CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

From India to Gaza: Youth Revolts and the Struggle to Break Open the Future

Photograph Source: Subin Siby – CC0

“What if all the cockroaches come together?” – Abhijeet Dipke

“What if all the cockroaches come together?”

Marx and Engels issued the historic call: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Today, that summons returns with renewed urgency and takes a new form: Young people of the world unite and resist. Youth today possess the courage, imagination, anger, and numbers to change the course of history. They have grown up in societies paralyzed by cynicism, loneliness, desperation, and hatred, conditions that isolate people from one another and teach them to regard cruelty as inevitable. Yet even amid this desolation, a radical possibility remains: the recovery of solidarity as a passion for justice and love as a public and collective force. This militant love begins with the recognition that our lives are profoundly interconnected, that freedom cannot be reduced to individual escape, and that none of us can be secure while others are rendered vulnerable and disposable. It creates bonds strong enough to break through isolation, connect private suffering to public responsibility, and transform compassion into organized resistance. As James Baldwin and Malcolm X understood in different ways, learning to live requires learning to love, not as sentimentality or a retreat into private life, but as a refusal of hatred, racism, and the machinery of disposability.

Militant love takes the side of justice. It finds expression in solidarity, shared struggle, and the willingness to assume responsibility for lives beyond our immediate experience. It transforms loneliness into connection, despair into collective courage, and anger into a disciplined struggle for a world in which no human being is considered expendable. With catastrophe no longer on the horizon but at their doorstep, young people must build a worldwide movement of resistance that neither propaganda nor repression can silence. It is time to bring to a halt the machinery of death sustained by governments and their military-industrial-academic institutions, all stained by the suffering of children, women, the elderly, and those condemned as disposable.

But solidarity becomes a radical force only when moral conviction takes the form of organized struggle. Student-led protests in India have demonstrated how culture can become both a pedagogical weapon and a vehicle of collective resistance. After Chief Justice of India Surya Kant contemptuously referred to unemployed young people as “cockroaches,” Abhijeet Dipke  answered with a provocative challenge on Instagram: “What if all cockroaches come together?” The question spread rapidly, transforming an insult meant to humiliate into a rallying cry of defiance. Confronting the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Modi government, students, unemployed young people, and their supporters used memes, satire, and Instagram reels to expose corruption, puncture the mythology of power, and mobilize mass protest. Met with tear gas, police violence, and detention, they refused to abandon the streets. Their resistance revealed that domination is sustained through more than force. It also depends on images, narratives, and a manufactured common sense that teaches people what to fear, accept, and obey. By turning culture against power, the protesters entered the very terrain where identities are formed, anger finds a language, and private suffering becomes public outrage and collective action.

The youth-led Cockroach Janta Party converted this defiance into a rapidly expanding movement.  With more than 20 million followers on Instagram, it built an alternative public sphere beyond the government’s propaganda machine.Young people turned digital ridicule into political solidarity and carried it from the screen into the streets.  Images of police repression widened public outrage, while the movement’s growing power forced the resignation of India’s education minister and placed educational reform and public........

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