By K Raveendran
The cockroaches have won another emphatic victory, and this one came almost embarrassingly quickly. Within hours of the Cockroach Janta Party taking its demand to Parliament Street police station, the machinery that had previously appeared content to defend its handling of the Jantar Mantar assault began moving. Provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act were added to the case, further complaints were acted upon and Swatantra Bhardwaj, the self-professed Hindutva activist whose podcast boasts triggered the fresh controversy, was detained in Uttar Pradesh.
It would be tempting to treat this simply as an instance of belated police action. That would miss the larger story. What is accumulating around CJP is no longer a sequence of unrelated concessions. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, the retreat over criminal cases against student protesters, the intervention over crumbling government schools and now the movement in the Bhardwaj case constitute the beginnings of a recognisable political pattern. An organisation that possesses neither seats in Parliament nor a conventional party machine is repeatedly forcing institutions possessing both power and authority to respond.
There is an important factual qualification. Delhi Police dispute Bhardwaj’s boast that he had “cracked” the skull of protester Nishu Azad’s father, saying the medical evidence showed a simple injury. Bhardwaj himself subsequently described the confrontation as self-defence. Those issues belong to investigation and, eventually, adjudication. What cannot be disputed is the extraordinary political recklessness of publicly boasting about violence while invoking supposed political connections, followed by an institutional response that accelerated after protesters appeared outside a police station demanding action.
That is why Parliament Street matters symbolically. The geography almost writes the argument by itself. Jantar Mantar was where an examination controversy became a national confrontation. Parliament Street was where a movement ostensibly lacking formal political power demonstrated that administrative inertia could be made politically expensive. Between those two locations lies Parliament itself, the constitutional centre of representative politics. Yet some of the most consequential political bargaining of the past few months has taken place outside it.
The pattern began with something considerably larger than one criminal case. The agitation over examination irregularities eventually became a demand for accountability at the highest level of the Education Ministry. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25. Whatever combination of political calculations produced that decision, the resignation represented a landmark for the protesters because the demand that once seemed maximalist had become reality.
Then came the FIRs. The state had initially answered parts of the agitation in the familiar language of public order: barricades, police action, criminal cases and identification of protesters. Yet the government subsequently moved towards withdrawing cases against students, and the Supreme Court used its extraordinary constitutional powers to quash FIRs arising from the protests. CJP, in return, called off its September 5 march. This was not unilateral surrender by either side. It looked more like negotiation between a state and a pressure movement that had acquired enough legitimacy to make continued confrontation unattractive.
The “School Thik Karo” campaign widened the experiment. CJP moved from examination reform, an issue naturally suited to students, into the physical condition of government education. Its activists visited neglected schools, filmed broken infrastructure and converted local administrative failures into nationally circulating political images. At Rampura Kanwarpura near Jaipur, where activists had been attacked during a visit, an unsafe school structure was subsequently demolished and plans advanced for a replacement building. The details matter because they demonstrate how CJP’s politics operates: find something visibly indefensible, expose it publicly and force the responsible authority to decide whether fixing the problem is cheaper than defending it.
That method explains why CJP may be more troublesome to established parties while remaining outside conventional electoral competition. Had the movement transformed itself into a normal political party, every campaign would immediately have acquired a political interpretation. A school protest in Rajasthan would become an attempt to defeat the BJP. An agitation in a Congress-ruled state would be judged by whether CJP was helping the BJP. Its leaders would need candidates, funding, caste equations, alliances, constituencies and positions on hundreds of questions unrelated to the causes that created the movement. Every intervention would be filtered through the question that eventually consumes political parties: who gains votes?
By resisting that transformation, CJP can attack failure without first identifying the party responsible for it. That gives it a freedom established opposition parties rarely possess. Its constituency is not defined neatly by ideology but by grievance: students angry about examinations, parents angry about schools, young people angry about policing, citizens irritated by the apparent immunity of the connected. Such coalitions are unstable, but while they hold together they can be extraordinarily difficult for governments to confront because repression itself becomes recruitment.
There are obvious limits to the phenomenon. Social movements can mistake media visibility for durable power. Online mobilisation can disappear as rapidly as it arrives. Success encourages expanding demands, and expanding demands eventually expose ideological contradictions. A movement capable of uniting people around leaking examination papers may struggle when forced to take positions on religion, reservation, taxation, foreign policy or federalism. Its claim to political independence will also face constant scrutiny. Ministers have already tried to connect CJP figures with established opposition parties, an obvious attempt to strip the movement of its outsider status.
There is another danger: victory can produce its own arrogance. Pressure politics enjoys democratic legitimacy only while it demands that institutions perform their constitutional duties; it becomes more problematic if it begins imagining itself entitled to replace those institutions. The distinction is essential. Police should investigate because evidence requires investigation, not because the largest crowd outside a station demands a particular charge. Governments should repair schools because children deserve functioning schools, not because every viral video automatically establishes administrative guilt.
Yet those caveats do not diminish what has happened. They explain why the development deserves attention. CJP’s emerging power does not come from overthrowing institutions but from making their failures visible enough that institutions are compelled to correct themselves.
That is considerably more threatening to an entrenched political system than another small party contesting elections. An electoral challenger can be defeated, absorbed, divided or deprived of seats. A distributed pressure movement is harder to locate and therefore harder to neutralise. It can declare victory over one issue, dissolve into the crowd and reappear around another.
The joke contained in the name is consequently becoming less funny for those in authority. Cockroaches are supposed to be creatures that can be stamped upon without consequence. India’s political establishment is discovering something different: every attempt to stamp on these ones appears to leave more of them crawling towards the next institution that has something to answer for. (IPA Service)
