India’s Cockroach Movement Is Just Getting Started

Since the Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court, Surya Kant, described the country’s unemployed youth as ‘parasites’ and ‘cockroaches’, state forces have shot, beaten, tear-gassed, hospitalised, imprisoned, doxed and harassed the school-age students who took to the streets to denounce the broken education system.

Yet this movement, which quickly adopted the name ‘Cockroach Janta Party’, has nevertheless gained strength, mobilising tens of thousands and giving voice to millions more. As it channeled widespread anger at the corruption and cruelty of the ruling BJP, it sent shockwaves through the establishment, toppling the notoriously venal education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, earlier this month.

Now, following this crucial victory, the Cockroach movement has reached a transition point. Its cadre who feel that the central government is no longer listening have called for a march in Delhi on 5 September, and some are travelling across the country to support local student protests that have continued to rage since the minister resigned.

One of the activists at the centre of the movement is Danish Ali, a student leader and organiser in Delhi who went on hunger strike at the height of the revolt. Threats from the government levelled at her and her family have not weakened her resolve. While traveling on a solidarity tour through the state of Bihar, she spoke to Tribune about the rising anger and desperation in Modi’s India, the evolving tactics and objectives of the Cockroach Movement, and where it goes from here.

Evan Robins

Why did you get involved in the Cockroach movement?

Danish Ali

As a young person in India, you just feel very disheartened. You feel like your life will never improve. The BJP has deliberately destroyed the education system, and here the leaking of exam papers — which gave rise to this movement — is one of the key issues. Leaks mean that students are required to re-take their exams, which naturally causes outrage. Earlier this year, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper, which one has to take for entry to medical college, was leaked. That same paper was also leaked two years prior. I myself had to sit for a re-examination after a different paper was leaked in 2024. It’s become a tradition in this country.

This is happening not only at the national level but also at the state level, where many state jobs require an entrance exam. There are serious issues around these jobs. One is that vacancies are becoming increasingly scarce. Another is that there is already a long delay to find out if you passed the exam. If a government exam happens in 2026, then the result will come out years later, maybe by 2028. Between the leaks and the delays, many people who’ve been continuously preparing and betting their whole future on the exams are disappointed. You simply cannot trust the examination system of this country anymore. You cannot believe that if you are meritorious enough, if you work hard enough, that you will have a better life.

Beyond that, the country’s educational spaces are physically crumbling, especially in government schools. There aren’t enough classrooms or enough teachers. There are no laboratories, no libraries and no playgrounds. The BJP government has deliberately created this situation and uses it as an excuse to close government schools around the country. A new study shows that more than 90,000 government schools have been closed over the last decade, an average of around twenty-five a day. The students who go to these schools come from very marginalised backgrounds and cannot afford private school.

Colleges and universities are also in a very bad shape. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), for example, is one of the top universities in the country. But if you go to JNU, you find that the hostels and classrooms are in disrepair. Ceiling fans fall on the heads of students. In one case, the ceiling itself fell down. That’s a top university, so just imagine the condition of the state level universities.

Funding cuts are one of the main causes of decline. Student organisations have been demanding that the central budget expenditure on education be increased to at least 10 percent. Right now, it’s not even near 3 percent. But instead of increasing this figure, the government is trying to force institutions to generate their own funding, and that leads to fee hikes. As a result the students who can’t afford the higher fees don’t go to higher education institutions at all.

The government is trying to destroy the very idea of public education; they want to privatise the system and sell education as a commodity. They are comfortable, to say the least, with all the corruption in the system. When we started this movement, we wanted to snatch that comfort away. We wanted to tell corrupt ministers that someone has to take responsibility for the paper leaks, which are so devastating that they cause some students to commit suicide. As the person sitting at the top of the education system, we believed the education minister himself needed to resign.

Evan Robins

What has been your role in the movement?

Danish Ali

I’m a doctoral student at JNU, where I’m the joint secretary of the students’ union. I’m also connected to a student organisation, the All India Students’ Association (AISA), which has been continuously raising these issues for decades. Back when the previous paper leak happened in 2024, we went to Jantar Mantar, organised a sit-in for ten days and were detained by the Delhi police.

