Arvind Rajagopal interview: How the Cockroach Janta Party Took Politics From Screen to Street

Arvind Rajagopal is professor of media studies at New York University, with affiliated faculty appointments in sociology and social and cultural analysis. His books include Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2001) and The Indian Public Sphere: Structure and Transformation (2009). In this interview, Rajagopal says that the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has emerged in response to the media-saturated society the BJP has built, one where declining legacy media profits have produced not reform but servility. For the conglomerates today, media holdings matter not for revenues but for the political rent they symbolise, paid to the ruling regime by advancing sectional interests and deflecting public attention from politically significant issues. Excerpts:

The world watched as tens of thousands of young people gathered under a satirical outfit called the Cockroach Janta Party. What did the protest tell us about the media landscape today?

What we still politely call the “mainstream press” now survives as a set of tiny appendages of large corporate empires, within which media holdings are shrinking assets. This is not a metaphor; the figures were recently assembled by [the journalist] Aakar Patel. The six listed news media companies had a combined revenue of about Rs.6,300 crore in 2014 and about Rs.7,700 crore a decade later, growth below the rate of inflation. In other words, the industry shrank in real terms across the first [Narendra] Modi decade, even as the profits of Nifty 50 companies compounded at 18 per cent a year in its latter half. And consider the proportions of the new ownership: NDTV’s turnover amounts to 700ths of 1 per cent of the Adani Group’s; TV18’s amounts to 1,500ths of 1 per cent of Reliance’s. The news channel is no longer a business in its own right; it is a rounding error in a conglomerate’s accounts, which means it is held for something other than business.

The second lesson concerns social media, which, despite being subject to capture, created a mass awareness of the possibility of people power through horizontal, bottom-up communication. If the attention economy is restructuring politics, what happens when attention is drawn to gatherings of Cockroaches? The government’s response—to stigmatise the protesters and attack them physically—confirms that social media enabled the movement to spark off, but also the realisation of not being alone, the experience of mutuality under batons and tear gas, were all galvanising.

Why students? What makes students the bearers of this politics?

Students are a kind of universal class. Almost everyone has been, or hopes their children will be, a student; the examination is the one gate through which nearly every Indian family imagines its future passing. In an earlier era, people had no trouble identifying themselves as BSc or BCom (Failed) because they went on to employment anyway and earned enough to hang a name plate with the degree, with pass or fail on it. Today, the degree carries no such guarantee: by the [2026] State of Working India’s estimate, more than 40 per cent of graduates under 25 are unemployed, and unemployment in India now rises, rather than falls, with education. Marx said the workers of the world would unite because they had nothing to lose but their chains. The unemployed have no material chains to lose. They are students who failed to secure employment or could not complete their examinations because of leaks, and who have, through a series of contingent events, come to see themselves and each other as a class whose strength lies in their numbers.

Hence the third lesson of the protests: students see that they must enter the field in person. Physical presence at Jantar Mantar was not a nostalgic residue of an older politics; it was a precise response to a mediated one, and it kept the movement within the attention economy. A body in a park cannot be shadow banned, though it can, as we saw, be lathi-charged.

You have said that the history of the BJP is acutely relevant to understanding this moment. Most commentary treats the party simply as a formidable electoral machine. What is being missed?

What is missed is how peculiar the BJP’s attitude towards politics has been. The Prime Minister has never held a press conference and explicitly rejects any form of accountability except elections. The BJP’s belief seems to be that the party will diminish if it concedes any fault. If any protest is made legitimate by proving effective, that, in the BJP’s view, is the beginning of the end. That its own route to power depended on protest against the Congress does not alter its attitude.

