The Cockroach Janta Party won this battle partly because the legions it led seemed armoured with an alloy of innocence and insouciance. This had something to do with how young they were
It was the 6th of June. Abhijeet Dipke had set out his stall at Jantar Mantar after returning from Boston. I took an Uber to the junction where Tolstoy Marg met Janpath and walked down to the barricaded square into which the Delhi Police had kettled the protesters, the camera persons and curious political tourists like me. It was striking how young the milling crowd was. A man came up to me and hesitantly asked why I was there, given how old I was. I grinned and said, “curiosity”, which was true. It was a lively gathering, with posters calling on Dharmendra Pradhan to resign and men in startlingly plausible cockroach masks, complete with antennae, but it also felt a bit low-pressure and desultory. Sonam Wangchuk wasn’t yet a part of the demo and the hunger strike hadn’t begun.
When I returned on Monday, seven weeks later, a couple of days after Wangchuk had been forcibly removed by the police, I didn’t know what to expect. We took the Metro down to Connaught Place where the Delhi Police with characteristic pettiness had barricaded all the exits closest to the demonstration. This meant we had to walk a couple of minutes longer. As we crossed the face of the Regal Building and got to Parliament Street, we saw that the place was rammed with people. It was impossible to get to the manch; we were jammed in the middle of a congealed mass of young people, shifting this way and that. The average age of the gathering seemed lower than India’s voting age and yet, for the first time in years, a release from the airless inhumanity of Narendra Modi’s politics began to seem possible.
Not because the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan will change desi politics or even fix the broken examination machinery that triggered this uprising. The possibilities that this movement has created are to do with the way in which it expresses its exasperation with a system that has failed it. The justness of their cause is self-evident because generations of desis have staked their all on all-India competitive examinations of one sort or another.
In a country where the so-called demographic dividend of a young population has been squandered because the economy can’t create remotely enough jobs for its young people, the villainy of a government that corrupts one of the few avenues to a decent, professional education is established beyond argument. Modi’s government has done worse things, but the massive consensus about the NEET disaster gave the insurgent cockroaches assembled at Jantar Mantar and elsewhere a moral weight that was hard to discredit even for the scheming operatives of this vicious regime
Edward Thompson, historian of the English working class and other subaltern movements, once explained that insurrection doesn’t necessarily occur because of scarcity. It occurs when people come to believe that the shortages that oppress them are the result of unfair manipulation. It is the unfairness, not the scarcity itself, that outrages people and gives them the strength to risk the reprisals that collectively challenging the State always entails. Thompson’s term for this melding of the material world and morality is moral economy. The corruption of NEET violated the moral economy of desi aspiration and transformed the chief justice of India’s ‘cockroaches’ into avenging angels.
Pradhan’s resignation wasn’t inevitable. It was, in fact, very unlikely because it has been a point of honour with Modi’s government to never acknowledge error. This is the first time in twelve years that the prime minister has been forced by an organised political protest to sack a cabinet colleague. Something in the pharaonic facade of this government has cracked.
The Cockroach Janta Party won this battle partly because the legions it led seemed armoured with an alloy of innocence and insouciance. This had something to do with how young they were. I saw Neha Bora, one of the students who fasted alongside Wangchuk, make an inspired speech that spoke the language of solidarity and idealism and righteous anger in a way that had, in the defeated cynicism of our world, seemingly gone out of style. I saw clips of young people defiantly talking back even as they were savagely beaten by policemen. I saw laughing students chanting, “Jab jab Modi darta hai, pulis ko aage karta hai!” The alternative rhyme was even more rousing: “Jab jab Modi darta hai, Hindu-Muslim karta hai!” I saw a young woman in Mumbai stop a police bus loaded with detained protesters by casually leaning against its windscreen. Idealism isn’t just the opposite of knowingness; it’s also the absence of learnt fear, of disabling prudence.
The contrast between this cheerful insolence, this inspired idealism, and the corrupt, leaden, violent response of Modi’s government, its brutal police, its grotesque godi anchors and its leering influencers, was so stark, and this starkness was so massively available on social media, that the struggle was abstracted into a no-contest between light and darkness, good and evil, Rama and Ravana.
None of us, not even, I suspect, the organisers of the CJP know how this movement will evolve. What we do know is that the prime minister’s affectation of Olympian impunity is now past its sell-by date. Nothing illustrated this better than the toe-curling informality of his vertical video on Instagram. It was like watching Ozymandias, Shelley’s fallen pharaoh, do a piece to camera.
I returned from Jantar Mantar that afternoon, both buoyed up and worried. The battalions of police seemed like a bad augury and the spaces enclosed by the barricades with their narrow entries made me nervous. Still, the cockroaches won the first round. As things stand, it’s CJP 1:BJP 0. After years of defeat, we’ll take the win. I think of all the times my student cohort marched up Parliament Street or assembled at Jantar Mantar, and this triumph makes those memories better. The young redeem us. The cockroach insurrection isn’t quite the French Revolution, but these lines could have been written for it: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”
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