The cockroach that refused to die: India’s Gen Z revolt and Asia’s youth awakening
I think I've seen this film before and I really liked the ending. What began as a slur became the emblem of India’s largest student movement in years.
Tents pitched under a battered sun, medical bulletins read out like weather reports, and a name so deliberately absurd that it has become impossible to ignore: the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). For nearly two months, Jantar Mantar in New Delhi looked less like a protest site and more like a small, improvised republic.
What began in May as an online joke aimed at India's Chief Justice Surya Kant, who had compared unemployed young people and social media activists to "cockroaches" and "parasites", grew into one of the country's largest youth mobilisations in years.
By the time Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on 25 July, the movement had forced a sitting government to blink and, in doing so, revealed something about a generation that the world had until recently written off as politically indifferent.
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Anatomy of an uprising
The trigger was mundane in the way most scandals start out mundane. In May, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, India's gateway exam for medical school, was found to have been compromised by a paper leak. More than two million students who had spent years preparing for the exam were told they would have to sit again for the test. The retest was held on 21 June.
For some, the pressure proved unbearable; families of at least a dozen students who died by suicide in the aftermath have linked their deaths to the fiasco, though the exact toll remains contested. The Cockroach Janta Party puts the number at 21. Reuters has said it could not independently verify the figure.
Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old political communications strategist who had been applying for jobs in the United States only weeks earlier, turned Kant's insult into a rallying cry. The Cockroach Janta Party started life as a satirical social media page. It now has more Instagram followers than either of India's two largest political parties.
The movement's escalation followed a familiar, almost theatrical arc. A gathering at Jantar Mantar on 6 June tested the waters. A day-long protest permitted for 20 June refused to end, hardening into a round-the-clock sit-in that has run ever since.
On 28 June, Sonam Wangchuk, the veteran education reformer and climate activist, joined the demonstrators on an indefinite hunger strike, pulling in parents, retired civil servants, lawyers, and public figures who had never previously engaged with student politics. Wangchuk was eventually carried out on a stretcher and hospitalised, an image that spread across social media and hardened public sympathy rather than dampening it.
The turning point came on 20 July, when thousands attempted to march towards parliament. Police responded with tear gas, baton charges, tasers, and pellet guns, while metro stations were shut down and barricades went up across central Delhi. Delhi Police put the injury count at roughly 180, including both officers and protesters.
Rather than dispersing the movement, the crackdown pushed it into new cities, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Ahmedabad among them, and drew solidarity demonstrations from the Indian diaspora abroad.
Five days later, Pradhan resigned. The Indian government agreed to drop cases against protesters and pay compensation to the families of students who had died. "Cockroaches won. Democracy won!" the movement posted on X, moments before crowds broke into celebration at the protest site.
A republic of strangers
What drew as much attention as the politics was the texture of the protest itself.
Restaurants and cafes near Jantar Mantar kept their shutters open through the worst of the baton charges, sheltering students who had nowhere else to run. Gurudwaras across the city, true to a role they have played in nearly every Delhi upheaval in living memory, opened their doors to the injured and the stranded without asking who they were or what they believed. Doctors set up informal first-aid stations and treated head wounds free of charge. Lawyers handed out their personal numbers and turned up outside police stations to represent students they had never met.
People travelled in from rural districts on trains they could barely afford, unconcerned about the wages they would lose. Auto-rickshaw drivers waived fares for those heading to or from the site. Mothers brought their children along, treating the protest as a claim staked on their future as much as their children's.
And in an unusually visible reversal of Delhi's long, uneasy history with gender and public space, women were seen shielding men from police lathis, while men formed protective cordons around women when police lines advanced.
Strangers shared phone chargers, water bottles, legal advice, and the informal work of fact-checking rumours as they spread.
When the police withdrew each evening, the site would turn into something closer to a fair than a protest camp, with skits, stand-up routines, songs, and satire filling the hours until morning.
What sociologists would call this
Perhaps most strikingly, in a country where communal politics can be summoned at the slightest provocation, attempts to frame the movement along Hindu-Muslim lines appeared to have found little traction with the wider public.
There is a vocabulary for what unfolded at Jantar Mantar, even if the protesters themselves would not use it. More than a century ago, French sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote about the intense, almost electric solidarity that takes hold when people gather around a shared symbol or cause, a state he called collective effervescence.
