Interview: ‘Good chance that BJP will co-opt Cockroach Janta Party’s demands’

The Cockroach Janta Party, which began as an online satirical campaign on May 16, has kept up the pressure on the Modi government. Its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, announced plans to return from the United States to India on Saturday to lead a protest demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The online popularity of the campaign has sparked speculation that India, too, could see dramatic political changes driven by youth protests like the upheavels in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. But Amit Ahuja, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was sceptical of this possibility.

Ahuja has written extensively about protests, social movements and political parties in India. He told Scroll that even if the cockroach campaign manages to bring some of its social media followers out on the streets, the Bharatiya Janata Party is likely to eventually co-opt its demands.

However, this does not take away from the fact that India is witnessing a crisis of employment, Ahuja argued. All political parties, particularly the ruling BJP, would do well to be more sensitive towards the “desperation” among the youth that the Cockroach Janta Party represents.

Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

A lot of commentators in India are calling this the start of a movement and saying that it could lead to Nepal or Bangladesh-like street protests in India. Do you think that's possible?

I can see why people would draw those kinds of conclusions. Not just in Nepal and Bangladesh, but even in Sri Lanka, we've seen street movements bring about regime change. I would not draw those conclusions about the Cockroach Janta Party for one simple reason: so far, it's just been online.

A street movement and online collective action are two very different things. It remains to be seen what kind of ground activities it [the Cockroach Janta Party] organises. And most importantly, I have not seen anywhere a desire to change the government as a major goal of this movement. Its demands are very traditional.

There is something else which we need to remind ourselves of when we make these comparisons. Delhi has seen multiple movements at different points such as the 1988 farmers’ movement or the farmers’ movement that came later [in 2020]. Governments have noticed and responded to them by protecting Delhi and government machinery.

So, those are broad lessons that governments in Delhi have learnt. There are procedures in place. There are security processes in place which will not allow something like what happened in Nepal, for example, to occur in Delhi.

The Cockroach Janta Party is articulating what many young people in India are feeling today, which is that our examination system seems to be riddled with corruption. Have similar anti-corruption movements in the past been good for Indian democracy in your view?

When you see demands ending up on the street, that's almost like a canary in the coal mine. There is something that's not working. That's why people are on the streets. Protests represent demands which the formal system of democracy doesn't seem to be doing a good job of representing.

Corruption is a perennial issue. Whether what is happening with the cancellation of exams is corruption or just plain bureaucratic incompetence, that the government will have to establish. But clearly, because it's a crisis, there will be an administrative response to this and there will be efforts made to correct it.

In the meanwhile, what these kinds of protests will do is put pressure on the government, but also highlight this issue and then force political parties and the media to run with it.

Protests of this nature, which are peaceful, represent popular demands. When demands go unmet by the political process, there are still mechanisms available through these freedoms to protest to put pressure on the government of the day to respond to them. That's what keeps the wheels of democracy running.

In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power campaigning on an anti-corruption plank. To this date, it draws a lot of support on this issue. Do you think the Cockroach Janta Party campaign could change that?

[That] Remains to be seen. Think about where the BJP is and where it is coming from. It's won the last three national elections. It has a very popular prime minister. It is just coming off major victories in state elections.

And then think about the scale at which you need to mobilise to be able to attain these victories. So, this is still a popular party. It has a handle on some of the issues that are in play here.

I go back to 2014. The BJP at that moment was running on the corruption plank. [But] It was not the only plank they were running on — their broader plank was good governance.

Modi, who was rising as a national star at that time and making a pitch for being the next prime minister, was saying, ‘Look, I will run the country how I ran Gujarat.’ So, it was a good governance plank and corruption became a part of that plank.

On the other side, you had a Congress-led coalition government. There were internal differences in that government. The Prime Minister served at the pleasure of the party leadership. The kind of pressure that Manmohan Singh had to take was of a very different nature.

The BJP will worry about the kind of support this movement has been able to mobilise, especially on corruption. And then it will respond.

Parties take note of popular demands that can bring people out on the street. When public opinion begins to back certain demands, they will respond because they are in the business of building large coalitions. Taking popular demands on board actually helps them in this.

There's a very good chance that the BJP will actually co-opt this demand and turn it around by correcting some of the problems that are being highlighted.

One thing that makes this Cockroach Janta Party campaign stand out is that it began as a response to something that the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, had said in court. What does that tell us about the perception of the judiciary in India right now?

