Great to see you return to this week’s Politics to Policy edition. This week, we are going to talk about the Cockroach Janta Party protests at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, and what it means for the youth of India going forward. So let’s begin.

Three thousand years ago, the ancient Egyptians wrote a banishment spell. It appears in the Book of the Dead, and it reads: "Be far from me, O vile cockroach." Three millennia of human civilisation followed. The cockroach outlasted all of it.

On May 15, 2026, the Chief Justice of India offered his own version of that ancient spell. Speaking from the bench during a Supreme Court hearing, CJI Surya Kant said, "There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don't get any employment and don't have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone."

He later clarified. His remarks, he said, were directed at people with fake and bogus degrees who had infiltrated professions. In the ecosystem of Indian social media in 2026, the clarification ran as its own news cycle.

India's youth heard the original remark. They did what cockroaches, by pure biological design, do extraordinarily well. They adapted.

On July 20, two months later, more than 10,000 of them marched toward Parliament in New Delhi. The government met them with tear gas and baton charges. Mobile internet was cut across central Delhi. Sixteen metro stations, including Rajiv Chowk and Central Secretariat, were shut on "security grounds".

The cockroach earned its reputation through a fraction of its species. Of the roughly 4,000 to 5,000 species that exist on Earth, the overwhelming majority have never entered a human home. The varieties found in kitchens and drains are a tiny fraction of a lineage that has been on this planet for over 300 million years, surviving every mass extinction, including the Cretaceous-Paleogene event that eliminated 80% of all animal life. The T. rex is extinct. The cockroach is still running.

In the wild, the cockroach functions as one of nature's essential decomposers. It breaks down organic waste and returns nitrogen-rich nutrients to the soil. The American Museum of Natural History describes wild cockroaches as "little sanitation workers". They process leaf litter and animal waste that other organisms cannot efficiently handle. Research in comparative ecology has found them more effective than earthworms at turning over dense layers of decaying biomass. In tropical rainforests, they are among the most critical food sources for birds and lizards.

The cockroach thrives precisely where rot has accumulated. It processes filth that others leave behind.

This is the creature the Chief Justice of India chose as his metaphor for India's unemployed youth. The bench remark had a party named after it by the following morning.

The State of Working India 2026 report by Azim Premji University found that unemployment stands at nearly 40% for graduates aged 15 to 25, and at 20% for those aged 25 to 29, even as educational enrolment has risen sharply for over four decades. Youth unemployment in the 15-29 bracket runs at nearly three times the overall national rate. Of male graduates who find employment within a year, only 7% secure permanent salaried work.

Behind those numbers, a generation is dealing with stagnant wages and rising prices. The entrance examination that was supposed to be its meritocratic route out has been sold to the highest bidder.

In 2024, India's most consequential medical entrance examination became a crime scene. The NEET UG 2024 was sat by over 24 lakh students. Bihar Police later revealed that the question paper had been leaked 24 hours in advance and sold for Rs 30 to 32 lakh per seat. An unprecedented 67 students achieved perfect scores of 720 out of 720 on the same examination. When the Supreme Court ruled, it acknowledged a paper leak in Hazaribagh and Patna but declined to cancel the examination, citing disruption to 23 lakh students. The CBI filed chargesheets against 13 accused. The NTA was told to reform.

Two years later, in May 2026, NEET UG was cancelled nationwide. A digital leak involving 410 questions had circulated before the examination date. Of those 410 questions, 120 appeared in the actual paper. The CBI was deployed again. Over 22 lakh aspirants found themselves in limbo. The movement that eventually gathered at Jantar Mantar documented 21 student suicides linked to NEET-related pressure across both cycles. The system warned in 2024 had remained unrepaired.

The examination that determines who becomes a doctor in India can, evidently, be purchased by those with Rs 30 lakh and the right contacts.

The NEET scandal is a national story. Jammu and Kashmir has its own, running in parallel.