There was initially a lot of doubt and scepticism among students, and among many people in general about the Cockroach movement, especially because of the narratives peddled by Godi media and the BJP IT cell. Many people questioned Abhijee Dipke, the thirty-year old founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, who left Boston University to return to India and lead the protests. ‘Who is he?’ ‘What are his motives?’ I also had those doubts, as did my organisation. But we knew we had to come together and fight.

Evan Robins

How has the movement developed over the last several months?

Danish Ali

Because the movement started as a kind of an internet phenomenon, as a meme, many people said that it wouldn’t translate into a genuine mobilisation. There were real concerns that people wouldn’t show up for the first big protest on 6 June. But thousands of people from around the country arrived in Jantar Matar in Delhi that day, and it was a big success. After that, we started seeing student protests across India: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bangalore and Pune.

Despite this, the government still refused to open any lines of dialogue with us. On 20 June, protests again started at Jantar Mantar, and we decided to shift to a sit-in protest. When the government remained unresponsive, the activist Sonam Wangchuk went on a hunger strike and I decided to join him, along with five others in my organisation.

This was the peak of summer in India. There was so much heat and humidity during the day. At night, the rain would destroy our tents. The police were a constant threat. They declared the protest illegal and tried to get us to move out. But somehow we continued. On the seventh day of my hunger strike I had to be hospitalised because my body stopped retaining water and my blood sugar was dangerously low. Some of the others continued for twenty-three days.

In the early morning hours of the twenty-first day of the hunger strike, the Delhi police used white sheets to hide the main stage area and brutally dragged Wangchuk away. The image was haunting. After seeing how the government treated the hunger strikers, the movement gained a lot of support from across the country and internationally, including from politicians, actors and singers. So we called the Parliament march for 20 July. On that day, even Jantar Mantar became small, because so many people turned up. In my own estimation, it was more than 100,000, even though many people were not allowed to get to the protest site.

Evan Robins

What kind of repression did you face that day?

Danish Ali

On the night of the 19th, the police started barricading the gates to our campus. Students were stopped at their places of residence and prevented from going to the protest site. Then, when the march started, the police brutally cracked down and there was a lot of lathi-charge.

The protests, it should be said, have been peaceful from day one. Dipke has always focused on the non-violent character of the movement. At Jantar Mantar, it was the police, not the people, who were violent. They used water cannons, tear gas, and for the very first time, pellet guns in the centre of Delhi, which they’ve used on protestors in Kashmir for about a decade.

The next day, I visited many hospitals in Delhi where I met victims of this police violence. I met at least two students who were injured by the pellet guns, even though the Delhi police initially claimed they didn’t use them. There was pressure from the government to prevent the real number of casualties from coming out. The medical staff and the police both refused to tell us anything. They didn’t want the media to report that thousands of students were hurt and admitted to the hospitals around the city.

The government and the police might have thought that that kind of violence would intimidate us, and perhaps that it would prevent more students from joining. The opposite happened. People got even angrier with the government because of how they dealt with us.

After 20 July, the crowd swelled. Thousands and thousands of students came to Jantar Mantar each day and stayed there from morning until night. From that point on, the protestors were not only demanding the resignation of the education minister, but started demanding the resignation of Amit Shah, the minister of home affairs, and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government understood that if they didn’t let the education minister go, the anger of the protestors would be turned against the government itself. That’s why the resignation happened.

Evan Robins

What’s happened since the education minister resigned?

Danish Ali

Now the focus has shifted away from Delhi and Jantar Mantar to the student-led movements happening across India. I’m currently in Bihar, in the capital city of Patna, where a movement against paper leaks has been going on for at least twenty days and there are students on hunger strike. In Jharkhand, there was a twenty-five day sit-in and also a hunger strike before the government had to relent to the students’ demands.

Protests are happening everywhere because this was never just about the NEET exam. This is about the corruption of this government in general, and particularly in the education system. This frustration is still there, and students are still fighting.

