Cockroach Movement: Can Gen Z Protests Reshape Indian Democracy?

What happens when “the tumult and the shouting dies”? Will the students just disperse? Will Abhijit Dipke resume his studies in Boston? Will Modi-Shah (and Gyanesh Kumar) carry on as before? Or will we see a new generation take office?

These are loaded questions, for the fact is that after the July demonstrations at Jantar Mantar forced the resignation of the then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the ABVP, the BJP’s student wing, belonging to same generation as the Cockroaches, won three of the four seats in the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) election.

Now, the demonstrators have added tens of thousands, perhaps even a couple of lakhs to their numbers, after the hitherto moribund opposition mobilised its troops to take to the streets. Others too joined them in Round 2: trade unions, farmers, gig workers, the unemployed, anyone with a grievance, as the spectacle on the streets of Delhi grew to the largest in decades.

Yet, the niggling question remains: How did the same age cohort that gave rise to the Cockroach movement fail to enthuse their own kind in the DUSU election? And, also, not add to the opposition’s score in in byelections held in different States since the first Jantar Mantar demonstration? Should one lose heart?

The CJP could, with considerable justification, answer that they are not in electoral politics. That path is for registered political parties. The CJP has not even sought registration. So, they should not be measured by the same yardstick as the losing members of the INDIA bloc. Just as their principal objective in July was to render the Union Minister of Education accountable, so is their aim now to remove the Chief Election Commissioner who has been accused of grave acts of commission that have brought disrepute to the constitutional office.

They could argue that opposition political parties are welcome to contest elections on the issues raised by them but it is not for the CJP to enter the electoral fray. Once Gyanesh Kumar goes, they would return to their constructive task of radically repairing a broken education system, both in terms of physical infrastructure and pedagogical content.

Meanwhile, shocking reports, including professional journalists’ eyewitness testimony, of the brazenness with which the Delhi Police are misbehaving with the boys and girls of the Cockroach movement, are beginning to appear in the mainstream media too, after going viral in social media.

Notwithstanding the arbitrary violence unleashed on them, the demonstrators remain unfazed. They have set an example to their elders, who are now pouring on to the streets, together breathing new life into the INDIA bloc notwithstanding the sudden, and obviously opportunistic, attempt of the government to denotify the centrally-located Jantar Mantar as a designated centre of protest, and get such shows of people’s power off the eyes and minds of the electorate.

The Narendra Modi government is not only in panic but also apparently divided on how to react to this political assault from a totally unexpected non-political quarter. They do not know, as none of us do, whether the DUSU and byelection results confirm the marginality or centrality of the Gen Z protests that have shaken those in seats of authority.

Clearly, the recent Delhi Police actions, aided and abetted by contingents drawn from elsewhere, resulting in more police personnel at the capital’s hitherto recognised protest sites than are available in highly disturbed Manipur, were aimed at warding off the largely non-violent students thronging Jantar Mantar and its environs.

All this is at the behest of Amit Shah’s Home Ministry, and beginning to increasingly resemble those of Mussolini’s fascisti and even Hitler’s monstrosity. The worst has been signalled. It may yet come to pass. Fingers crossed.

It is amazing how closely the ongoing youngsters’ agitation in France resembles what is happening in India. There too, students much younger than the Cockroaches have thrown the Emmanuel Macron government into disarray by focusing their street demonstrations, starting from September and apparently not petering out, on issues of education: “Broken windows, crumbling classrooms, absentee teachers. And poor education altogether”, as one observer summed it up.

France, of course, is the Mother of Street Demonstrations, tracing its history back to the fall of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, which heralded the French Revolution. I was fortunate to be an eyewitness to a massive student uprising in Paris in May 1968 that shook the administration of President Charles de Gaulle to its very foundations. True, by mid-summer, most of the demonstrators had packed up and gone home. But the consequence of that earth-shaking event was such that the great de Gaulle, hero and saviour of the French, found himself demitting office within a year of the demonstrations. So, will the Gen Z revolution eventually bring about the departure of the Modi government?

Uprisings worldwide

Before venturing an answer, let us take stock of other similar instances. First and foremost, Vietnam. It was the US Gen Z of the late 1960s that took to the streets with slogans like “Hey, hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?” Quite as irreverent as the youngsters we saw at Jantar Mantar. They succeeded in stopping Lyndon B. Johnson from running again as President because they reflected a larger section of public opinion than just themselves.

Equally, although student protests against Richard Nixon and his cohort had the contradictory consequence of Nixon winning in 1972 by the largest margin ever in a presidential election, the entire edifice crumbled two years later because the US Cockroaches of the time had eaten into its very fabric.

Nearer home, we have seen public discontent boiling over and leading into regime change in many of our neighbouring countries: Sri Lanka, Nepal, and, memorably, Bangladesh in the “Monsoon Revolution”. Is the pattern repeating in Modi’s India? Has the current regime lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the voters? And is that why voters are being removed by the crore from the electoral rolls?

And how is the chaos affecting the establishment itself? The sound of knives being sharpened by those who wish to succeed Modi grows squeakier and shriller. But will the Cockroaches score an own goal by knocking Modi off his pedestal only to see Amit Shah or Adityanath clamber on to the vacated pedestal? And would that not be an even greater disaster than leaving a discredited leader on his self-constructed elevation? As Bob Dylan sang, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

The fact is that the outcome of the Cockroach movement is less about the specifics of the education system or police excesses and more of a challenge to the social and economic order of the country and what Indian democracy has been reduced to over the last decade and more.

Politics, as Rajiv Gandhi once remarked, is like a game of billiards: a ball is struck to ricochet towards another ball that is pocketed. Just as the fall of the Bastille had consequences far more lasting than the release of the few prisoners held in the prison by unleashing the most significant revolution in the political history of humankind.

That is why the Cockroach movement has a resonance far beyond the satirical drawings of a Boston-based discontent. As such, the Cockroach movement, despite itself, is filling a void in our democracy that NOTA, “None of the Above”, had failed to fill.

We have been here before, when the Aam Admi Party (AAP) was formed and hailed. Many of the CJP leaders were part and parcel of that disappointing journey to nowhere. With one major difference. The CJP activists who deserted the AAP did so because they discovered the truth about Arvind Kejriwal before the rest of the country woke up to its reality.

As such, as and when the CJP leaders come into electoral politics, as they must do if they are to consolidate their challenge to the social and economic order, one expects they will not be a pale version of today’s AAP honchos but flag-bearers of an alternative order, based on constitutional values, that we thought was glimpsed in 2012. So, there is hope still. When democracy breaks down in the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, the street becomes the fourth branch of governance.

Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009. He has published nine books, the latest, A Maverick in Politics, the second part of his memoir.

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