Cockroach Protest Exposes A Youth Challenge Modi Cannot Brush Away

By K Raveendran

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government may have done itself a favour by allowing the Cockroach Janta Party protest led by Abhijit Dipke to proceed without turning it into another confrontation between the state and restless young citizens. For a government that has often preferred firmness over accommodation, the decision to let anger over examination irregularities spill from social media timelines into a public square was politically sensible. It denied the protest instant martyrdom, lowered the temperature on the streets, and allowed the ruling establishment to signal that it was not afraid of noisy dissent. But it would be a mistake for the government to read the modest crowd strength as proof that the movement is electorally harmless or socially shallow.

Numbers matter in politics, but they do not always tell the whole story. The cockroach protest did not have the machinery of a trade union, the district-level network of a national party, or the mobilisation capacity of caste and community organisations. It lacked buses, convenors, local committees, booth workers and the invisible logistics that turn outrage into a disciplined mass gathering. Yet young men and women still came from different parts of the country to join a protest around a cause that has touched nearly every middle-class, lower-middle-class and aspirational household: the credibility of examinations. That is what should worry the government. A protest without an organisation is not always a weak protest. Sometimes it is a warning that the organisation may come later.

The issue at the heart of the agitation is unusually combustible. Examination irregularities are not viewed by students as a routine administrative failure. They are seen as theft: of years of preparation, family savings, emotional stamina and the promise of social mobility. Parents mortgage comfort and sometimes assets to fund coaching, hostel stays, application fees and travel. Students spend their teenage years under brutal pressure, often measuring their self-worth against cut-off marks and answer keys. When papers leak, marking systems fail, or exam bodies appear casual about accountability, the damage is not merely procedural. It strikes at the moral bargain that keeps millions invested in the system: work hard, compete fairly, and the state will protect the sanctity of the contest.

That bargain has been under strain for some time. The explosion of competitive examinations has created a vast economy of hope, anxiety and exploitation. Coaching centres, online platforms, private hostels, test series providers and application portals have grown around a state-driven scarcity of seats and jobs. For young Indians, exams are not episodic events; they are life-defining gateways. Any perception that these gateways are compromised carries a political charge far beyond education policy. It feeds directly into discontent over unemployment, uneven opportunity and the belief that merit is being mocked by incompetence or collusion.

By permitting the protest, the government chose containment over provocation. That was a prudent move. A crackdown could have transformed a loosely structured movement into a national cause overnight. Detentions, barricades, lathi-charges or visible humiliation of young protesters would have supplied the movement with images more powerful than speeches. The decision to let the anger find physical expression allowed the state to avoid that trap. It also created a controlled release valve for frustration that had been building in the digital space, where rage often grows faster because it is not tested against the discipline of public mobilisation.

Yet the same strategy carries a risk. Once a movement moves from social media to the street, it acquires a different kind of legitimacy. Online followings can be dismissed as algorithmic storms, performative outrage or influencer politics. Bodies in a public protest are harder to wave away. They show sacrifice, however limited. They show that people were willing to travel, stand, shout, expose themselves to scrutiny and associate their names with a cause. For a movement like the CJP, that transition matters. It tells the government that the cockroach label, whether mocking, self-deprecating or defiant, has begun to carry emotional meaning among a section of youth.

Abhijit Dipke’s real achievement is not that he has built a conventional political organisation. He has not. His challenge will now be to convert attention into structure, emotion into strategy and anger into a programme. Indian politics is littered with examples of movements that captured the public mood but failed to survive the grind of organisation. The street can produce visibility, but politics and sustained pressure require cadres, discipline, internal democracy, funding transparency, local leadership and clarity of purpose.

For the government, however, the immediate question is simpler: what does it do with Dharmendra Pradhan? Modi’s decision to include the education minister in his Paris delegation was clearly meant to convey steadiness and defiance. The message was that the Prime Minister would not let a protest dictate personnel choices. Such signalling has value. No government wants to appear as if it changes ministers under street pressure. But the longer the examination issue remains alive, the more Pradhan risks becoming the face of a problem larger than himself.

A cabinet reshuffle, if it comes, gives Modi the cleanest route out. Removing or shifting Pradhan during a broader restructuring would avoid the appearance of surrender while allowing the Prime Minister to claim responsiveness. It would also help reset the education portfolio at a time when credibility matters more than rhetoric. A new minister would not solve paper leaks, institutional weaknesses or examination mismanagement overnight. But political accountability has symbolic weight. For students who believe nobody pays a price for their suffering, even a change at the top can signal that the government recognises the seriousness of the breach.

The danger for Modi lies in underestimating the emotional memory of examination failures. Young voters may not always protest in large numbers, but they carry grievances into homes, hostels, coaching classrooms and family conversations. A student who loses faith in an exam process influences parents, siblings, neighbours and peers. The political effect is diffused but real. It does not always appear immediately in rallies or vote shares, but it corrodes goodwill. For a leader who has built his authority partly on the promise of efficiency and delivery, administrative failure in such a sensitive domain is not a small embarrassment. It is a reputational wound.

The cockroach movement also arrives at a moment when youth politics is searching for new forms. Traditional student unions remain active but are often trapped within ideological campuses and party structures. Digital platforms have created leaders without offices, movements without manifestos and publics without membership cards. Such movements are unstable, sometimes erratic and vulnerable to exaggeration. But they are also fast, emotive and difficult to neutralise through old political methods. The CJP may fade, fragment or mature. Whatever its future, it has revealed a constituency that feels unheard by both the bureaucracy and mainstream opposition.

The cockroaches may not yet have the numbers to shake the government. They may not even have the structure to sustain themselves beyond the first wave of attention. But they have crawled into a crack in the Modi model: the gap between the promise of youth empowerment and the lived anxiety of young people navigating an examination system they fear is unfair. Governments can survive protests. They cannot afford to look indifferent to the dreams of students. If Modi wants to show that his concern for youth is more than a campaign refrain, the coming reshuffle offers him an opportunity to act before a manageable protest hardens into a wider political indictment. (IPA Service)