According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2024-25, urban youth aged 15 to 29 in J&K face an unemployment rate of 32%, against the national average of 15.9%. The J&K Economic Survey 2025-26 found that nearly 46% of educated youth remain unemployed. As of early 2025, over 3.70 lakh young people had registered on the government's employment portal, in a territory with a total population of roughly 1.5 crore.

The examination system has functioned as a site of repeated betrayal across successive cycles.

The Jammu and Kashmir Service Selection Board held the Sub-Inspector recruitment examination on March 27, 2022. The selected list of 1,200 candidates, along with 1,300 junior engineers, was cancelled following allegations of paper leaks and malpractice. Papers had reportedly been sold for Rs 15 to 30 lakh per seat. The alleged kingpin, a 43-year-old from Haryana's Rewari district, had orchestrated the operation from outside the territory. The CBI filed a chargesheet against 33 accused.

In August 2025, the JKSSB Junior Engineer examination was cancelled again. Fresh paper leak allegations emerged on the day of the examination itself. The same board, the same failure.

The educational infrastructure beneath this broken recruitment system is itself compromised. J&K's schools completed fewer than 150 academic days in 2024-25 against the mandated 220. The secondary-level dropout rate stands at 25.33%, above the national average, with districts like Anantnag recording rates above 46%. The University of Kashmir registered more than 124 vacant postgraduate seats in 2023 as students concluded that better prospects lay elsewhere in the country.

The brain drain is the market's verdict on J&K's institutions.

A structural factor makes the crisis distinctly worse here. No government vacancies were advertised in the territory between 2017 and 2020. Every graduate of those years now competes for the same shrinking pool of posts, under rules that have shifted repeatedly through changes to reservation policy and recruitment criteria.

When the CJI described India's unemployed youth as cockroaches, J&K's graduates had been living that description inside their own territory's examination system for years.

On May 16, one day after the CJI's remarks circulated online, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old student at Boston University, posted a Google Form on X. He called it the Cockroach Janta Party, and he invited people to register.

Within hours, thousands signed up. The movement describes itself as a youth-led political front using satire, memes, and online campaigns to raise issues including unemployment, examination paper leaks, political accountability, and freedom of expression. Within one week, the movement had accumulated more than 14 million followers on Instagram.

Four days after the CJP's X account crossed 200,000 followers, it was withheld in India. The account had existed for less than a week. The founder's response was direct: "This was expected since there were attempts to hack the account yesterday. But this is a self-goal by the government." Neither MeitY nor X's policy team issued any statement explaining the legal basis for the action.

Within hours, the movement launched a backup account named "Cockroach Is Back". It accumulated 42,000 subscribers in two hours. The updated motto announced, "Cockroaches don't die."

The suppression of a satirical manifesto demanding Cabinet reservations for women and judicial accountability establishes, on its own, that the government found the CJP's questions genuinely threatening.

The X account withholding was part of a wider documented pattern. MediaNama recorded more than 40 instances of account withholding, geo-blocking, or content takedowns in March 2026 alone, involving journalists, satire pages, political commentators, and ordinary users. In July 2025, the Indian government ordered X to block 2,355 accounts under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. The order included two Reuters news agency handles, demanded compliance within one hour, and provided no justification. X said publicly it was "deeply concerned about ongoing press censorship in India".

The systematic removal of the space for consequence-free dissent is visible in the suppression of satirical accounts, the blocking of news handles, the shutdown of internet services during protests, and the deployment of security legislation against voices the administration finds inconvenient.

A democratic constitution is preserved by citizens who can criticise power without consequence. The systematic narrowing of that space is what authoritarianism looks like before it acquires its final form. India in 2026 is building the administrative infrastructure through which a democracy removes the conditions that make it one. The direction of travel is clear. The destination, if this trajectory continues, has precedents in countries where elections continue but dissent does not.

