After 36 days at Jantar Mantar, the students wound down, leaving behind a dazed government, its leadership confused, and a police machinery exposed as brutal, lacking the sensitivity the moment required. Watching the boys and girls pack up their belongings and fold their cotton sheets, I thought of Iqbal’s couplet: maana ki teri diid ke qabil nahin huun main/tu mera shauq dekh mira intizar dekh (Granted that I am not worthy of your sight / Look instead at my deep zeal and my endless waiting). As they moved out of Jantar Mantar, their resolve was palpable. This was not the end. They would be back.

Every major mass movement in India over the last century has organised itself around a moral authority: Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Anna Hazare. The Cockroach movement inverted this template. Its founder is a young man skilled at communications, not a moral authority. Its closest thing to a unifying figure, Sonam Wangchuk, was an ally who lent his hunger strike to a cause he did not create. What emerged instead is a distributed structure — social-media accounts, campus unions, Left student federations — moving in loose, non-hierarchical coordination. Its organisational logic makes a singular leader almost unnecessary........

© Indian Express