repelled them with tear gas and lathis — the long bamboo sticks used by Indian law enforcement — injuring, according to CJP founder Dipke, around 150 protesters.
Allegations also circulated regarding the use of rubber bullets, which the police dismissed as “completely false and misleading”. The following day, more than ten thousand people gathered once again at the protest site, amid an atmosphere of extreme tension.

There is, however, one detail – an incident that needs to be recounted. On Tuesday 21 July, Rahul Gandhi — leader of the opposition and president of the Indian National Congress — together with his sister Priyanka and other party representatives, led a sit-in outside the Prime Minister’s residence to demand answers regarding the police violence of the previous day. The police physically removed him, loading him onto a van along with the other detained MPs, in an image that quickly went viral in the national and international media. Gandhi wrote on social media that Modi must resign for “having destroyed the future of young Indians”, and later described him as the “most anti-youth” prime minister in India’s history, adding: “Firing tear gas at students and charging at them with batons is not democratic. Their demands are legitimate. The Prime Minister should heed them and take action.”

Released after a few hours, Gandhi returned to the streets the following day, Wednesday, leading opposition MPs — many dressed in black, carrying placards calling for Pradhan’s resignation — into the parliamentary chamber, where the protests forced the proceedings of both the Lower and Upper Houses to be repeatedly suspended.

This is not the first time Gandhi has been detained by the police during a demonstration — it had already happened in 2022, during a protest over the National Herald case — but the fact that it occurred right in the midst of the ‘cockroach’ uprising carries particular symbolic weight: the opposition leader is, in effect, being treated as one of the insects to be swept away from society.

Exhausted and worn out by the protests, Gandhi began by saying: “Democracy in India is happening right now”.

Why it matters, beyond India

What is happening in Delhi at the moment deserves attention even beyond the Indian subcontinent, for at least three reasons.

The first is the simplest: it is the most serious public challenge that Narendra Modi’s government has faced in recent years.
Twelve years of rule by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party that many journalists have long accused of suppressing dissent and imprisoning political opponents, now finds itself facing a movement that does not stem from a traditional party, has no recognisable hierarchical leadership, and is therefore all the more difficult to ‘normalise’.
Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high despite record economic growth: this is the disconnect that the ‘cockroaches’ slogan has brought home to millions of people in just a few weeks.

The second reason concerns the method. A judge of India’s highest court used a dehumanising metaphor to describe an entire generation, and that very generation has turned the insult into its own banner. It is a mechanism of cultural resistance that has been seen in other protest movements around the world — from the ‘fleet of paupers’ in the 16th century to industrial workers referred to as ‘ragamuffins’ — but rarely with the same speed and digital reach: from a few hundred people to twenty million followers in a matter of weeks.

The third reason is the most political, and it is the very same reason that makes the image of Rahul Gandhi hoisted onto a police van so disturbing: when repression targets unarmed students and the leader of the parliamentary opposition alike, the message that comes across is that in India today, dissent — whatever its source, whether satirical or institutional — receives the same response.

And this is perhaps the most important point for a free continent like ours to grasp: when even those who sit regularly in Parliament are treated like insects to be squashed, the question of just how free the space for dissent really is in a democracy becomes legitimate, urgent, and can no longer be put off.

In conclusion, when it comes to insects, the cockroach is the creature that can survive practically anything: it can withstand starvation, radiation and the most determined attempts to exterminate it, and it gets in everywhere. Perhaps the Indian Prime Minister is starting to find them truly frightening.