CJP’s ‘Kya Bolti Public’ and the Fight for Young India

What happens when a young movement that has just shattered the political ceiling decides that listening to people is more important than asking for their votes? The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) will begin a listening tour, aptly named “Kya Bolti Public” (What the Public Says), starting September 1. For the next two to three months, CJP members will travel across India, meet young people and ordinary citizens to ask what their concerns and demands are. Their focus is on education, unemployment, and institutional accountability, but the cockroaches clearly have a sharp political edge. They seem to have decided to take on the Prime Minister directly and repeatedly, besides calling out the government’s loyal media and keeping up the vigilance on the judiciary.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the CJP as a hyper movement that can just fade away or merge with existing structures. Indeed, some high-profile visitors to the Jantar Mantar protest site had given gratuitous advice to the cockroaches to wind up and merge their protest with that of the Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi. Needless to say, that did not go down well with the young people protesting in the sweltering July heat.

The CJP intends to do its own thing, and the momentum has already been created, which will be followed by structures, they hope, that will grow organically as the movement takes off. There is an action plan that has managed to keep up with the high speed of events. The cockroaches have decided to be relentless as they seek to strike roots in the soil now, with the same ferocious virality with which the online meme campaign began on May 16 when Abhijeet Dipke created the cockroach meme and launched the CJP. It was merely 20 days later, on June 6, that a protest began at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar; on July 20, the state cracked down with lathis, tear gas, even pellet guns; and five days later, the then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned.

All very fast and furious. Since the Delhi protest was called off, school children have organically begun protests against the terrible infrastructure in their schools. Data on the reality of government schools is so terrible in parts of the country that addressing it is actually a low-hanging fruit, except that traditional political parties have instead preferred identity issues such as Hindu vs. Muslim, caste, regionalism, and so on. The CJP quickly picked up the issue with the “School Thik Karo” (Fix the Schools) campaign on Independence Day. This struck a chord with everyone but annoyed the state. One person has already been martyred for the cause—the father of CJP volunteer Abdul Hafeez in Bankura, West Bengal, was assaulted by goons linked to the ruling BJP, and died of injuries.

The CJP co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka travelled to the site to meet the family. Ranka has incidentally sharply focussed on schools in his home State of Rajasthan, where the BJP government has now issued orders against outsiders being allowed in schools and has also prohibited videography. Should the CJP decide to take the plunge into politics at a later stage, Rajasthan could be a starting ground. State elections are due to take place at the end of 2028, along with those in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, three months before the next general election.

Meanwhile, three months after the cockroach swarm changed political equations and optics, the only memorable thing about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lacklustre Independence Day speech, besides him stating that the youth will determine the future, is his creation of a category called “dimagi naxals” (intellectual naxals), presumably pointing to irreverent young people who protest. Notably, Modi did not say anything on the Hindu-Muslim theme, so, presumably, the greater threat in his mind, or that of his speech writers, is that of dimagi naxals.

This threat has made the BJP take stock. It has revamped its entire organisation for the first time in the Modi era. Some individuals who had been sidelined in the party and were considered as being out of favour with Home Minister Amit Shah have been resurrected. Has Shah also been diminished? It would have been his decision to order the police and paramilitary crackdown on students protesters in Delhi, a decision that rebounded badly on the party. Is he still a successor to Modi and is Modi still the face of 2029? These questions do arise.

Students form a human chain in protest against poor facilities and shortage of teachers in their school, at Balaganj Circle, Lucknow, on August 17. | Photo Credit: PTI

One can say with certainty, however, that the Education Minister’s resignation, the organisational revamp, and the expected Cabinet reshuffle are all consequences of the student protest that completely spoilt the Bengal victory party that the national party would have otherwise planned. The protest also ruined the BJP’s monsoon session in Parliament, and its ambitious plans to pass a constitutional amendment enabling expansion and delimitation of constituencies had to be shelved.

Abhijeet Dipke, meanwhile, continues on the path of being a phenomenon. In his home State of Maharashtra, he has hit the ground running, making reels about the shocking state of schools. Possibly due to his own Dalit background, he has reportedly asked for greater participation from subaltern social groups. Meanwhile, the CJP stance that it will remain a pressure group at this stage and not plunge into elections does not mean that it is not examining future options. It does, however, seem unlikely that the CJP will intervene politically in State elections in either Uttar Pradesh or Punjab due early next year, except for campaigns on issues. It is evolving, examining the ground to see what is working for it and what is not. It now has to be real and cannot be driven by AI memes alone.

The listening tour, meanwhile, is similar to what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, all of 34 years old, did before he made his bid for the mayoral post. Mamdani famously went to working-class areas across the city, asking people what their problems were instead of lecturing them on sweeping solutions. He would make reels of interactions with different immigrant groups and sections of society, and constantly generate content that was both serious and light/catchy.

All the “listening” then shaped the policy positions around which voters were organised. A team was created in the process, with young people getting attracted to the idea of working for radical change against big capital and established political lobbies. India is entirely different from New York, but ideas do have wings and both nations are currently ruled by right-wing formations.

If one watches Dipke carefully, between examining schools and creating a team, he also makes reels offering to show his degree to the world only if the Prime Minister shows his. He comes through as both authentic, funny, and very young. There now appears to be a troika at the top of the cockroaches: Dipke first, with Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das as co-convenors. Das, a legal journalist, can be expected to flag everything linked to the judiciary. All three of them have not struck a wrong note in their statements yet and come across as individuals who seem ready to transcend traditional barriers and prejudices to speak of universal rights and issues. They do not seem to be afraid and that is very fresh.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.

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