It was almost an accident that a party like the BJP came to power at all, given that its parent organisation never had a quarrel with colonial power, even after Independence. The task of building the Hindu nation was going to be slow, and had [M.S.] Golwalkar’s methods remained, it would still be ongoing today. It was because the RSS had no theory of politics, embracing instead a theory of maximum media exposure as the road to power, that it could take advantage of the rapid growth of the media market after the Emergency. Local entrepreneurs seized the chance to cater to the growing markets of political pilgrims. The Congress party’s soft Hindutva could not counter the BJP’s fluid alternation between soft and hard nationalism.

If the BJP had any real belief in give and take, it would not have found the CJP’s challenge so difficult to answer. The CJP is not going away, nor is the jobs crisis to which it responds. It poses the question of whether the BJP can accept other political groupings and movements as legitimate and engage with them with an open mind. That would imply that the Hindu nation and its leaders do not have the answers to all questions. No public admission of the kind seems possible at present.

Student protesters celebrating after the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, in New Delhi on July 25. | Photo Credit: Naveen Sharma/ANI

If the BJP indeed has no theory of politics, as you put it, how did it succeed so completely through the electoral system?

It was not only through adept use of the media—though it was certainly that—but [also] because the meaning of media itself changed under its feet, and the BJP was the first to grasp the change. From representing the public, the media itself became the public. Today, what matters is not what India’s farmers want or students demand but what the major media organs are saying and showing. The measure of an event is its coverage; a grievance that is not televised has, politically speaking, not occurred.

In the run-up to the 2024 general election, a study of 429 prime-time debates across six major channels in India found that more than half were devoted to attacking the opposition and over a quarter to praising the Prime Minister, while exactly five addressed jobs and education, the two issues that filled Jantar Mantar.

There, the public constituted on screen and the public assembled in the street parted company; the protests are the audit of that divergence. Under the BJP, elections ceased to be a mechanism of representation and became a periodic plebiscite on a permanent incumbency. This is why the Cockroach protesters unsettled the arrangement: they turned up in person to inspect their representatives and found no one at the counter.

You have pointed to a change in the state’s relation to the media, something more concrete than the atmosphere. What marks the shift?

There is an instructive parallel here that is not much discussed. At least until the Emergency, the government treated the media not only as a nuisance to be contained but as genuinely meant to represent the people. Until [more] recently... a press accreditation card all but guaranteed access to North Block, which houses the Ministries of Finance and Home; journalists could stroll the corridors and talk to officials directly. This changed within days of the BJP’s return in the 2019 election. Thereafter, prior appointments became necessary for nearly all access. Today, a journalist’s accreditation can be withdrawn for acts “prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India”. The government media were always agents of the state, of course, but the privately owned press was not. Today, the private media are captive to the party they did so much to promote.

Captive in what sense? These are, after all, profit-seeking companies.

That is precisely the point: analysis suggests they are no longer profit-seeking, at least not through their media holdings. Most of the legacy media have diversified or been taken over by conglomerates for whom media holdings matter not for revenues but for the political rent they convey and symbolise—rent paid to the landlords of the public, namely the ruling party. The rent is paid by finding creative ways to advance sectional interests and by deflecting public attention from politically significant issues inconvenient to the government.

Government advertising, once the single largest revenue source, became indispensable precisely as commercial revenue collapsed, and it was thereafter wielded as a weapon more openly than before. For example, after the pandemic, the Centre cut print’s share of government advertising from over Rs.600 crore to under Rs.200 crore in just four years. The carrot shrank while the stick grew: some 44 uses of Central agencies against media outlets were documented in the five years leading up to 2023. Two reputed journalist-proprietors in television, Prannoy Roy and Raghav Bahl, were raided, obstructed, and litigated against until both sold to Adani, after which the cases against Roy were dropped.

The behaviour has no commercial explanation, from either advertising or audiences; what remains is rent. And because media holdings are economically immaterial, the servility will not end with a change in government; the estate will simply pass to the next landlord. When media are held for rent rather than revenue, the audience ceases to be a market and becomes an estate to be administered, which is why declining profits produce not reform but deeper servility.

