Five months after its founding, India's Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has demonstrated what youth-led democratic movements can achieve — and how difficult they are to sustain.

The movement was formed in May 2026 to protest the government's cancellation of medical school exams, and it gained further momentum after Chief Justice Surya Kant likened unemployed youth to cockroaches. By July, the largely Gen Z movement had scored an early victory: the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The CJP has since shifted its focus to a far larger political issue — the Election Commission, the body that administers India's elections, and its reported deletion of approximately 130 million names from the voter rolls, the official lists that determine who may cast a ballot. That figure exceeds the population of all but a handful of the world's countries. Since Oct. 2, protesters have taken to the streets of Delhi, Mumbai and other cities with three demands: the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a halt to the deletions pending an independent inquiry, and the restoration of the previous electoral rolls before the next elections.

The movement has run into firm government resistance. Amid a crackdown on the protests, two of its spokespersons, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, were detained, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing populist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have refused to yield on the voter roll issue, instead accusing protesters of undermining democracy.

Even so, the protests have surfaced deep-seated public anxieties over democratic erosion in country of nearly 1.5 billion people, according to Amrita Basu, a longtime scholar of Indian political parties and social movements at Amherst College. Through courage and acerbic wit, she argues, the CJP has accomplished something that eluded conventional opposition parties for 12 years: puncturing the ruling party's aura of invulnerability. In doing so, the protests have challenged the government's conception of who "the people" are, what democracy means, and who speaks for youth, women and the politically marginalized.

Defining 'democracy' and 'the people'

Modi frequently describes India as the "Mother of Democracy," a reference to the country's civilizational heritage and to Bharat Mata, the Hindu mother goddess. Democracy, he insists, is not a Western import but a native inheritance — an implication meant to reassure: India has always been democratic and always will be.

Some outside monitors disagree. Sweden's V-Dem Institute classifies India as an "electoral autocracy," meaning that although the country regularly holds multiparty elections, it fails basic democratic benchmarks such as legislative and judicial checks and balances and citizens' active political participation.

Judged by its treatment of dissent, the record is damning: activists jailed without trial under anti-terrorism laws, protest sites barricaded, internet blackouts and police brutality.

The CJP, by contrast, regards peaceful protest, along with upholding the country's constitution, as essential elements of democracy. Demonstrators regularly circulate images of B. R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution, on posters, in slogans and in songs. Like Ambedkar, the movement's 30-year-old leader, Abhijeet Dipke, is a Dalit — a member of the community once treated as "untouchable" within the Hindu caste system.

Critics argue that the BJP defines the nation through Hindu civilizational identity, an approach they call exclusionary because it rejects India's Muslim historical traditions and casts doubt on the political loyalties of the country's Muslims, who make up about 14% of the population, or 197 million people. The CJP, by contrast, draws no line between insider and outsider by faith, caste or birth, defining community instead through shared commitments.

The voter roll dispute illustrates what is at stake. The Election Commission says the revision will remove duplicate entries, deceased voters and noncitizens. Critics counter that the burden of proof falls on voters themselves — a heavy lift for poor Muslims, Dalits and migrant workers who may struggle to produce decades-old birth, education and land certificates. Those whose names are struck from the rolls also fear being branded illegal immigrants.

Cracks appear in BJP's dominance

Although the BJP had held the prime minister's office before, Modi's 2014 election victory marked a sea change in Indian politics, disrupting the Congress Party's long dominance.

The BJP owed much of its electoral success to attracting young and first-time voters with promises of employment, economic growth and what is known in Hindi as "achhe din aane waale hain" — "good days are coming." Since the party took office in 2014, India has charted strong GDP growth, but that macroeconomic success has been belied by rampant inequality that falls especially hard on the poor and the young.

The BJP claims to have fulfilled some of its more targeted campaign promises, including merit-based public sector hiring. Yet 40% of Indian college graduates under 25 are unemployed. Paradoxically, the unemployment rate for young people who cannot read or write hovers around 3.4%. For college graduates — the CJP's main constituency — it is nearly nine times higher, at roughly 29%.

Seizing on this mounting discontent, the CJP deploys the slogan "Achhe Din" ironically on posters and memes. Its manifesto opens: "If you are going to call us cockroaches, the least you can do is pay our rent." It calls for making "lazy" — a code word for the unemployed — a protected political identity.

Beneath the joke lies a serious point: the stigmatization of the jobless offends millions of impoverished people, something critics note is protected by the dignity and equality guarantees of Articles 21 and 14 of the Constitution.

Who speaks for women?

The BJP has built women's electoral support through targeted welfare schemes, backing for increased women's representation in legislatures and constant talk of women's empowerment, or "nari shakti."

Masses of women protesters, however, have challenged this state-defined version of empowerment. They stop police vans carrying detainees, scale barricades and criticize the prime minister directly.

Among the most prominent is Neha Bora, a Ph.D. student and president of the left-wing All India Students' Association, whose blunt messages to Modi have propelled her into the spotlight. Modi has said he was subjected to vulgar abuse by protesters and was shocked that "our daughters" could use such foul language, but he characterized them as "misdirected" and said he was ready to forgive them.

The women on the streets express deep discontent with the government's paternalism. They reject its Hindu-inflected understanding of empowerment and insist on speaking for themselves rather than being spoken for. They are outraged by the government's harsh response to their peaceful protests, describing beatings and sexual harassment by police, while anonymous self-styled guardians of religious morality have engaged in doxing, threats of rape and acid attacks, and circulated demeaning AI-generated images of them. For the protesters, that record sits uneasily beside the prime minister's denunciations of violence against women.

'Cockroaches never die'

The CJP's motto, "Cockroaches never die," has struck a wide chord. Protesters have survived — though not escaped — violence, incarceration, internet blackouts and police blockades. The movement's sunglass-wearing cockroach mascot mocks leader-centered nationalist branding.

Recent youth-led uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal have shown how quickly online mobilization can outrun official control. What distinguishes the CJP is its pairing of humor with legal and technical infrastructure. Its online portal, the Saakshi vault — "Saakshi" means "witness" — collects photos and videos of police violence uploaded by protesters, which volunteer lawyers use to file complaints against officers.

The CJP's recent successes do not mean the movement is likely to disrupt the BJP's hold on power at the next parliamentary elections in 2029. For now, the party remains fairly concentrated in urban strongholds and would need to build organizational infrastructure and develop long-term demands. In the near term, the immediate development to watch is whether the Election Commission entertains the call for an independent inquiry, and whether the deletions are halted and the previous rolls restored ahead of the next elections.

Still, a generation that a government minister wrote off as lazy and expendable has exposed cracks in the system that the chief justice defended. Whatever form it takes, Basu writes, the movement offers a vision — and a reminder — of what democracy looks like.

This article is based on analysis by Amrita Basu, Professor of Political Science, and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, Amherst College, republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Source: Fortune.