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The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which has brought India’s most powerful prime minister to his knees, had a rather bizarre origin. It was born as an angry response to the Chief Justice of India’s (CJI) unbecoming remarks about unemployed youth: he compared them to “cockroaches”.

No other mass movement in India was born on social media, that too just hours after the CJI’s “cockroaches” remark. First, the CJI sought to explain what his remarks really meant and then, on July 24, the court placed curbs on reporting court proceedings on social media.

“I would like to thank CJI Surya Kant. If he hadn’t called us cockroaches, I wouldn’t have come to India. This movement would not have started,” Dipke told supporters after education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation.

This is the first time that the office of the CJI has become the spark for a massive agitation that culminated in a great humiliation for India’s most powerful prime minister. And this forms the first takeaway from CJP’s 36-day agitation.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The second takeaway is how the regime will try to recover from the humiliation it suffered from the youth upsurge. Will it continue with plans to push more splits in political parties, wrest a two-thirds majority in parliament, pursue the delimitation of constituencies and other measures for more authoritarian control?

We will know more about its strategy in the coming days.

Third, in the early years of Narendra Modi as the prime minister, the young graduates who believed industrial units would sprout everywhere and had rallied round his ‘Modi hai to mumkin hai’ (If Modi is in charge, anything is possible) slogan have now deserted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime and formed the CJP.

Fourth, the CJP is not going to be a one-stir phenomenon. It is evolving and post-agitation developments show that it is here to follow up on the terms of its agreement with the Union government.

But here is a word of caution. Union home minister Amit Shah, who has fought many tricky political battles for twenty years, is more than a match for the youthful adversaries he faces in the form of the CJP. There are already attempts to divide their rank and file. The “midnight deal” with climate activist Sonam Wangchuk to end his fast could well be in that category of tactics. There are also efforts to wean away sections of the CJP by using influential BJP contacts.

In the case of the removal of Pradhan from the Cabinet, the regime first offered to change his........

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