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The Cockroach Revolution: India’s Students Are Rewriting the Rules of Protest

How a slur inspired an unprecedented revolt against the Modi government

Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published as “Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous” by The Wire on July 22, 2026. It has been reprinted here with permission. Weeks-long mass protests by students culminated in the resignation of India’s education minister on July 25.

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.

Here is the story, for the record. In response to an arrogant, contemptuous comment by the chief justice of India, Surya Kant, calling some unemployed young Indians cockroaches, Abhijeet Dipke, a student living in Boston, posted a comment on Instagram: “What if all cockroaches come together?” Millions responded. And thus was born the Cockroach Janta Party. Dipke became the Pied Piper of cockroaches.

The party’s first demand was the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister atop a corrupt, rotten ministry under which public exam papers are regularly leaked. An estimated 152 since 2014, according to opposition parties. These leaks have devastated the lives of millions of young people who spent years preparing for these exams, some of whose parents have had to sell their land or homes to support their children’s studies and pay the fee for the right to appear for these exams. A novel form of legal extortion. After the recent leak of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper, twelve distressed, wrecked students died by suicide.

As Cockroach anger grew into an online tsunami, Dipke returned from Boston on June 6 and went straight from the airport to Delhi’s famous protest grounds at Jantar Mantar. Sonam Wangchuk, the well-known activist and education reformer from Ladakh, joined him and declared an indefinite hunger strike. Six university students—Neha Bora, Manish Kumar, Aameen Amitosh, Danish Ali, Hrishikesh, and Deepak, members of the All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Liberation)—declared they would fast too and took up position on an adjacent stage. Protests began in other cities.

As the condition of those on fast grew critical, the young roaches who had swamped the internet began to show up at Jantar Mantar for real. The Cockroach Janta Party announced that, on July 20, the day Parliament was to open for its monsoon session, they would march on Parliament. Two days before the planned march, Wangchuk was snatched off the stage by the police and held in detention, first in a government hospital and later, at his wife’s insistence, in a private hospital. On the morning of July 20, the day of the march, the AISA students ended their fast.

The Cockroaches took the capital city by storm. They came by train, by bus, by air, by metro, their numbers increasing by the hour. Hours before the first rays of sun lightened Delhi’s monsoon skies, they began to pour into Jantar Mantar in the tens of thousands. By sunrise, it was clear that a generation of desperate and furious young people who have seen their future snuffed out before their eyes was going to reclaim what their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had conceded: our dignity as a people and as a country. Our rights as citizens of a democracy. The protesters exorcised the corrosive fear that has become second nature to us all with their sheer courage and grace. And humour.

By the end of the day, it was clear that the protest had become about something far bigger than what the protesters or their leaders were demanding. Pradhan is small change now. The stakes are far bigger. The rot in the whole system of governance, from top to bottom, is clearly visible and has begun to stink like a decomposing corpse. Even the tiniest of the Cockroaches, some no more than seven or eight years old, were able to clearly articulate that.

Despite the quick and almost clandestine appointment of a new police chief days before the march, and despite worried whispers about the terrifying proficiency of our terrifying home minister, both the police and the home ministry completely miscalculated the scale of the tsunami that engulfed Delhi on July 20. They tried everything. They blocked buses and roads and metro stations. It didn’t help. They tried to jam the internet. But the young roaches—creatures of the internet—somehow subverted that effort with a deluge of memes and videos that made you laugh and cry at once.

In Delhi, of all the places in the world, young women who were part of the protest said that they felt safe in the crowd—although some complained about being groped by the police. We saw Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, people belonging to every........

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