On a rain-soaked Monday in central Delhi, a young man stood his ground before a line of riot police, shouting “Maaro sir, maaro sir” — beat me, sir — as batons swung towards him. The scene, captured in a video that ricocheted across social media, was not an isolated flash of bravado but the signature of a movement that has turned an entomological slur into a badge of honour. Around him, thousands of protesters, many wearing cockroach costumes or carrying the Indian Constitution, had been trying to march on Parliament, only to be met with tear gas, lathi charges, and the closure of five metro stations. By evening, more than fifty police personnel were injured, over seventy demonstrators detained, and the protest site at Jantar Mantar had been dismantled — yet the agitation refused to die.

The force behind this confrontation is the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a political campaign that began in May as a satirical response to a Supreme Court judge’s remark comparing unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites”. Its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old political communications strategist who had been living in Boston, turned the insult into an online movement that amassed 22 million Instagram followers within days. When a national medical entrance exam was cancelled after a paper leak — affecting 2.3 million aspirants — the CJP moved offline, launching a sit-in at Jantar Mantar on 20 June. The protest gained moral weight when Sonam Wangchuk, a Ramon Magsaysay Award-winning engineer and education reformer, joined the hunger strike on 28 June. His forcible removal to hospital on 18 July, after 21 days without food, became the spark that drew tens of thousands to the capital.

The cockroach, in this context, is a creature of dark, resilient symbolism. It thrives in the cracks of a system that, for many young Indians, has become a closed door. The NEET scandal was only the latest in a string of examination irregularities that have eroded trust in the meritocratic promise of competitive testing. Behind the demand for Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation lies a deeper, less easily articulated fury: at unemployment running at 9.9 per cent for those aged 15 to 29, at a political class perceived as indifferent, and at a public sphere where dissent is often met with silence or force. The CJP’s genius was to fuse this anger with the grammar of internet culture — memes, costumes, and a name that parodies the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party — making protest feel less like a grim duty and more like a collective act of defiant wit.

The movement’s resonance was visible in the crowd that gathered on Monday. There were schoolchildren in uniform, elderly couples who had travelled overnight from neighbouring states, and Bollywood actors Shabana Azmi and Prakash Raj, who sat with hunger strikers and addressed the crowd. Opposition leaders, from the Congress’s Rahul Gandhi to the Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra, condemned the police action, while inside Parliament, the monsoon session was repeatedly adjourned amid uproar. The government, which had initially ignored the protest, scrambled to open a channel: Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda met CJP representatives, who submitted demands including Pradhan’s resignation and compensation for families of students who died by suicide. Yet no commitments were made, and by nightfall, police were clearing the site and examining social media for evidence of a “conspiracy”.

From his hospital bed, Sonam Wangchuk scrawled a note saying he would continue his fast until youth leaders were allowed to meet parliamentarians. The image of that handwritten message — a 59-year-old man, weakened but unyielding, appealing for dialogue while batons fell on peaceful marchers outside — captured the strange, stubborn hope at the heart of the cockroach revolt. It is a movement that began as a joke, but its punchline is a question India’s establishment has yet to answer.