The cockroach dilemma facing India’s political parties

How does the cockroach protest alter India’s political landscape? A considerable section of those opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sees hope in the mobilisation triggered by the self-deprecating cockroach activists. Some even believe that political parties— particularly the Congress — should fall in line with the outfit that calls itself the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which took its name from a remark by a judge of the Supreme Court of India who likened India’s disgruntled youth to cockroaches. An opposing view, expressed as hope within the BJP and concern within the Congress, is that this protest could cannibalise the latter. “AAP [the Aam Aadmi Party] finished the Congress in Delhi and Punjab. Let’s see where the CJP ends the Congress,” Devendra Kumar, an election strategist who works with the BJP, posted on X.

The Opposition parties are not unified in their approach to the cockroach protest. Differences exist both between and within parties. The Samajwadi Party and the Left believe that joining the protesters could expand the Opposition space, while within the Congress, opinions are divided over whether playing second fiddle to the protesters would be useful. There are also voices within the Left that favour a more cautious approach. On July 21, the Congress attempted to seize the moment by staging a dharna outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence.

The politics of public anger

Occasional outbursts of public anger, frustration, and resentment against the government of the day are a normal feature of democratic societies. Whether such sporadic outbursts turn into political mobilisation with electoral consequences is a different question. A protest movement can lead to diametrically opposite outcomes depending on the circumstances. Public anger can be consolidated and galvanised into dramatic electoral outcomes; it can also be diffused through protest, averting or diverting political change.

The Kejriwal-Anna movement of 2011 consolidated public anger against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and in favour of the Narendra Modi-led BJP. The Congress bore the brunt of public anger then. Now, the party fears that popular resistance against the ruling BJP, which it believes is snowballing, could be scattered by an apolitical mobilisation without any clear programme or organisation. Those in the Opposition who want to ride with the cockroach protest believe that the protesters are taking aim at the government, and that this sentiment can and should be politicised and amplified through better coordination with them.

Referencing at least three past instances of self-proclaimed apolitical mobilisation may be helpful. The protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019-20 and the farmers’ protests of 2020-21, both of which took place during the second term of the Modi government belong to one category. Before these came the Anna Hazare-Arvind Kejriwal anti-corruption agitation of 2011, followed by the Nirbhaya rape and murder protests of 2012.

There is no way to precisely decipher the social composition of these movements, but some broad features are worth noting. The farmers’ protests were driven largely by relatively prosperous farmers in a narrow belt around Delhi. The anti-CAA protests came to be framed largely as a Muslim issue. An urban middle class that considers itself apolitical took out candles for Anna’s movement and its call to “hang the corrupt at Vijay Chowk”, as it was put, but remained silent during the farmers’ protests and possibly turned against the anti-CAA movement.

By then, its apoliticism had, in many cases, turned into outright communalism. The apolitical middle class periodically finds purpose in declaring all politics illegitimate and undesirable, rallying instead around movements that usually reflect immediate personal grievances — price rise in 2011, question-paper leaks, or the severe income and opportunity stress confronting young people in 2026. Examination irregularities are only the trigger; protesters are agitated by the precarity staring them in the face.

The farmers forced the government to withdraw the controversial farm laws, while the CAA protests fizzled out. Both protests had limited political impact nationally in subsequent elections. They represented sectional interests that the BJP could isolate as the other and amplify its own politics. It is precisely on this point that youth protesters pose an unprecedented challenge to the BJP and an opportunity for the Opposition.

CJP protesters represent a horizontal segment of Indian society, concentrated in the BJP strongholds of the Hindi heartland, where the demographic bulge is manifesting more as disenchantment than hope. It is a segment that cannot easily be cornered as a sectional interest or labelled in any other manner easily by the BJP. It is socially diverse but largely located within the young, Hindu-Hindi spectrum, preempting any communal polarisation on the issue. Anti-corruption slogans were a shell for movements such as the Gujarat Navnirman movement (1974), the JP Movement (1974), and the Anna movement, in which diverse interest groups coalesced to undermine the Congress system.

The difference now

Whether the same pattern of mobilisation that helped bring the BJP and its Hindutva politics to power can also undermine it remains an open question. At its peak in 2019, the BJP secured about 37% of the national vote. At any given point, more than 60% of Indians do not vote for the BJP. If a protest remains confined to a particular segment of society or a particular region of the country, the BJP remains largely unconcerned. It may even seek a counter-consolidation, as it did during the farmers’ and anti-CAA protests. There is considerable dynamism in the voting preferences of people. The BJP may have lost many of its earlier supporters since 2014 while gaining new ones elsewhere. The ideological appeal of Hindutva remains intact, but the party is also keen to improve its vote-to-seat ratio through a fresh delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies ahead of the next general election (in 2029).

In the BJP’s scheme of things, it would rather have the CJP in the headlines than Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. But its toolkits for dealing with protests, which worked earlier, are less effective now, partly because the BJP is dealing with a new generation and its collective psyche. The 20-year-old protester of today was only eight when Mr. Modi became Prime Minister in 2014. It was their parents’ generation that cheered the arrival of the BJP then; their children are now shaking off the burden of their political inheritance. If it was the WhatsApp generation that fuelled the rise of what I term Hindutva 2.0 under Mr. Modi, it is the Instagram generation that is challenging it now. All this makes it possible that this apolitical, sporadic outburst of public anger could expand into a mass mobilisation with sufficient critical weight to unsettle the BJP. What is clear, however, is that the cockroach protesters alone have no capacity to achieve that. That is where the role of the Opposition, particularly the Congress, becomes critical.

A new battleground

The BJP and its Jan Sangh predecessors were able to turn popular mobilisations such as the JP movement and the Anna movement to their advantage and against the Congress, while leaving smaller political gains to figures such as V.P. Singh and Mr. Kejriwal along the way. This is the first time that a comparable phenomenon is being tested against the BJP itself — a party with a stronger ideology, greater organisational discipline, ruthless political determination, and a willingness to deploy state power to its advantage.

The long arc of such apolitical protests has, so far, bent towards the erosion of public trust in the liberal, secular, and untidy middle ground of Indian politics. In that sense, the cockroach protest is more a symptom than a remedy for India’s democratic disarray. Can the Congress do to the BJP what the BJP has done to the Congress over the years through apolitical protests? That is the question before us. Both the BJP and the Opposition face risks as well as opportunities in these protests.

varghese.g@thehindu.co.in