WHEN everything else comes tumbling down, the cockroaches will survive. This metaphor encapsulates an important political warning emanating from India.
What began as an online political satire materialised on the streets of Delhi this weekend. Abhijeet Dipke led a protest calling for India’s education minister to step down to answer for the mangling of India’s high-stakes university entrance exams, marred again this year by paper leaks. Dipke is the founder of the tongue-in-cheek Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a quickfire, predominantly online, youth movement sparked in response to disparaging comments against young Indians made by India’s chief justice.
Despite Dipke’s success in rallying a street protest, the CJP is unlikely to materialise as a serious threat to the ruling BJP. But it does highlight the growing explosiveness of youth disaffection, which over the coming years is increasingly likely to erupt.
Complacency in the face of youth movements is misplaced. In recent months, young activists toppled governments in Bangladesh and Nepal. Pakistan itself has a history of youth activism in the form of the National Students Federation (NSF), which led to Ayub Khan’s downfall in 1969. More recent youth movements have taken the form of ethnonationalist mobilisations or religious politics (which, in an extreme form, have presented as militancy). These framings have, however, diluted the youth concerns that are being prioritised in regional youth activism.
India’s CJP has flared in popularity because mainstream politics is not adequately engaging with youth challenges: the failings of the education system, followed by the disappointments of the job market. Forty per cent of under-25 Indian graduates are unemployed, and one in five of all 20-29 year olds are jobless.
Complacency in the face of youth movements is misplaced.
The bleak prospects for dignified work and prosperity in the age of AI, the choking of emigration options, the mounting of stressors linked to climate change and conflict — all these herald the persistence, indeed the growth, of youth activism.
This aligns with global trends, with ‘Gen-Z socialism’ proving unsettling enough for the Economist to call it out as a disruptive political force. The Western version of youth activism is driven by similar concerns of affordability and employment, but finds its demands coalescing more coherently around calls for wealth taxes and price controls on food and rent. Such coherence is harder won in the Global South, where youth concerns blur with wider calls for justice, accountability and rights.
How successful these movements will be depends on a few things. Firstly, on whether the youth channel their rage through democratic politics, eventually cohering into political contenders for established parties, or whether their fury will remain a rag-tag assembly of online ‘hashtag’ activism (#MainBhiCockroach), identity politics-linked protest (Aurat March), or wider mobilisations framed within ethnic, linguistic or geographic limits that are inherently fragmented at the outset.
A political approach seems unlikely. India, despite being the most mature — though increasingly flawed — regional democracy, has worrying figures. The BBC reports on a survey that found that 29pc of young Indians avoided politics entirely, while only 11pc were members of a political party.
The other question is how intense the crackdown on youth politics will be. The New Delhi police allowed the CJP protest to go ahead this weekend, and, at the time of writing, Dipke had not been arrested.
That’s not how it usually goes. Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh was toppled because of the severity of its response to peaceful student protests calling for reforms to the quota system in civil service jobs. Security crackdowns involving bloodshed, student arrests and an internet ban fuelled youth rage. That rage was underpinned, as elsewhere, by the desperation of 18 million jobless youth feeling disempowered and neglected while corruption lined the pockets of elite stakeholders.
Pakistan reacts similarly to youth political organising. The threat of the NSF has led to subsequent decades of suppression of youth activism, through student union bans, media censorship and authoritarian tactics. Charismatic leaders such as Dr Mahrang Baloch are indefinitely detained, and anti-terrorism laws are deployed to ban any youth-dominated movement that threatens to build traction. The tactic used on the PTM has now been deployed against the JAAC.
But as ridiculous as it may be, that’s why the CJP should be taken seriously. It’s a reminder to the political establishment that no matter how hard you try, you can’t get rid of ‘cockroaches’, no matter efforts to censor, intimidate, disappear or proscribe them. That’s the political reality for the coming decades.
The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.
X: @humayusuf
Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2026