Written by: Apurba Kumar Baruah
“The public in contemporary India needs to engage with independent civil society organizations and youth-led movements that demand transparency outside traditional party lines.”
Shashi Tharoor’s recent appeal, published in The Indian Express, urging Gen Z to join the system rather than agitate against it, is a poor attempt to persuade young people who have realized that the system itself needs to be challenged and changed. He appears to be completely disconnected from the lived experiences of frustrated young people who are increasingly realizing that they are trapped in a broken system. In fact, this appeal exposes a growing disconnect in Indian politics.
Tharoor has been a privileged member of Parliament. This is the same Parliament that quietly witnesses exam paper leaks and the unbearably high rate of unemployment. His claim that many like him are listening to the youth sounds somewhat hollow to those who experience the everyday neglect and injustices of a system that a section of the political class not only protects but also glorifies.
Tharoor seems worried about the possible subversion of a system in which he and others like him, who hobnob with and thrive alongside the powers that be, have prospered. As a well-known diplomat, he therefore does what he knows best. He makes a diplomatic move to resolve the conflict between rebellious young people and the established democratic procedures that successful politicians of most hues practise in contemporary India.
He offers young voters an institutional blueprint that emphasizes the processes of daily democratic politics within the Westminster model—such as flooding local MLA offices with complaints and suggestions and making use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. In doing so, he seems blissfully unaware of—or perhaps deliberately ignores—what goes on in contemporary India in the name of constitutional democratic politics. As a privileged politician with a background in international diplomacy and access to the corridors of power, he naturally downplays the deep structural decay in our political life. Consequently, he fails to appreciate the reasons behind Gen Z’s reliance on digital satire rather than formal attempts at reform, a choice that reflects their distrust of a corrupt and undemocratic system.
Tharoor does not seem to notice that movements like the one launched by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) are not merely about venting the anger of young people. The angry Gen Z understands that it must subvert the system if it wants to be heard. In this sense, the CJP movement aims at the deliberate subversion of a political system that refuses to listen to legitimate grievances.
Our political system, as it stands today, refuses to listen to the standard language of democratic politics. So what options do the cockroaches have? There is not only anger in their minds but also pain in their hearts. Yogendra Yadav recently explained in an interview with the BBC that satire, and even jokes, often express pain. Gen Z, interestingly, is preaching peace and non-violence even in its moment of agitation. It is not resorting to violent demonstrations; it is turning to satire.
As the protest on 6 June shows, the expression of pain, frustration, and anger in this form is acting as a unifying language for a large number of young people with grievances who feel completely excluded from mainstream politics by a privileged elite.
By urging Gen Z to partner with student unions, legal collectives, and policy organizations, Tharoor seeks to provide a roadmap for transforming online hashtags into binding legislation or court petitions. But the question remains: do the functioning of our legislatures and courts today inspire confidence among the deprived that there will be fair play?
Unfortunately, the democratic politics that Tharoor preaches is not in tune with statecraft in Modi’s India. The activists of the CJP are not naïve. They realize that when the presiding Chief Justice, despite all his protestations and subsequent attempts at clarification, referred to unemployed Indian youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites,” he almost got away with it, largely because a significant section of the ruling elite and its supporters expected young people to quietly swallow the insult. The angry and pained youth seem to have decided otherwise.
For many, that remark was one of the final blows to the credibility of institutional mechanisms for expressing dissent. Tharoor and like-minded politicians need to understand that the cockroaches may be here to stay longer than anticipated because a large section of the youth finds itself at the end of its tether. They will fight back, particularly because their satirical protest appears capable of mobilizing a broad section of citizens who want to correct the course of Indian politics.
There are, indeed, apprehensions among many well-meaning activists regarding the possibility of the establishment co-opting the leaders of this seemingly unorganized movement. These activists wonder why a government that has ruthlessly suppressed protests by student unions and youth wings of opposition parties whenever they question official policies is taking a relatively soft line in the case of the CJP.
Those of us who remember the India Against Corruption movement would naturally be apprehensive about the possibility of similar forces, with the backing of the present regime, taking over this movement and creating conditions that further strengthen the stranglehold of crony capitalism, a corrupt bureaucracy, and divisive communal politics.
However, considering the widespread fury over structural issues such as the NEET-UG examination paper leaks and CBSE evaluation anomalies, the state may have realized that denying permission to, or crushing, an online movement could trigger unstructured and aggressive street protests, transforming internet outrage into an uncontrollable physical movement. The Cockroaches, in my opinion, have pushed the state onto the back foot, at least for now.
Perhaps it is because of this that our erudite parliamentarian appears to be trying to convince CJP activists that demanding local accountability by flooding MLA offices with complaints is a viable way out. Whom is he trying to fool?
