India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement camps out until education minister resigns

New Delhi, India — Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z political movement born out of a joke and despair, have camped in the Indian capital to demand the resignation of the education minister, defying police orders.

The June summer heat is sweltering in New Delhi, where dozens of protesters slept overnight on roads and pavements, with more people joining on the second day amid a heavy police presence.

Abhijeet Dipke – the viral movement’s leader, who recently graduated from Boston University in the United States – returned to India earlier this month to escalate the protests from online to the streets, addressing the simmering anger among Indian youth.

More than half of India’s 1.4 billion population is under 25. Frequent leaks of exam papers and discrepancies in exam scores have caused widespread outrage among young people already stressed by the pressures of studying and seeking jobs.

Dipke’s Cockroach Janta Party (Cockroach People’s Party, or CJP) has been channeling that anger and frustration, demanding that the federal education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resign.

Until recently, it was all jokes and digs on social media. In May, the Indian chief justice’s comments equating the youth with cockroaches drew widespread ire. Dipke casually wrote on X at the time: “What if all cockroaches came together?”

Soon, it went viral — and Dipke set up an official website, and its Instagram followers breached the 22 million mark, double that of India’s ruling party in power for the last 12 years.

Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party spend the night at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi after vowing to maintain a round-the-clock protest until the education minister resigns [Yashraj Sharma/Al Jazeera]

Since staging the party’s first protest in New Delhi on June 6, Dipke has taken the demonstration to several Indian cities, including Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Nagpur, drawing hundreds of supporters.

Past midnight at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site in the capital, 18-year-old Sachin Kumar was lying on the road, sharing wired earphones with a friend he made there, Shubhankar.