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Why India's cockroach protesters are still on the streets in over 40C heat
Delhi's Jantar Mantar - an 18th century astronomical observatory and the Indian capital's best-known protest site - is heaving with hundreds of students, young professionals and activists who have camped here day and night for the past 10 days.
A harsh sun beats overhead and temperatures hover above 40C. Young men and women stand around in groups; some sit, while others even sleep on the baking-hot road, hemmed in by heavy, yellow, metal barricades erected by Delhi police to contain the crowd.
As protest leaders take turns at the microphone, the crowd chants slogans and sings Bollywood songs of rebellion under the watchful gaze of police and paramilitary personnel.
The protesters, who call themselves "cockroaches", belong to an online satirical movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).
They are demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan after a key entrance exam for aspiring doctors - called the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET-UG - was cancelled in early May following a paper leak. They say he must take moral responsibility for the leak and quit.
On Sunday, the protests intensified after Sonam Wangchuk, a well-known climate activist from a remote Himalayan region, joined the protesters and began an indefinite hunger-strike.
CJP emerged in mid-May after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant triggered outrage by likening some unemployed young people turning to journalism and activism to "cockroaches" and "parasites".
The judge later said he was referring to people with "fake and bogus degrees", not young people in general, but the backlash had already spread.
The man at the centre of this movement is CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke - a 30-year-old postgraduate student of public policy at Boston University in the US.
"I had just come back from the gym and was playing FIFA on my PS5 when I saw the chief justice's comment," he told the BBC at the protest ground.
A bit disappointed and baffled" by it, he shared in a one-line post on X: "What if all cockroaches come together?
Dipke's attracted hundreds of thousands of views and responses, "especially from the Gen-Z".
There were lots of memes and jokes and comments and many of them wrote saying we should start our own platform, maybe our own party. And I thought, why not, let's do something crazy.
An AI prompt gave him a logo and a mascot - a suit-wearing cockroach. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) - the name parodying Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - was born.
Within days, CJP evolved from a platform for memes and jokes into a forum where young people voiced anxieties about scarce jobs and repeated exam-paper leaks - and demanded answers from those in power.
"None of this was intended or planned. It was just meant to be satire, but as millions began signing up, people started saying we also want to turn this into a serious movement because no other political party is talking about our needs or hopes and aspirations. I was kind of forced into it by our supporters," says Dipke.
As we are a youth movement, we decided to first take up the issue that concerns the youth. Over the years, we've seen so many exams getting cancelled and no-one doing anything to fix the system or taking accountability.
CJP is not a political party, and its leaders show no sign of wanting it to become one. Nor is it clear whether its vast online following - 22 million on Instagram - can translate into support on the ground.
CJP's first protest, demanding Pradhan's resignation, was also held at Jantar Mantar on 6 June, shortly after Dipke returned from Boston. His return - and the planned protest - had been widely publicised, and few expected police would let him attend.
"Even I didn't think I'd be allowed to leave the airport. I was expecting to be arrested," he said, adding that he was met at his seat inside the plane by police, but they let him off and a few hours later he was at Jantar Mantar, leading the protest.
Since then, CJP has staged protests in half a dozen cities before returning to Jantar Mantar last week to renew its demand for the minister's resignation. This time, organisers say, they will not leave until he steps down.
Pradhan has refused to quit, dismissing CJP and its supporters as "the B-team of disruptive elements" who "do not have faith in the country's progress".
Nitin Nabin, the BJP president, also attacked the group, warning of "new virus and cockroach-like parties" emerging "to destroy" and "break the country into pieces".
On 21 June, the government held a re-test of NEET-UG, but it has done little to assuage the anger at Jantar Mantar.
At the protest site, cries of "Pradhan go back" ring out every few minutes. Beneath a yellow tarpaulin stands a memorial wall for students whose families say they took their own lives after the NEET-UG exam was first cancelled.
A volunteer lifts the tarpaulin with a metal pole, revealing the names and photographs of 14 students from across India. The toll has since risen to nearly 20, says CJP's chief spokesperson, Saurav Das.
Hundreds of messages of support are scrawled beneath the photographs. One, in Hindi, reads: "If we don't fight, who will? If we don't speak, who will?"
Pointing to the photos, schoolteacher Sheetal Choudhary says these students had taken loans to study for the exam.
"They are not from well-to-do families. They are from very poor, very marginalised families. These are the sort of students that I teach in my class," she says.
Tamannah Kumari, an undergraduate hoping to join the police, says she comes to the protest every day because, "for the first time, someone is speaking for us".
"I'm preparing for the police recruitment exam, but I worry about a paper leak which would spoil my future," she says.
Holding a CJP flag in one hand and India's national flag in the other, Tamannah's aim is clear: "the education minister must resign".
As evening falls, the crowd at Jantar Mantar swells. "The movement is growing by the day, and the momentum is strong," says Das.
Students' unions and civil society groups are supporting us. People send us food and water. Every morning, I receive messages from people I know - and also strangers - asking how they can help.
On Sunday, thousands gathered to cheer Sonam Wangchuk, the respected educationist and environmentalist from Ladakh who inspired a hit Bollywood film, as he began an indefinite hunger strike.
"The education system has immense problems, but even the examinations are failing. I'm here to support these youths in their movement to bring accountability in education with the minister for education," he told the BBC.
But, the government, he says, "is not responsive, they are not sensitive".
When asked how long he can continue his hunger strike in temperatures above 40C, he said: "It's the early days, so no issues. But I don't think much about health. It's either death or this series of indefinite hunger strikes, whichever comes first".
The protesters, meanwhile, insist they will not leave until Pradhan resigns.
But, as Das puts it, Pradhan's resignation is "just one battle and battles can be won in days, weeks or months".
But everyone here who's on the ground and who's supporting us online knows that this is a war. And wars cannot be won in a short time.
He said that would be "to get a transparent, accountable, answerable system and that's a fight for the long run".
Source: BBC
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