Reimagining Indian Protest Grammar
In the last two months, the ‘cockroaches’ have been everywhere: crawling or scuttling all over social media feeds, in memes, hashtags, reels and even jingles, with algorithms clearing the way. But in June earlier this year, the cockroaches came out and rallied to form one of the largest youth-led social movements India has witnessed in recent years.
What began as a short phrase of dissent on X1 (earlier Twitter) quickly snowballed into a massive online, digitised platform for protest and solidarity. In many ways, this was not merely a disapproval of the remarks made at Tilak Marg2; rather, those remarks only triggered what was already a mounting frustration and mistrust in a larger system that had promised justice, stability and development. And thus, the Cockroach Janata Party popped up from supposedly thin air.
Almost like clockwork, the labels began to fly immediately; the old names were recalled and thrown, eerily reminding one of the ‘Tukde Tukde Gang’, ‘Urban Naxals’, anti-nationals and, of course, the Pakistan rhetoric. India is not unfamiliar with this blueprint. The 2019 CAA protests and the 2020 Farmers’ protest were subjected to similar attempts at delegitimisation. The questions raised at that time remained just as relevant: why is criticism of an institution increasingly translated into criticism of the country? Why is it always reduced to a binary of nationalism versus betrayal?
But perhaps the more interesting question this time is not merely what the protest was saying, but how it protested.
Political frustration and its channelling in the public spheres by youth are nothing new in India. Even before India became a republic, students spearheaded resistance, including the Quit India Movement and were active participants in key mobilisations in the freedom struggle. From the student mobilisations of the 1970s during the Emergency to the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement in the 2010s, the role of youth has clearly etched itself in India’s political milieu. Even popular films such as Yuva (2004), 4 the People (2004), and Rang De Basanti (2006), along with their box-office successes, mirrored the anguish over the then-incumbent government’s response to corruption and its general misalignment with voters’ expectations during UPA 1 and even UPA 2; neither were Facebook posts supporting these anti-corruption movements uncommon.
Fast forward to 2026 – demonising any idea or thought that disagrees with any establishment has become normalised. Yet the virality of the Cockroach Janata Party is a testament to how social media can transform spectators into participants. Protests need not have a party office, an established hierarchy, or cadres to turn into a rally. Participation can happen through a screen, a delivery app, a meme, a reel, or, of course, a journey to the protest site.
The anger, therefore, is not new. What has changed is the grammar.
Earlier movements depended heavily on physical mobilisation, formal organisations, speeches, rallies, posters, and the traditional media channels that carried those images beyond the site of protest. The CJP movement has blurred many of these boundaries. Even participation itself began to acquire a different meaning. A person sitting in a city far from the epicentre of the protest in Delhi did not necessarily have to travel to participate. Food and other necessities3 could be ordered for protesters through e-commerce and delivery platforms. Volunteers, many of them self-proclaimed, turned up to help with cleaning and support, a stark reminder of the Gandhian principle that picking up the broom was also crucial – participation does not necessarily mean shouting slogans, and the CJP knowingly or otherwise revived the idea.
This is where the movement becomes culturally significant. The platforms of everyday convenience, the same platforms through which we order dinner, groceries and almost everything else, can also become infrastructures of political participation. A delivery order from thousands of kilometres away could not only materially sustain the protest but also serve as a metaphorical reinforcement from afar. Of course, this was also convenient for those who wanted to play it safe – showing solidarity anonymously without getting their hands dirty. But whether this was a limitation or a strength of the movement depends on how we understand participation itself. Does protest require personal risk, or can solidarity from a distance be meaningful – should participation look the same for everyone involved?
The protest, therefore, did not simply use social media to advertise itself. It adopted the language of the internet itself; a meme became the placard, a reel became the effigy, and satire and absurdity became the manifesto.
This does not mean that conventional political organisation has suddenly become irrelevant. Rather, the CJP reflects a moment in which the boundaries between the organised and the spontaneous, the online and the offline, the spectator and the participant have become increasingly porous.
The movement also thrives on internet culture, algorithms and AI, with remarkable speed and reach. While other, more recent political outfits with apparent youth mobilisation, such as actor Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, have amassed massive followings, CJP has acquired a remarkably large digital following4 in an extraordinarily short span of time. Its rapid growth is striking precisely because it does not appear to have emerged through the conventional machinery associated with political mobilisation — visible IT cells, large advertising budgets, cadre networks or established party structures.
Although CJP was conceptualised on an online platform and organically garnered a large following, the protest had to materialise as a physical one on the streets for it to be taken seriously. The presence of its leaders, along with many prominent figures in Indian politics, not to mention the massive number of protesters who showed up day after day at the protest site, signalled that the CJP meant business. The government eventually had to take heed, and the minister whose resignation was one of CJP’s demands was met. And so, while this new-age protest mechanism of mobilisation may have changed, the street remains the most important site where digital dissent can garner political visibility.
However, as noted earlier, while the grammar of protests may have evolved in India, so too has the manner in which the state contains these protests changed. Controlling a protest may still mean unleashing the repressive state apparatus and scattering the crowds that had peacefully gathered at these sites, but this was no longer enough. The apparatus has also extended itself into the digital spaces – keeping a keen eye on what gets ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ on social media, taking down accounts, posts or even websites for ‘violations of content policy’ – the list is endless of how the modern state has reimagined itself in Digital India – a form of constant surveillance and monitoring. The CJP itself has claimed that its website and other social media handles have been blocked on several occasions. Meanwhile, several reports from the ground, at the CJP protest sites, had reported the state machinery using cameras to record the faces of the protesters.
Of course, this is not new either. During the 2019 CAA protests, there were several reports of facial recognition applications being used to track and intimidate protesters. The UP government had gone the extra mile to display these details on large flexes to ‘name and shame’ the participants (footnote 5) – an eerie warning to the others who might consider showing solidarity by simply showing up for the protests.
Yet, despite these expanded forms of repression, the CJP protestors did not retreat – they appeared to recognise that the greatest strength of the protest lay precisely in these online platforms. A reel posted from the protest site and watched by someone miles away has now removed the distance, physically and otherwise, between the spectator and the protestor! Not only did these reels capture the vigour and passion of the protests, but they also gave protestors a means of physically recording the repressive state apparatus at play. The countless clips of police officers clearly harassing protesters and even bystanders, some of them mounting to serious and reckless misuse of power, with at least a few of them, sexual in nature, have been posted on social media platforms and have gone on the internet’s permanent archive. Social activists and opposition leaders have cited these clips in official forums to call out the government and its approach to curbing the protests, with some filing police cases in which these clips and platforms served as evidence (footnote 6).
And so, after years of what appeared to be complacency, the CJP protests may have triggered the change India may not deserve, but certainly needs – not the refined, linen-clad political ambition of power, but the raw exhaustion of digital natives who always felt alienated, with a deep desire to be seen and heard
And as for the cockroaches, if nothing else, they have shown India something rather simple: political frustration has remained. Only the grammar has changed!
NOTES
1 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz72y11jjq1o
2 .https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/jobless-cockroaches-attack-the-system-cji-surya-kant/articles how/131127870.cms
3. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/delivered-online-from-across-the-country-food-and-suppo rt-reach-cjp-protest-at-delhis-jantar-mantar/articleshow/132570652.cms
Dr Aghil P Komban is an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at CHRIST University, Bengaluru
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