I don't think this has anything to do with the perception of the judiciary. This is more a clash of different age groups. People who have a particular way of thinking about things and who are looking at these problems, especially with the youth, are scoffing at it.

As somebody who teaches a younger age cohort, I think it's important to appreciate that when people in this age group protest, their contexts are different. Life experiences of every age cohort are unique. And their politics is influenced by them. That's why politics shifts with age cohorts.

The important thing to remind ourselves here is that we are looking at a demographic bulge where there are very serious employment needs that are not being met. There is a crisis of employment. Whether the government is able to respond to this crisis remains to be seen. We have to be more sensitive to where this age cohort is, their experiences, and the sense of desperation that this movement is representing.

This campaign also comes at a time when it has become incredibly complicated to hold protests in India. So many activists are still in jail merely because they participated in the anti-CAA protests in 2019 and 2020. Do you think that might also be driving the popularity of this online campaign?

The anti-CAA protests were followed by the farmers’ protests that were around for the longest time. The government tried all manner of ways to respond to it. And eventually, they had to withdraw the policy. So, protests as a grammar of politics have survived even when there has been state repression.

In fact, we see more frequent street protests because the cost of bringing people together has fallen with technology and online digital networks. But these digital networks don’t always have an on-the-ground operation. As long as you don't have that, you are not going to be able to sustain this kind of protest over a period of time.

Yes, protests can be criminalised. But if you have an on-the-ground operation, an organisational structure, then your ability to sustain protests, despite repression, will still be there. Does the Cockroach Janta Party have that? Remains to be seen.

The Cockroach Janta Party has amassed millions of online followers so quickly. What does that tell us about our opposition parties? They are also doing a lot of things on social media. But nothing seems to have galvanised anger against the Modi government like this.

It should not surprise us because political parties are in the game of fighting elections. You can build a huge network online, but ultimately what matters is how many people you can bring to the polling station on election day. And that scale is very different from a Jantar Mantar protest.

These are two very different forms of collective action. Yes, parties do take on online activities because they will do everything that's required to grab the attention of the voter. But parties also understand that this alone does not produce the results in terms of turnout on election day.

But let me go back to the question that you were asking. Why does this movement suddenly galvanise so many people, whereas parties cannot? Think about how much money is required in our elections and the allegations of corruption that all governments of all parties face in India. That tells you that on this particular issue, parties just don't have the credibility. That is why movements have been the vehicle for highlighting this issue.

You've written a book about Dalit politics in different parts of India. What do you think Dalits would be making of the Cockroach Janta party right now? We don't know what the campaign thinks of social justice and caste discrimination. But the founder, Abhijeet Dipke, has publicly owned his Dalit identity.

You have to remember that this is not a movement which started on a caste issue. There are strong feelings across caste groups about corruption. So it's not unique to a particular caste or regional or religious identity. That said, there are a few things which are worth noting here.

One is the backlash to the disclosure of that identity [by Dipke], which tells us that whether we like it or not, even when we have casteless issues which impact everybody, caste does manage to come in.

The second aspect which is also worth noting is that Abhijeet Dipke started an anti-corruption movement and people followed it online. That he's a Dalit doesn't matter. You can actually have a Dalit who can be a leader of a movement which people from different castes join.

We've had this notion because of what our political experience teaches us that when it came to Dalit leadership, it was prominent only when it was leading Dalit movements. But that's not the case. Even in the anti-CAA protests, the role that Chandrashekhar Azad played to mobilise support beyond just Dalits tells us that we have leadership coming out from among Dalits that will lead big umbrella movements.

We can point to even the BJP today. The BJP of 2026 has a prime minister who is from an OBC [Other Backward Classes] caste. And this is his third tenure. He remains popular. When you go back to the BJP's history, it was seen as a predominantly upper-caste party. Its own complexion, its own profile has changed. Its leadership is different.

How caste captivates Indian politics and how we think about caste boundaries is changing. The backlash reminds us that caste still matters. Caste discrimination and caste prejudice still matter. But none of this is static.

Is this what makes the Cockroach Janta Party campaign different from the last major anti-corruption protest that we had in India, the India Against Corruption protest? That was largely led by retired upper-caste bureaucrats and public figures.

Yes and no. It depends on how the issue of corruption is framed. If the kind of corruption that's being talked about is about middle-class concerns, then it still is an interest-based movement.

Where I think the two movements are different is that the previous one started with actual on-the-ground protests. This movement starts online. If it translates into sustained, on-the-ground protests which will remain peaceful but still have a disruptive effect, then they'll be more similar.