How India’s Cockroach Party Became a Political Force

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1:57Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. It started out as kind of a joke.

2:10A satirical political movement in India that moved from social media to the streets. It's a packed house at Pokros protest in New Delhi, central Delhi area. Thousands of protesters have gathered over here. And finally, to the highest levels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. It's the first time since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014 that one of his ministers has resigned under public pressure. We have done it! We have done it! protesters in New Delhi erupted in celebration over the weekend following the resignation of India's education minister his decision to quit comes after weeks of cockroach protests which kicked off in June amid outrage over a botched national medical school entrance exam some two million students who dreamed of becoming doctors took the exam and when it emerged that answers had been leaked in advance disrupting what for many young Indias is a rare pathway to economic advancement.

3:15Anger over India's education system spilling onto the streets. It sent tens of thousands of self-proclaimed cockroaches into the capital.

3:30Police in New Delhi used tear gas and batons on Monday to disperse thousands of students marching on parliament. The rally, led by the so-called Cockroach Janta Party, was the largest in India's capital in recent years. It all came to a head last week when the protesters called for a march to the parliament on Monday and way too many people showed up choking every arterial road leading to the parliament. Atul Dave is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News in New Delhi. It led to scuffles and skirmishes between the protesters and the police and the police used force, including tear gas and batons and allegedly even pellet guns.

4:11Since then, the protests only grew. And over the weekend, the resignation of the education minister was accepted by the prime minister, which was a remarkable development. The protests that toppled the education minister also announced a powerful new force in Indian politics. Young people frustrated by dwindling job opportunities in a country where unemployment among college graduates far outstrips the national average. And the thing worth understanding here is that it is not about a single exam paper leak. It is a much larger problem. It should be looked at as a moment that sort of crystallized all of that anger among Indian students.

4:59This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca Chung-Wilkins, in for one half. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive this ever-shifting region. Today on the show, India's cockroach protests, how they drove so much change so fast, and what they tell us about how young people in India feel about their government and their future.

5:38Atul, protests in New Delhi have been intensifying and spreading until last weekend when we had the resignation of the education minister. You've been on the ground for all of it. Some of our listeners will just be tuning into this story for the first time. Tell us, what is the cockroach movement? The cockroach junta party, as they call themselves, is a satirically named political movement that grew out of off-the-cuff remarks that were made by the Chief Justice of India in May during a court hearing. And he referred to some of the unemployed youngsters as cockroaches. And this guy who was sitting in Boston decided to sort of start a website called Cockroach Shanta Party.

6:22That somebody was Abhijit Dipka, an Indian national who was finishing graduate school at Boston University and looking for a job when the top judge called some unemployed young Indians cockroaches and parasites. Dipka set up a satirical website that he built as a home for India's lazy, unemployed and forgotten and a voice for millions of young Indians who feel neglected by traditional politics. And very quickly, over 22 million people joined it online. and then he sort of posted this now famous tweet that was all over the protests that asked what if all the cockroaches came together and he moved back to India.

7:06He came to this designated protest site in Delhi called Janthar Mantar and he had been sitting there for about a month until last week. So you have this satirical CJP party and it's that sort of a nod to Modi's BJP, right? Exactly. They're not quite a political party, but they have actually rallied around this key set of demands. So tell us what they are. They call themselves a social movement. They have so far made it a point to remind everyone that they are not a political party. So this whole thing sort of galvanized into student anger and everything because of a spate of exam paper leaks in India, which is a big problem.

7:47And there was this one particular exam that is taken by students out of high school for entrance examinations for medical colleges across India. And this is a very high pressure exam and students appeared for it. And then before the results were to be announced, it was found that papers were leaked in advance and some people had an unfair advantage, so they had to cancel the entire nationwide examination and reconvene it. And this sort of precipitated a lot of anger that people were feeling. So the Cochrane Janta Party's demands was resignation of the education minister. Their second demand was that the families of over 20 children who committed suicide because of the exam paper leak should be compensated.