Decades later, anthropologist Victor Turner, studying ritual and pilgrimage, described a related idea: communitas, the flattened, egalitarian bond that forms specifically in liminal moments, when people step outside their everyday social roles and the usual hierarchies of caste, class, gender and seniority have not yet reasserted themselves.
During the protests, students stepped out of coaching centres, hostels and family expectations into a zone where ordinary rules were visibly suspended on both sides, the state set aside its usual restraint and the crowd set aside its usual divisions.
Each attempt to break up the protest by force paradoxically tightened the bond among those who remained, functioning less like deterrence and more like a rite of shared ordeal. In that sense, the crackdown may have done more to build the movement than any single organiser could have.
Not an isolated flashpoint
India's cockroach uprising did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the latest entry in a run of youth-led revolts that have swept across Asia since 2020, each distinct in its trigger but strikingly similar in its shape: digitally organised, largely leaderless, quick to turn state repression into fuel, and driven by a generation frustrated with entrenched elites who seem accountable to no one.
Hong Kong and Thailand, 2020
The decade's wave arguably began here. In Hong Kong, students led mass protests against a sweeping national security law.
In Thailand, they demanded constitutional reform and challenged lèse-majesté laws that criminalised criticism of the monarchy, confronting a military establishment that had long treated governance as an inheritance.
Sri Lanka, 2022
Sri Lanka's 2022 protests, known as the Aragalaya or "The Struggle," erupted in March over fuel shortages, power cuts and runaway inflation caused by government mismanagement of the economy. It led to a crisis involving severe inflation, daily blackouts, and a shortage of fuel and other essential goods.
The largely leaderless, apolitical movement camped at Galle Face Green in a protest village called "Gotagogama," chanting "Go Home Gota" and demanding then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa's resignation. In July, protesters stormed the presidential residence, forcing Rajapaksa to flee and later resign. The uprising became one of South Asia's most striking recent examples of people power.
Bangladesh, 2024
Bangladesh's 2024 July Uprising began after the High Court reinstated a quota reserving 56% of public-sector jobs for specific groups. It reignited student anger that had simmered since 2007.
What started as a campus protest escalated after police killed Abu Sayed, a student of Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur, on 16 July, and then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina called protesters "Razakars' descendants" days later, both of which drew far more people into the streets. In the face of the uprising, Hasina resigned and fled the country on 5 August 2024, ending her rule spanning over 15 years.
Nepal, 2025
A sudden government ban on social media platforms, layered on top of years of frustration with a revolving door of the same political elites, triggered protests that saw parliament set ablaze and forced then-prime minister KP Sharma Oli to resign.
Protesters nominated Sushila Karki, Nepal's first female chief justice, to lead an interim government through an informal online vote, and she was sworn in soon after.
Indonesia, 2025-2026
Anger here was sparked by a monthly housing allowance worth roughly $3,000 for members of parliament, nearly 10 times Jakarta's minimum wage, compounded by the police killing of a delivery driver during the unrest. President Prabowo Subianto eventually rescinded the allowance and suspended lawmakers' foreign travel, though not before protests left several people dead and spread in solidarity to Malaysia, Thailand, and beyond.
Similar anti-corruption and anti-government mobilisations, often carrying the "Jolly Roger" flag borrowed from the manga "One Piece" as an unlikely shared emblem, have played out in the Philippines, Mongolia, the Maldives, Timor-Leste, and Iran, with echoes as far afield as Madagascar, Peru, and Morocco.
The common thread
Strip away the local triggers – a paper leak here, a housing allowance there, a social media ban somewhere else – and the same grievances resurface again and again: youth unemployment, elite impunity, nepotism and a political class that appears to answer to no one.
The organising pattern repeats too. These movements rarely have a single leader who can be arrested or bought off. They spread through Instagram reels and livestreams rather than party structures, and they treat state violence not as a deterrent but as evidence to be broadcast.
That same decentralisation is both their strength and their vulnerability. Sri Lanka's new leadership has not dismantled the laws that made its uprising necessary in the first place. Bangladesh's interim government faced its own accusations of arbitrary arrests and press restrictions. Whether Nepal's post-uprising government will meet the expectations of the generation that toppled its predecessor remains an open question.
In India, since the protests ended, its government has appeared increasingly uneasy about the movement's digital afterlife. Authorities have sought the removal of some protest-related content, while police are pursuing legal action against several students and activists linked to the demonstrations - prompting CJP to warn that such actions would lead to further protests.
