Commentary: India’s ‘cockroach’ youth are proving hard to crush

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SINGAPORE: India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is facing a second wave of youth-led protests this year. An earlier wave began in June over examination scandals and culminated in the resignation of the education minister in July. But now, the stakes are higher – protestors are seeking to oust India’s election chief.

As befits its name, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) refuses to be shooed away. 

The movement’s founder Abhijeet Dipke was detained by police upon arrival at the airport on Saturday (Oct 10), ahead of a planned protest over the weekend, and released a day later. Tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were mobilised in the capital, with reports that they dragged protesters off the streets and carted them away in vans and buses.

It showed how seriously Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government perceives them as a threat. 

THE GERONTOCRACY IS AT A LOSS

The cultivated aura of Mr Modi, 76, has been punctured; a key element of the Gen Z-led protests is their irreverence. 

The Instagram- and YouTube-raised generation has been openly mocking Mr Modi and his BJP. Another target is India’s mainstream media, which Gen Z sees as toeing the government line.

India’s fundamentally patriarchal, gerontocratic establishment just does not know how to deal with this new and frustrated generation of irreverent youth – who appear to only gather strength from every crackdown.  

In the June and July protests, police fired tear gas and violently contained the protests. This time, they tried to prevent the protests before they even began by detaining CJP leaders and protesters on their way to the protest site Jantar Mantar.

Undaunted protesters went straight back into the streets after their release. 

On Monday, authorities shut Jantar Mantar as an authorised protest site. Two CJP leaders entered the stretch of road that had been one of India’s most prominent protest sites for three decades anyway, and were subsequently sent to jail for five days.

The Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) also filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court over alleged detention, assault, and obstruction of journalists. 

Neha Bora, a 29-year-old doctorate student at Delhi’s traditionally leftist (and therefore frowned on by the right-wing BJP) Jawaharlal Nehru University and the national president of the All India Students' Association has become a social media phenomenon. Bora has been detained multiple times. She has run through the streets of the capital dodging police, later to appear alongside Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at the third day of the protests on Monday. 

LARGER GRIEVANCES

The movement itself was born out of a slight in May, when India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant likened unemployed youth who turn to social media or “right to information” activism – moving courts essentially to force information from the government – to “cockroaches”. He later said he had been misquoted.

The Cockroach Janta Party (janta means people) within weeks got millions of followers on Instagram. Gen Z responded by turning the label into momentum: What started as frustration over education became about larger grievances. 

If there was an Indian dream, despite robust economic growth it has been elusive for many young people. At over 7 per cent growth, India is among the fastest-growing major economies of the world, but analysts have been warning of jobless growth. 

India has the largest youth population in the world, with 371 million young people. Nearly 65 per cent of the population is of working age. But there are not enough jobs. 

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the unemployment rate of college graduates aged 15 to 29 was 28.4 per cent in 2023. About 7 to 8 million youth will be added to the labour force annually in the next decade. India risks wasting its demographic dividend.

SUSTAINING THE MOMENTUM

The youth movement has now turned its attention to elections and an electorate verification exercise they say strikes at the heart of a functioning democracy. 

The CJP is calling for the ouster of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and a complete halt to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise undertaken by the Election Commission to verify and revise electoral rolls.  

Over 130 million names have been struck off the roll, with allegations that many were wrongful deletions that disenfranchised eligible voters. The SIR exercise may have affected the outcome of elections in West Bengal, a state long coveted by and finally won by the BJP in May.

The Narendra Modi government is weaker than it has ever been, senior journalist, film maker and publisher Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told me. 

“What is unique about (the movement) is that it has broken social barriers – gender, caste, religion and class.  The scale and spontaneity has taken the government by surprise, and having accepted the demand of the youth and the students for the resignation of the education minister, it fears that if the chief election commissioner is removed it will become weaker and vulnerable to more pressure to completely scrap the SIR.”

This would be a significant reversal. “SIR is its (the BJP’s) final attempt to convert a rambunctious democracy into a tame, gelded electorate which it can call upon at will to legitimise its democratic credentials," historian and political and social essayist Mukul Kesavan told The Wire this week. 

Taking on an immovable state may lead to a stalemate, but the broadening youth movement is unlikely to stop trying. There are risks ahead, including violence, and disunity in the leadership, but there is no doubt that this is the most serious threat to the credibility and stability of the Modi government since the prime minister first took power in 2014.

Across South Asia, youth are demanding more and increasingly challenging entrenched, orthodox and in many cases corrupt political elites. There are lessons in this that could resonate beyond India – the world’s largest democracy – to corrupt and complacent gerontocracies elsewhere. 

Nirmal Ghosh, a former foreign correspondent, is an author and independent writer based in Singapore. He writes a monthly column for CNA, published every third Friday.