One image will be remembered as the poster of the massive “Cockroach movement” in India. A lady standing in front of a police van full of freshly arrested protesters, one hand stretched out against the metal hood: she refused to move, for 40 minutes, under heavy monsoon rain in Mumbai. The image broke the internet and went viral, capturing the essence of the protest that forced Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make one of his Union ministers step down after public uproar, for the first time in 12 years. A movement that has become a pain in the neck for the Indian PM, who has to deal with the fallout from one of the hardest challenges his government had to face in years.
It all started last May, in response to remarks made by the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, who had referred to activists and unemployed youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites of society,” sparking outrage. The youth, though, claimed the name back and made it their symbol. The satirical profile created by Boston-based Indian student Abhijeet Dipke—who had asked “What if all cockroaches come together”?—quickly surpassed both the BJP and the Congress Party on social media in terms of followers, gaining support and catalyzing the growing youth frustration and dissatisfaction with the government in a context where the space for dissent has enormously shrunk under Modi’s tenure. The name Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) itself is a parody of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has ruled the political scene since 2014.
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“CJP protest destroyed PM Modi’s two-decade public image in two weeks,” said author Arundhati Roy, whom over the years has been a vociferous critic of Modi and his ethno-nationalist and increasingly authoritarian policies. “For the first time in years, it feels wonderful to be Indian. Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain. The progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke”, she wrote. The movement spread all over India and was quickly backed by various segments of civil society, including prominent environmental and right-to-information activists, who urged the government to address youth concerns regarding employment, exam transparency and accountability.
In June 2026, the CJP began organizing a number of protests after technical and administrative failures on the entrance tests to undergraduate medical studies. The movement called for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan after the leak of national entrance examination (NEET) question papers, one of the world’s most competitive admission tests. High-stakes exams like NEET have acceptance rates below 1 per cent, and millions of students compete for a restricted number of university seats and stable jobs. Competition is brutal in India, where the youth constitute almost a third of the population, and education is the only tool many families have to come out of poverty: for unprivileged students it means years of sacrifices and suffocating expectations. At least 12 students died by suicide across India after the leaked exam was scrapped, forcing over 2 million students to retake it.
After the demands of the movement were not met, including the resignation of Pradhan, the CJP began an indefinite protest in Delhi on 20 June that went on for weeks. They gathered in Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory, half a mile away from the Parliament, the designated place to hold demonstrations in the capital. For weeks, it was an encampment of students, teachers, lawyers, but also parents who had spent all their savings for their children to prepare for the exam. It was a Gen Z-led protest, the first one in India, although less intersectional and hence quite different from the ones that in recent years rocked Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. The protesters, mostly in their twenties, used the tools of satire and social media to spread their message. “The protest had become a meme, the meme a crowd, and the crowd had built its own distribution network—it reads in an article—Part of what the CJP was conquering was its own narrative”.
Then, it all went on fire in mid-July. The spark was the case of educationalist and climate activist Sonam Wangchuk. On July 18, police forcibly brought to the hospital the hunger-striking activist who had become one of the faces of the leaderless movement. That night, thousands of supporters flocked to Jantar Mantar. Wangchuk, 59, is a well-known face in India: an engineer, inventor, and activist from Ladakh who backed the protesters from the early hours. The movement—which describes itself as “a political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth: secular, socialist, democratic, and lazy”—spread like wildfire and quickly got an openly anti-Modi connotation, despite many protesters being largely apolitical and belonging to his Hindu vote base.
On July 20, the protesters started to peacefully march towards the Parliament to bring their requests to the halls of power, where the monsoon session was to take place. Despite being peaceful, the march, which drew some 50,000 people to the streets, was met with brutal repression as denounced by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Police forces indiscriminately used tear gas, batons and even pellet guns (the ones reportedly used in Kashmir) against the young protesters: Sansad Marg in central Delhi turned into a battlefield. The movement had three demands: the resignation of the education minister, compensation for the families of students who took their lives over the scrapping of the entrance exam, and the dropping of all charges against protesters. Pradhan finally resigned—which was considered a major victory for the youth movement—and the government agreed to meet the other two demands: it was a total capitulation.
“After the protests had been called off on 23 July, following a deal with the government and assurances that all FIRs against the protesters would be withdrawn, a promise that wasn’t kept. The protesters, especially young women, were subjected to orchestrated online vilification, doxxing and intimidation. Vigilante supporters of the government were seen intimidating protesters in busy markets even as the police stood by,” writes Ashok Swain. “When criticism of this retaliation intensified, and young people threatened to return to the streets, Modi reappeared on Instagram to bestow his gift of forgiveness, turning the question of state accountability into a morality play about the wounded feelings of a powerful man”.
But the unrest did not settle and kept on burning the country, fueled by the dissatisfaction of the youth who are demanding education reform and fighting chronic joblessness. More recently, a youth protest in Patna was met with brutality and widespread arrests while Jharkhand was rocked by a state-wide agitation led by thousands of students. Youth unemployment crisis in India hit the rate of 9.9 per cent in 2025, three times the overall unemployment rate in the country. “Over 65 per cent of our population is below 35 years of age, yet our leader, political parties and governments do not speak seriously about their education, employment and future. The government focus is solely on Hindu-Muslim politics”, claimed Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the movement. Youth unemployment in India has become a structural challenge, whereas higher education does not guarantee work, due to a mismatch between formal job creation and the massive annual output of university degrees.
According to the India Employment Report 2024, nearly 83 per cent of India’s unemployed are young people. Over the past two decades, despite more young people gaining qualifications hoping to find security through their studies, it takes them longer to find a stable job. “India is sitting on what policymakers have celebrated for years as a ‘demographic dividend’. But a demographic dividend is not an automatic gift. A young population becomes an economic advantage only when a country provides quality education, relevant skills, productive investment and enough dignified jobs”, wrote Mohd Ziyaullah Khan. “Without those, a demographic dividend can become something very different: a demographic pressure cooker. The events of 2026 suggest that the pressure is rising”.
The chickens have come home to roost for Modi, who has repeatedly failed the youth by not addressing the chronic lack of jobs even for the most educated of its young citizens. In his Independence Day speech, on August 15, PM Modi threatened to target “intellectual Naxals”, referring to the recent youth-led protests—claiming that while the country has largely succeeded in eliminating the Naxalite insurgency (a militant guerrilla in India that follows Maoist ideology) from the forests, “dimagi (intellectual) Naxals are lurking around”. The reference echoes how the PM has in the past labeled critics and dissenting voices: “anti-nationals”, “urban Naxals”, “traitors”, “Tudke-tudke gang”. It also betrays how this latest wave of protests has caught Modi off guard, exposing the flaws and weaknesses of the government’s policies on many fronts. The PM’s aura is fading away behind the ideological façade. The youth are showing the way and only time will tell how far this will breach Modi’s (self-)perceived invincibility. Meanwhile, four weeks after the protest was called off in Jantar Mantar, the CJP announced another “peaceful march” on September 5 in Delhi, accusing the Center of not holding to its promises.
Cover photo: Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) supporters wave national flags a day after the resignation of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Mumbai on July 26, 2026, as protests over alleged NEET exam irregularities were called off. Pradhan resigned on July 25 after mass youth-led protests demanded his ouster in anger over a string of irregularities in potentially life-changing exams. (Photo by Punit PARANJPE / AFP)
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