On June 28, activist Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. His demands centred on accountability for the NEET paper leaks and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. He had also been fasting for the restoration of full statehood for Ladakh, a former constituent of Jammu and Kashmir whose constitutional status has remained unresolved since the territory's reorganisation in 2019.

Wangchuk's presence drew student organisations and civil society groups to the CJP's site. Opposition politicians followed. The movement became a convergence of grievances: examination corruption, stagnant wages, rising prices, constitutional uncertainty, and a government that had, across 12 years in power, developed a consistent pattern of ignoring public disquiet until it became electorally inconvenient. Course corrections under BJP governance have arrived in proximity to elections rather than in response to parliamentary debate or public protest.

On July 18, twenty days into his fast, Wangchuk was forcibly removed from Jantar Mantar by Delhi Police and shifted to Safdarjung Hospital on High Court orders following medical advice. The CJP described it as a "forceful abduction".

On July 20, the opening day of Parliament's Monsoon Session, more than 10,000 people marched toward Parliament in what the CJP called "Chalo Sansad". The march was swelled by anger at the forcible hospitalisation two days earlier. Delhi Police had declared the march unlawful the previous day. The protesters came anyway.

Police deployed tear gas and baton charges near Parliament. Allegations emerged of pellet guns being deployed against demonstrators, with reports of at least one protester undergoing surgery for pellet wounds. Delhi Police denied those claims. Students described police dragging demonstrators through the streets and using electrified barricades against them. Reports of children being detained in police buses emerged throughout the day. Gurdwara Bangla Sahib became a refuge for those fleeing the force. Videos of the crackdown, widely shared hours after the event thanks to a government-ordered cutting of the internet, sparked outrage.

The final toll: 180 people injured, including 60 protesters and 118 security personnel. Seventy protesters were detained, with police announcing that legal action would be initiated against them.

A meeting with Health Minister JP Nadda was eventually conceded. The CJP presented its demands in sequence. Wangchuk's immediate release from the hospital. Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation. Compensation of Rs 1 crore for the families of the 21 NEET aspirants whose suicides the movement has documented. Nadda offered to "discuss this at the appropriate level." The CJP called it no commitment at all.

The government had the option of conceding a meeting at any point across three weeks of a hunger strike at a designated protest site in the nation's capital. Choosing to offer one only after the crowd had reached Parliament's doorstep and the tear gas had been deployed established the sequence for the historical record.

On July 21, Dipke announced the CJP would halt further street marches because of fears that police would hurt the youth again. The sit-in at Jantar Mantar continued. Sympathetic protests spread to Varanasi, Patna, Chennai, Shimla, and Bengaluru. Opposition parties aligned publicly with the movement. On July 22, internet services were again suspended at Jantar Mantar. The CJP's founder shared a screenshot of the government order and posted a single question: "Govt planning another brutal crackdown?"

The BJP's response throughout has been to characterise the protesters as people who want to "make the country hollow". The government's official position is that NEET's administrative failures have been resolved and demands for Pradhan's resignation are electoral politics by another name.

Political support for a public mobilisation is inevitable in a democracy. The operative question is whether the underlying grievance is real. Two successive NEET cancellations, 21 documented student suicides, and a question paper sold for Rs 30 lakh establish that it is.

Pradhan held on for five more days after the July 20 clashes. On July 23, under the weight of 65 Members of Parliament visiting Wangchuk at Medanta Hospital and signing their support, the government issued written assurances on two fronts: Parliament would take up a formal discussion on examination accountability, and no cases would be registered against peaceful protesters at Jantar Mantar or participants in the July 20 march. Wangchuk ended his 26-day hunger strike that night in the presence of JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh.

On July 25, Pradhan resigned.

Hours later, the government accepted the remaining two CJP demands: Rs 1 crore compensation for the families of every student who died by suicide during the examination crisis, and a guarantee that no punitive action would be taken against the July 20 marchers. CJP national spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka, standing alongside Nadda and Jitendra Singh at a joint press conference, announced the withdrawal of the 36-day protest at Jantar Mantar. "All our demands have been accepted," he said.

