From online joke to India’s biggest youth uprising in a decade: How ‘Cockroach’ movement took on Modi
What began as satirical response to a judge's insult has become a mass protest movement that has filled Delhi's streets, drawn tear gas and baton charges, and forced opposition into parliament wearing black
NEW DELHI (MNTV) — The name was meant as an insult. It has become a badge.
For more than a month, tens of thousands of young Indians have occupied Jantar Mantar, the 300-year-old observatory in the heart of the capital, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over a national exam system they say has robbed millions of them of a fair chance. They call themselves the Cockroach Janta Party — a name lifted directly from the mouth of India’s chief justice, who compared unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites.
The movement has grown into the largest youth-led challenge Narendra Modi’s government has faced in over a decade, and this week it turned violent.
What happened this week
On Monday, more than 10,000 protesters attempted to march on parliament. Delhi Police had imposed prohibitory orders and declared the march unlawful.
Officers responded with tear gas shells, baton charges, and canes. Movement leaders said roughly 150 protesters were taken to hospital.
By Tuesday, demonstrators had returned to Jantar Mantar — many still bearing visible injuries — and rebuilt the makeshift camp that police had demolished the previous day.
“We will stand here with pride,” one protester who had witnessed the beatings told reporters.
That same day, a separate march headed to Modi’s residence. Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, was detained by Delhi Police during the demonstration and later released.
He said the group had gone to demand answers for what he called brutalities against young students, and called for the resignations of both Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, who oversees the police.
On Wednesday, opposition lawmakers disrupted a session of parliament in solidarity, gathering outside the building dressed in black and waving placards demanding Pradhan’s resignation.
Solidarity protests spread to Mumbai and Hyderabad, where demonstrators were detained.
Anger had already been building over the weekend, when police forcibly removed the veteran Ladakhi activist Sonam Wangchuk, 59, from the protest site and took him to hospital.
Wangchuk had been on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar since June 28. Protesters tried to intervene; police were filmed holding up sheets to block the view as they carried him away.
How it started
The origin is almost absurdly specific. On May 15, during a Supreme Court hearing on fraudulent professional credentials, Chief Justice Surya Kant remarked that there are youngsters “like cockroaches” who cannot find employment or a place in any profession, who become social media personalities or activists, and who then attack everyone.
He later said he had been misunderstood — that his criticism was aimed at people who had entered the legal and media professions using fake credentials.
It was too late. The next day, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old political communications strategist with a master’s degree from Boston University who had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, announced on X the launch of a platform for “all the cockroaches out there.” The eligibility criteria, he said, were being unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to rant professionally.
The party’s slogan: Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.
The name parodied the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. It went viral almost immediately.
Exam scandal at its heart
The satire found its cause in a genuine national scandal.
On May 3, more than 2.27 million students sat the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test — NEET — the single exam that determines admission to India’s undergraduate medical and dental programmes. For most of those candidates, competing for fewer than 130,000 places, years of study and family sacrifice rest on a single morning.
Nine days later, on May 12, the government cancelled the exam entirely. Investigators had found overlaps between a pre-circulated “guess paper” and the actual question paper, confirming a widespread leak.
The Central Bureau of Investigation opened a probe and arrests followed.
For millions of families, the cancellation was devastating. Students who had already sat the exam were told they would have to do it again, rescheduled for June 21. In the weeks that followed, several NEET aspirants died by suicide.
Public fury mounted — not only over this leak, but over a pattern of them stretching back years, and over an examination system that Indian students increasingly regard as rigged in favour of those with money and connections.
Protesters have also raised irregularities in the CBSE on-screen marking system, and are demanding broader structural reform in how public examinations are conducted, alongside justice for the students who took their own lives.
Why this movement is different
Indian governments have faced mass protests before — the farmers’ agitation, the anti-CAA demonstrations, the Ladakh statehood marches. What distinguishes the Cockroach movement, analysts have noted, is who is in the streets.
Earlier movements were often contained or delegitimised through identity-based vilification — cast as the work of a particular religious community, region, or foreign-funded conspiracy.
This time the protesters are students and job-seekers from what one analysis called “mainstream aspirational India”: the middle-class, upwardly mobile demographic that helped propel Modi to power in the first place. That makes them considerably harder to portray as an enemy category without alienating the government’s own base.
The movement has also been deliberate about its aesthetics. Demonstrators have brought different symbolic props each day: steel thalis and spoons, banged in a pointed callback to Modi’s Covid-era appeal for citizens to clatter utensils; diapers thrown into the air; roses handed to police officers on duty.
Many carry the Indian flag and copies of the constitution. Masks bearing the movement’s insect emblem have become ubiquitous.
Dipke, who arrived from the United States in June to lead the protest in person, has framed the grievance in terms that go well beyond examinations.
“In India, if you’re rich, the system dances at your fingertips,” he said. “If you’re poor, nobody will be there for you. We’re frustrated because the government has stopped listening.”
Government’s response
Modi, who rarely responds to criticism directly, has not addressed the protesters’ demands publicly. On Tuesday he sent word through the minister of parliamentary affairs, who told reporters the prime minister was committed to ensuring there would be no further paper leaks. Pradhan, the minister whose resignation is being demanded, has not commented on Monday’s violence.
Speaking to NDTV last month, he described the CJP as the “B-team of terror groups.”
The Supreme Court has shown little appetite for intervention. When a lawyer attempted to raise the matter, Chief Justice Surya Kant — the man whose remark started all of this — told him not to waste the court’s time or his own.
Legal scrutiny has come from elsewhere.
A public interest litigation filed in the Delhi High Court in July alleges that police subjected protesters to continuous photography, videography, and surveillance, creating what the petition describes as an atmosphere of intimidation and violating rights to privacy and peaceful assembly.
Wider grievance
Beneath the specific demand for one minister’s resignation lies something larger: a generation confronting persistently high youth unemployment, an education system riddled with corruption scandals, and a sense that opportunity is receding rather than expanding in the world’s most populous country and fastest-growing major economy.
The protests have also converged with other grievances.
Wangchuk, who joined the hunger strike, has spent years campaigning for statehood for Ladakh and constitutional protections for its tribal areas — a movement that has itself seen mass detentions at the Delhi border.
Dipke told a press conference on Tuesday that the protests would continue, though he declined to spell out the next steps. The camp at Jantar Mantar has now stood for over four weeks.
Whether it stands for four more may depend less on the protesters’ stamina — which has so far proved considerable — than on whether a government that has spent a decade successfully managing dissent has any strategy for a movement it cannot easily name an enemy.
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