I should also say that there has since been intense targeting of the students who participated in the Jantar Mantar protest. The police went to my very small ancestral village and threatened my relatives. My father got a call from the police in which he was instructed to control me and to tell me that I better focus on my studies and not take part in politics. Otherwise, there would be serious consequences for my actions. My education would be ruined, my career ruined, my life ruined, they said.

This happened to so many of us, especially the women. We’ve faced online harassment by the BJP IT cell pages. Every other day we receive rape threats and death threats from BJP supporters. Our personal information, like our contact numbers and our social media, has been made public and we’ve been doxed. Modi even made a video in which he said that he got culture shock seeing women openly abuse him, mock him and critique him.

One of the beautiful things about this protest was that so many young women turned up and became the face of the movement. That’s something that the patriarchal attitude of the BJP and the RSS simply cannot tolerate.

Evan Robins

What are you hoping to achieve on this solidarity tour to Bihar?

Danish Ali

The idea of the tour is that we should listen to each other as students and come together to decide how we are going to continue this fight. We’ve named it the Student Youth Parliament.

We started our tour on 11 July in Bihar, which is a very poor state. Here, people have to migrate out of the state in order to find work, because the state government cannot provide them employment. The students here were frustrated about the leaks and scams, but also with the way the government was treating the students who went out into the streets to protest. When these students themselves began protesting, the repression was very intense. The police even used AK-47 guns on them in a small town called Siwan. I personally met three students who had bullet injuries. From there, we’ve been visiting different villages and cities of the state, trying to coordinate with the students who have their own particular demands, like those on hunger strike here in Patna.

This government is increasingly dictatorial. I would call it a fascist regime. It has captured all the democratic institutions in this country — the electoral commission, the justice system, the media, the army and the police. If we want to resist this kind of government, we have to come together, forget our small differences and collectively struggle against their policies. My organisation, AISA, has been planning the future of this movement since the protest at Jantar Mantar concluded. Our president, Neha Bora, is also on tour visiting different places like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kerala and Mumbai.

When students in Bihar are protesting, students in other states must be in solidarity with them. When we were sitting at Jantar Mantar, students joined us from Bihar, Kashmir, the northeast, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and more. We understand that only by coming together can we be a strong force against this government, and through our efforts, actually push the government out of power.

Evan Robins

The BJP lost by-elections earlier this month in Bankipur, Bihar and Datia, Madhya Pradesh. These are places where the party usually wins, and opposition figures have credited the protests with these results. What’s your read on the movement’s ability to dislodge the BJP electorally?

Danish Ali

When the Modi government came to power twelve years ago it claimed an overwhelming mandate. But in the last two or three years, and especially since the recent protests, it is no longer confident about its popular base. When we were on hunger strike, so many people came to tell us that they used to be supporters of BJP but they’ve now come to the conclusion that this government is not doing the country any good. One man came to us and said that he had voted for BJP, but that his child — a NEET aspirant — had committed suicide, and he believed the government’s corruption was to blame.

The popular frustration is not just about education. As the government stokes hatred against Muslims, mob lynchings are happening and other forms of arbitrary violence have become more common. There are few protections, and there is no justice. It’s much the same for dalits and lower caste people who are being killed and mistreated, and for women who are facing all manner of attacks. This is a government that is constantly rewarding ministers who have rape charges against them. Every other day, you hear ministers making grotesque misogynistic statements. Crime against women has significantly increased; we constantly hear about a rape that has happened in this town or in that town, in that city or in this city. We don’t feel safe in this country anymore. The government also passed an anti-transgender bill earlier this year which removed the right to gender self-identification. Workers, too, have been hit by the government’s regressive policies. The new labour codes were pushed through without even the most basic consultation with the people they will affect. The farmers are suffering after the government has rowed back on promises after the major protests that erupted in 2020.

So the reality of Modi’s India is very different to the image he projects. It won’t be easy to change this when so many people are suffering. But if we don’t challenge the government, we’ll all be suffering for years to come.