The CJP's founders cite the Yippies and Hunter S. Thompson's Freak Power movement as historical precedents. Both are accurate. Both are incomplete.

The more instructive comparison is geographically closer, and it arrived within the last twelve months.

In September 2025, protests against nepotism erupted in Nepal after social media posts by the children of political elites appeared to flaunt lavish lifestyles and after the government moved to ban social media outlets. What began as outrage over internet restrictions escalated into a movement against corruption, economic exclusion, and a political class that had rotated the prime minister's post among the same figures for a decade. Youth unemployment in Nepal had reached 20.8% in 2024, and nearly a third of the population lived and worked abroad. The government fell. Nepal's March 2026 elections delivered a landslide to the Rastriya Swatantra Party. Its leader, Balendra Shah, a 35-year-old former rapper, became prime minister.

Sri Lanka's 2022 Aragalaya protests toppled a sitting president. Bangladesh's 2024 student movement led to the resignation of Sheikh Hasina and the installation of an interim government. Across South Asia, youth-led movements have rewritten political arrangements in countries where the gap between democratic promise and administrative reality grew wide enough to generate organised alternatives.

Each movement shared the same structure: young people locked out of economic participation, a political elite entrenched for a generation, digital infrastructure that made organisation faster than governments could respond, and a single triggering moment that converted diffuse frustration into collective identity.

The Cockroach Janta Party has all four of those elements. J&K's young people, carrying the additional weight of constitutional uncertainty and a recruitment system compromised across multiple examination cycles, represent a concentrated version of the same frustration inside the same national movement.

Nepal's establishment chose suppression. A 35-year-old former rapper is now prime minister.

The CJI's remark reflected a coherent institutional logic: classify the critics as the problem, and the underlying failures become someone else's concern.

The cockroach's biology refutes that logic. It processes filth that others leave behind. It thrives where rot has accumulated. It has survived every attempt at extermination through adaptation. The creature selected as a metaphor for disposable, inconvenient youth turned out to be the one organism most biologically suited to outlasting institutional failure. The dominant species of the Cretaceous period is available for fossil study. The cockroach is at Jantar Mantar.

The rot in India's case is extensively documented. Graduate unemployment is at 40% nationally. Urban youth unemployment is at 32% in J&K. A medical entrance examination was sold for Rs 30 lakh and cancelled twice. A recruitment board in J&K that has leaked papers across successive examination cycles. A satirical social media account was shut down within four days of reaching scale. Mobile internet was cut in the capital on the opening day of Parliament. Tear gas was deployed against a march whose participants carried no weapons and whose videos show no violence.

The Cockroach Janta Party is the form democratic dissent takes when democratic institutions stop functioning as designed. A peaceful, constitutionally grounded movement that channels collective frustration into manifestos, sit-ins, electoral bids, and public accountability demands is precisely what a democracy should produce and protect.

India is closing those channels. The government characterises protesters as politically manipulated. It offers meetings only after it has deployed force. It cuts the internet on the opening day of Parliament. It withholds satirical accounts. It forcibly hospitalises activists on hunger strike two days before a planned mass march.

The Egyptian banishment spell is three thousand years old. The cockroach is still in the room, and it is still processing the rot.

The swarm was at Jantar Mantar for 36 days. It left having secured the resignation of a Cabinet minister, a parliamentary commitment on examination accountability, amnesty for every student who marched on July 20, and compensation for the families of those who did not survive the examination crisis. The student organisations that joined the movement are still on the streets, with demands that go well beyond one resignation. The conditions that produced this generation's fury remain intact.

The Egyptian banishment spell is three thousand years old. It has never worked. The cockroach endures, tested against every attempt at elimination the planet has produced.

The spray has never worked. This is what cockroaches do.

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Anas Ahmad Tak