Who are the women powering India's youth-led protests?

On July 20, Navkiran Natt and her partner set out for the magistrate's office in New Delhi to get married. They arrived to find a tense situation, with police gathering to break up a youth-led march on Parliament. Office staff — and couple's wedding witnesses — running late due to barricades. 

The protest movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) had announced the march to demand the resignation of India's then-Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. 

The protesters were met with heavy resistance from security forces, who had deployed batons, tear gas shells and pellet-firing shotguns, leading to injuries and mass detentions.

Less than three months later, on October 10, Natt left home early in the morning and spent the day crisscrossing the locked-down Indian capital looking for a protest she could join. 

"The success of this protest is not how many people will reach Jantar Mantar," she told DW, referring to the protest site in central New Delhi. "It's that even after all this barricading and state violence, people are leaving their homes to join."

What are these protests about?

The CJP began as a satirical online movement after the chief justice of India, Surya Kant, referred to unemployed young people as "cockroaches" in an offhand remark. The name is an ironic riff on the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

After succeeding in seeing Pradhan step down in late July, the CJP is now demanding the resignation of the country's controversy-hit Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, after more than 130 million names were removed from draft electoral rolls nationwide.

With CJP leadership in judicial custody or under threat of detention, one name has fast become synonymous with the demonstrations: student leader Neha Bora, who prefers to use the pronoun they/them. 

Bora has run through the streets to dodge police officials, climbed barricades in the face of security personnel, shouted slogans from detention vans, and addressed press conferences alongside CJP spokespersons and others. 

They are the president of the All India Students' Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (CPI-ML). 

"In extremely disappointing, fearful, tyrannical times, people try to gather hope from whatever source they can … If these people are fighting, then probably we can also fight," Bora DW.

"It is a responsibility that you owe to people," they added. 

Women out on the streets in large numbers

The Cockroach-led demonstrations also come at a time when women and members of the LGBTQ+ community are calling for greater autonomy for women in the aftermath of the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in New Delhi late last month, placing the issue of safety in India back into the spotlight.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 441,534 cases of crimes against women were registered in 2024, averaging 1,210 cases per day. Experts say these official statistics can only give a partial account of gendered violence. 

But despite facing sexualized backlash from police on the streets and from online mobs, the women and genderqueer people leading the movement reject being cast as victims. 

"The "beti bachao" [save the daughter] thing just doesn't cut it with this generation. It is a very specific ask: see us as political beings, free beings," activist Kavita Krishnan told DW. 

"Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao" (Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter) is a flagship BJP government program launched in 2015.

Protest as daily life

These days, Gurmeher Kaur's day starts like any other — a workout or a yoga class — and often ends with Indian Youth Congress's lawyers getting her released from police detention. 

"Resistance can't be a separate event … a big day, and then you go back to your regular life," she told DW.

The 29-year-old author of "The Young and the Restless: Youth and Politics in India" spent a better part of the last decade in the public eye. 

This year, she joined the youth wing of India's main opposition party, The Congress, whose offices are located a stone's throw away from Jantar Mantar, the hub of the last wave of protests.

She said her political association has given her access to resources that can support the movement, offering a safety net for protesters "regardless of their political affiliation."

At a time when authorities are cracking down on CJP protesters, she said opposition members like her have a duty to fulfill: "Show up, put your body on the line."

The price of visibility

But showing up often comes with a cost, especially for women and queer protesters. 

Kaur explains how male colleagues often "feel quite elated when their photos are in the media." However, for her, "attention is equal to death and rape threats and humiliation and abuse."

Natt, an activist most significantly associated with the 2020–2021 farmers' protests, echoes Kaur's experience.

"If a woman is leading the protest, the first attack is on her sexuality," she said. 

Social media images have shown women protesters with their clothes torn during clashes with police.

Delhi officials have denied allegations of manhandling, adding that women protesters were treated with "dignity."

Bora refutes the police's claim, saying that a small number of female personnel were available to handle a large number of women protesters.

"Several women protesters came to protect me and prevent me from getting detained," they said. 

Authorities have registered a police case against a journalist who accused a senior Delhi police officer of sexual harassment under an Indian law meant to prevent crimes against members of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). They say her own allegations are under investigation.

The internet was also flooded with AI-made, sexualized images of women protesters edited into protest photos.

Why activists say the tactic is failing

This has not prevented protesters from taking to the streets even the day after being detained by authorities. 

"They don't know what they're dealing with," Krishnan said, referring to the government's crackdown on demonstrators.

She said authorities assume sexual humiliation will scare women off, but "this is not a generation that thinks of… sexual violence as being something shameful."

She was at the forefront of demonstrations after the 2012 "Nirbhaya" gang rape, where slogans like "Hang the rapists" were seen in public. This time, however, she said the anger "is not going to be about masculine displays of honor." 

It is about "dignity and freedom ... Women face all kinds of problems in every country, and Indian women are no different," she added. 

She said the youth-led protests are part of a wider global wave of "civilizational, cultural nationalism," which uses gender and the language of protection, whether of daughters, families or tradition, to rally support against minorities, immigrants and trans people. 

"You listen to the rhetoric of Donald Trump or Viktor Orban or the Alternative for Germany (AfD). It is the same," she said, referring to politics in the United States and Europe. "If you look at what's happening in India, you may be able to better understand what's happening in your country."

These young Indians, she said, are refusing to be taken in. They are "fighting back for a language of the future, a language that has hope."

Edited by: Wesley Rahn