Slogans and graffiti on a wall during the protests at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on July 24. “[The CJP] uses satire as immanent critique,” said Arvind Rajagopal. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma

Sceptics will say that the media never truly represented the country, that the golden age you are measuring the decline against never existed.

Up to a point I would agree. The colonial media mindset survived in the continued dominance of English-language media, although less than 10 per cent of the population knew the language. But the conclusion drawn today—that “legacy media” are simply “history”—is not the last word. For a long time, the media defined a broad consensus, reflecting the relative stability of one party’s dominance of politics over 30 years. That consensus splintered with the Emergency in 1975. After the election in 1977, the media flowered as never before. The tyrannical picture that the press painted of the Emergency contrasts strangely with the media’s near-complete silence today about far more consequential abuses of power. The Emergency remains the one despotism it is safe to denounce.

How did the BJP convert the post-Emergency flowering of the media market to its advantage?

Brilliantly—in terms of becoming attractive to capital as well as to content creators at every level. The opportunity became clear when the Hindu epics on Doordarshan began to bring public life to a standstill. A familiar Hindu tradition gave scope to local content creators and distributors—cassette sellers, calendar printers, procession organisers—especially when coupled with the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, which escalated once the Ramayan telecast proved successful. In the election that followed, in 1989, the BJP’s Lok Sabha strength rose from 2 seats to 85, and within a decade it had occupied the Centre for the first time. The BJP’s political ascent coincided with the growth of a middle class whose assertions of caste and religious status were now aided by a profusion of new symbolic and material artefacts; the mass media became vectors of caste and religious assertion. This was a middle class raised, in a sense, by the Congress; it defected to the BJP, believing that the tide of history had shifted to a Hindu majoritarian party.

What are the most interesting aspects that strike you about the CJP?

Three features deserve emphasis. First, its iconography is substantially AI-generated: the mascot, the memes, the mock campaign imagery are products of the same tools that flooded the last election cycle with propaganda. A caricature started the party, and it was built up with the machinery of caricature. Second, it uses satire as immanent critique: it demands nothing the Constitution does not already promise. Third, it made the passage from screen to street. An entity with no registration, no theory, and no leaders in the conventional sense demonstrated that presence remains the one political medium the regime cannot easily control.

How do we conceptually understand the evolving BJP regime on one side, and the possibilities of dissent on the other that India, against the steepest odds, continues to affirm?

About the regime, the first task is to stop describing it with the vocabulary of the order it has replaced. We reach for “press freedom”, “bias”, “propaganda”—terms that assume media standing between state and society, representing the one to the other, and doing it badly. But when media have become the public, when governance is conducted as publicity, and when the state disciplines the press not by decree but through dependency—granting and withholding advertising, licences, and criminal inquiries—the concept of representation itself needs rethinking. A regime that was always above politics has found, in the current media system, the technical means to institutionalise that position: it does not need to persuade the people so long as it can constitute the public. Our concepts—censorship, manufactured consent, even hegemony—presume a distinction between medium and world that the present arrangement has almost dissolved. The conceptual task before us is to describe the rule in an environment, not through a channel.

On dissent, we have seen that the resources of critique now lie inside the system’s own language. The CJP meets criticism from the major media arms, the ones that applauded Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign. They question the students’ motives. This is hardly an honest response. It is no accident that the same decade that ruined the corporate press has produced the rise of independent media as a material force: subscription-funded, audience-owned, and for that reason harder to discipline through advertising.

The Cockroach Janta Party took its name from the bench, its aesthetic from the meme economy, and its tools from the propagandist’s own AI—and inverted them all. The media-saturated society the BJP built, in which conformity was expected and dissent punished, has precipitated its own antithesis. Is it possible that the world’s largest democracy can also provide the world lessons on democracy?

Abhish K. Bose, a journalist based in Kerala, with 18 years of experience, previously worked as a staffer at The Times of India and The Deccan Chronicle-Asian Age.

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