Hundreds of people braved the sweltering heat to gather at a protest site in New Delhi donning cockroach masks on June 7, in the first physical demonstration of a nascent Gen Z movement called the “Cockroach Janata Party” that has already gained millions of followers online.
The city’s press corps turned up in large numbers to cover the great crawling out party.
It was the culmination of what emerged as an online satire in reaction to a throwaway comment by the chief justice equating jobless youths to cockroaches.
It blew up in no time, accumulating 19 million Instagram followers in less than a week, more than what the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party can boast of, and enough to raise “national security” fears for the government to have its site blocked on social media platforms.
The creator of this unique “voice of the lazy and unemployed”, a student at Boston University, made a dramatic return to Delhi on the day of the protest to lead the “revolution”.
His immediate demand is the resignation of India’s education minister, who has presided over a series of public examination fiascos such as paper leaks and misgrading that have aggravated the country’s youth.
After the initial uncertainty over whether the demonstration would be allowed at all, a government not known to take kindly to dissent relented with a super-quick clearance to avoid confrontation as the crowds swelled.
It is emblematic of pathologies that go beyond Modi’s government, and even India.
More than anything else, the cockroach movement is a reflection of the universal decay of political parties that ails all democracies today.
It is an expression of a deeply felt crisis of representation that has come to pervade India and many other democracies, where people do not connect with political parties anymore – including Opposition parties – and hence do not consider them as useful platforms for channeling their dissent.
The claustrophobia of post-truth polities with captured institutions run by strongmen like Modi, where the norms of democratic correction do not seem to hold anymore and dissent may feel futile, only exacerbates this resigned disconnect – but is not its principal trigger.
