India's Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) won its first fight by shaming a minister out of office. Its second, against the country's election chief, is starting to look like an attempt to topple a government.
Delhi Police detained founder Abhijeet Dipke for the second time in less than a week on October 16 as he set off for a "Lehra Do Tiranga" (Wave the Tricolour) flag march at Connaught Place, a major financial, commercial, and shopping district located in the heart of the Indian capital, the BBC reported. Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel sealed off Central Park, the planned venue, and the movement's three main leaders were once again taken into custody.
The march came five days after those leaders walked free on a promise to keep the peace.
Less than a week earlier police took Dipke off his plane at Delhi airport, and he and co-conveners Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, also detained that weekend, were released the next day on an INR50,000 ($526) surety bond "for maintaining peace and good behaviour, for a period of one year", Delhi Police said. However, Das and Ranka were back at the Jantar Mantar protest site, which the police had closed to demonstrators, on October 13, and the next day were sent to Tihar Jail for five days, accused of breaching their bonds.
Police then banned the October 16 march, and the CJP went ahead anyway with planning the gathering.
The movement is barely five months old. It began in May as an online joke after Chief Justice Surya Kant likened some unemployed young people to cockroaches, and by late July its protests over leaked exam papers had forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign, after a march on parliament turned violent. That was a policy win. The demand now is the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the scrapping of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls, which the opposition says is stripping legitimate voters from the lists and which the Election Commission says targets dead, duplicate and ineligible names.
Pressed on the streets in defiance of police bans, that demand goes to the legitimacy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 12-year tenure as head of the government itself.
The Dhaka template
The movement's allies are not helping. Neha Bora, president of the All India Students' Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, said in a video addressed to Bangladesh that circulated on October 15 that the Gen Z movement "first started in Bangladesh", congratulated Bangladeshis "for showing us the way" and called India's protests "a movement for democratic and voting rights", Varthabharati reported. Bora was subsequently detained on her way to the October 16 march.
As a result, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - the party of Prime Minister Modi - through its national spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari called her remarks an "open admission" of a planned regime change.
The reference point is August 2024, when students in neighbouring Bangladesh to the east turned a protest over job quotas into an uprising that drove Sheikh Hasina into exile in India, where she now lives. Nepal's Gen Z later protests in September 2025 brought down KP Sharma Oli's government and went on to overturn the political order at the polls in March.
India is a far harder target though. Modi has run the country since 2014 and won a third term in 2024, and, as Sadanand Dhume argued for the Council on Foreign Relations in a July essay, political, financial and technological power in India is not concentrated in one city the way it is in Dhaka or Kathmandu. The crowds are also smaller than the rhetoric: the BBC counted 200-300 people at Connaught Place at the start of the evening, well outnumbered by police and journalists.
American involvement
Dipke's own CV, however, is what gives the foreign-hand theory its traction. He was living in the US and studying at Boston University when he launched the CJP in May, and returned to India only in June to take it onto the streets.
Within a week of the launch, Kerala BJP president Rajeev Chandrasekhar had called the campaign a "classic cross-border influence operation", the National Herald reported.
The accusations have multiplied since. On October 16 former BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh blamed Elon Musk for the Delhi protests, offering no evidence, and when US Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal backed the anti-SIR protests, India's ambassador in Washington, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, called her comments "unacceptable interference" in India's "internal affairs", The Hindu reported.
To date, no one has produced evidence that Washington funds or directs the CJP. The suspicion draws instead on the historical record. In Serbia, US government money - about $41mn over 1999 and 2000, according to the Washington Post - paid for opposition polling, training for the Otpor student movement in Budapest and thousands of cans of spray paint before Slobodan Milosevic fell in 2000.
Washington funded the exiled Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress for years before flying him back into Iraq in 2003, and in 2019 it recognised Juan Guaido, a Venezuelan legislator with a postgraduate degree from George Washington University, as his country's interim president. When that failed, US forces took the direct route in January and captured Nicolas Maduro.
Hasina herself was reported in August 2024 to have blamed Washington for her fall, saying she was ousted for refusing to hand over St Martin's Island in the Bay of Bengal, though her son later denied she had issued the statement. The US State Department called any suggestion of US involvement "laughable".
Why India, why now
The motive, for anyone inclined to look for one, is not hard to find. India became Russia's biggest buyer of seaborne crude after 2022, Modi hosted Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at the BRICS summit in New Delhi in September, and Washington has spent more than a year trying to bend New Delhi's energy policy - first with a 50% tariff in August 2025 and now with the late Lindsey Graham's "hellish" sanctions law, which lets the White House impose tariffs of up to 100% on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas. A Modi distracted by unrest at home would be significantly easier to deal with.
The case against US involvement though, is at least as strong. Washington already holds those tariffs as leverage, Indian refiners are cutting Russian purchases on price alone, and US Ambassador Sergio Gor said as recently as October 15 that a trade deal was "very close". Stoking chaos in the world's most populous country, a legitimate democracy and Washington's main counterweight to China in South Asia, would be a reckless way to win concessions it is already getting.
The red salute
Viewed from another angle, Bora's message, which mentioned a "red salute" in reference to her Bangladeshi audience, invites the mirror-image suspicion that even Moscow or Beijing could work through India's communist left.
At present, there is no evidence for that either. CPI(ML) Liberation is a small domestic party with a handful of MPs, Russia is one of New Delhi's oldest partners, and while China would hardly mourn an India absorbed by unrest, there is no sign it has tried to engineer one - yet.
What the cockroaches have shown since May is that youth anger over jobs and exams, and now over the vote, is real, and that Modi's government can be made to give ground.
But by defying the police days after promising to keep the peace, and by borrowing Dhaka's language, the movement risks handing Modi's ministers the foreign-plot story they have already leant on.
Could India be headed back to its 1970s norm of ruling party supporters imagining foreign agents under every bed?