CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Generation That Refuses to Crawl

Image Source: SALlM BlN YOUSUF – CC BY 4.0

On 20 July, thousands of young people attempted to march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament. They carried placards, shouted slogans, and demanded the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over repeated examination irregularities, paper leaks, cancelled tests, and the government’s refusal to accept responsibility for the devastation inflicted upon students. The Delhi Police answered them with barricades, batons, and tear gas. Some protesters were detained, while others reorganised themselves into smaller groups and continued towards Parliament. The movement had crossed an important threshold: what began as satire on social media had entered the streets as a confrontation with state power.

The protesters call themselves the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The name arose after a derogatory judicial remark compared activists and unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites. Rather than retreat before the insult, the young turned it into a badge of collective defiance. If those who rule India see its unemployed youth as cockroaches, then the cockroaches will assemble. The name mocks the Bharatiya Janata Party, but it also captures something of the experience of a generation that has been told repeatedly that it is excessive, ungrateful, unemployable, and somehow personally responsible for the failure of the economic system, which they see as a precarious system that should give them jobs, but which —as the ruthless capitalist system—treats them as disposable.

Since its first major Delhi protest on 6 June, the movement has spread to cities including Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Lucknow, and Nagpur. Its supporters established a camp at Jantar Mantar, where climate activist Sonam Wangchuk undertook a hunger strike in solidarity with their demands before being forcibly removed to the hospital. The immediate questions are serious enough: the integrity of entrance and recruitment examinations, compensation for the families of students who have taken their own lives, the reform of an examination system riddled with corruption, and the resignation of the education minister. Yet behind these demands lies a much larger social crisis, since an examination paper is not simply a sheet covered with questions. For millions of working-class families, it represents years of savings, sacrifice, study, and hope. When that paper is leaked or the examination is cancelled, an entire household’s fragile plan is torn apart.

The media has eagerly described the Cockroach movement as India’s first ‘Gen Z protest’. There is some truth in this description. Its language was born on social media, and it therefore deploys memes, satire, parody, short videos, and........

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