Tharoor correctly identifies that while social media can spark a fire, it often lacks the organizational structure required to keep it burning. After the protest of 6 June, however, one need not worry about that. The CJP is virtually declaring war not only against the Education Minister but against the entire establishment that facilitates such corruption.
It is noteworthy that the CJP’s diagnosis of the problem goes beyond malpractice in examinations. Dipke clearly stated that communal politics must be confronted if constitutional democracy is to survive the present crisis. This suggests that the CJP is unlikely to remain merely a hashtag-driven phenomenon.
Despite voices like Tharoor’s, the youth wings of the Congress and other non-NDA parties have already raised the banner of protest in various forms. These parties have noticed that the Cockroach Janta Party has successfully tapped into the frustrations of the country’s youth.
Speaking to a French news channel, Saurav Das stated that the movement is fundamentally demanding accountability from the government. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has also explained why many young people in India are increasingly disillusioned and what the country’s opposition parties can learn from this viral movement.
According to Jaffrelot, “The Cockroach Janta Party is now the voice of the resentment felt by Indian youth not only toward the incompetence, and even corruption, of those in power—which manifests itself in repeated examination leak scandals—but also, and above all, toward unemployment.”
Jaffrelot challenges the narrative of a booming Indian middle class, a narrative frequently promoted by the ruling elite. Instead, he argues that the opposition must focus more directly on economic realities. In his view, if the opposition hopes to succeed, it must address the specific and intense desperation of graduates who find themselves locked out of the workforce.
The CJP movement presents an opportunity for the opposition to do precisely that. The opposition in India today faces a government that is both repressive and fundamentally populist. To effectively challenge such a regime, it must address deep structural economic anxieties and systemic inequalities. Relying solely on traditional political narratives is unlikely to be sufficient.
The CJP movement demonstrates that mobilizing young people through direct engagement with their economic realities may be a more effective strategy than campaigns focused exclusively on anxieties surrounding constitutional values and democratic institutions.
This is not to suggest that constitutional values are unimportant. On the contrary, constitutional rights are essential for defending the principles that have enabled people of different castes, communities, and religions to live together peacefully since the founding of the Republic of India. It is equally true that, without these values, the people of India could not have declared themselves citizens of a sovereign democratic nation.
We are all aware that it is the constitutional rights we gave ourselves that make it possible for citizens to come together and stand up for the freedoms and protections they have enjoyed for decades, even as those rights appear increasingly threatened under the present political dispensation.
However, when Congress leaders and many civil society groups speak about the need to protect constitutional democracy, large sections of the population often struggle to connect those appeals to their immediate concerns and lived experiences. To many ordinary citizens, such language can appear abstract, distant, and even elitist.
The CJP movement offers an opportunity to bridge this gap. It demonstrates how the defence of constitutional values can be connected to concrete issues such as unemployment, examination scandals, institutional unaccountability, and economic insecurity. By translating abstract democratic principles into everyday struggles, the movement provides a language through which broader sections of society can understand what is at stake.
This may well be the most important political lesson emerging from the rise of the Cockroach Janta Party. The movement suggests that constitutional democracy cannot be defended merely through speeches about institutions and procedures. It must be linked to the daily realities of citizens whose frustrations arise from economic hardship, exclusion, and a growing sense of powerlessness.
If democratic forces in India wish to effectively challenge the current political order, they must find ways of connecting constitutional ideals with the material concerns of ordinary people. They must show how attacks on democratic institutions affect employment opportunities, educational fairness, social justice, and economic security.
The success of the CJP’s satirical politics lies precisely in its ability to make that connection. It has transformed what might otherwise have remained isolated grievances into a broader political language of dissent. It has given voice to a generation that feels ignored by established institutions and alienated from conventional political processes.
Whether the movement ultimately succeeds or not remains to be seen. Whether it can resist co-option, maintain organizational coherence, and convert online energy into sustained political action are questions that only time can answer. Yet one fact is already evident: the movement has exposed a deep reservoir of anger, frustration, and disillusionment among India’s youth.
More importantly, it has highlighted the growing disconnect between sections of the political establishment and the lived realities of a generation struggling with unemployment, educational uncertainty, and shrinking opportunities.
The question, therefore, is not whether Gen Z should enter the system, as Tharoor suggests. The more urgent question is whether the system itself is willing to listen to Gen Z.
The Cockroaches have posed that question. The answer will determine not only the future of the movement but perhaps also the future trajectory of Indian democracy itself.
Apurba Kumar Baruah is a Retd. Professor of North East Hills University (NEHU) and a noted political scientist.