8:37But the movement, it is worth noting, it wasn't contained to those demands because at the front lines of the march to the parliament, the people who were shouting in the streets were not taking the name of the education minister. Their anger was channeled directly at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which is why the protest in themselves sort of signifies something larger. That larger thing, roughly speaking, is economic pressure. If you do well in school, if you can get to a decent college and earn a decent livelihood, you can lift your family out of poverty or out of the lower middle classes into something of a viable livelihood.

9:21Now, if we look at the figures, the family spending on education has risen substantially over the last two decades. The families that are sending their children to study for their exams are generally enrolled in coaching institutes, which cost a lot of money. So it is not simply a question of reappearing for the exam, but reinvesting all of that money and the added pressure of doing well in the exam. So the pressure is financial, it is emotional, it is psychological, and it is something that a lot of students have to go through. And the anger sort of rose out of the idea is that despite having to deal with all of that, they should not have to deal with the failures of the state.

10:08So the anger about the exams, that's all happening in May. We're now at the end of July and the CJP has seemingly transformed. How did it grow so quickly? When Abhijit Dipke, the founder of the CJP, decides to show up in New Delhi and sit at the protest site called Janatar Mantar, he is joined by a prominent Indian activist, Sonam Wangchuk, who says that he is going to be fasting on to death, or unless the education minister resigns and the government takes responsibility for the failures of the exam paper leaks. Then two days before the opening of the monsoon session of Indian parliament, the Delhi police showed up at the protest site and they forcibly removed this activist and admitted him to a hospital.

10:54The CJP had already called for a march onto the parliament and that was when it became a major story. It angered a lot of people because it conveyed to them the absolute authority that the government enjoys to do whatever it wants. And then last week the police used tear gas and batons to prevent students from marching to the parliament. So how quickly did that moment change the narrative in favor of the protesters? It happened pretty fast. I mean, the sight of students being beaten by the police, police firing tear gas, not in the air, but directly into the crowd of protesters. And every protester out there was armed by a camera.

11:40They captured this high-ranking police officer who just walks across and slaps a woman across her face. And these videos, they went viral on social media, and that changed the narrative very, very fast. It sort of just took a moral tone of these nonviolent protesters who are going out there and being beaten up by the police. And what I can say is that I have never in my entire reporting life heard the kind of language that was used in the slogans against Prime Minister Modi. Atul, as you've reported, the Cockroach Janita Party called off the latest protests after the resignation of the education minister, but doesn't rule out future protests.

12:27So what happens next? When the protesters were walking away, they smilingly turned to the police officers. Some of them had beaten them over the past week and they were like, goodbye, we will see you the next time. So it is this sense of like, we have achieved this victory, but do not think that this is over. This is a very significant moment that not only a cabinet minister has resigned, but a cabinet minister has resigned under direct public pressure. This is not the same government that it used to be until about two weeks ago. And this is where I go back to what the language that was used in the slogans against Narendra Modi.

13:09There was a sense of fear about speaking about the government. That has completely gone out of the window. The protest forced India's government to back down. But is this just a one-off victory or the start of something bigger? After the break, we look at what these demonstrations reveal about jobs, inequality, and Modi's political future.

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16:48To contain the political fallout from the protests, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made direct appeals to students and announced several measures to address their concerns. That includes creating a high-level cabinet committee to look into an exam reform and setting up fast-track courts to tackle the exam paper leaks. But Bloomberg's Atul Dev says this address is just part of the problem. The protests tacked into deep frustrations over jobs, opportunities and inequality in India's fast-growing economy. India is growing, you know, macroeconomically. The situation looks rather pleasant, but the opportunities are simply not available to a lot of people.

17:35In 1983, 4 % of Indians had a graduate degree. that number has gone up to almost 25 % at this moment. But these graduates are not finding jobs. If they are finding jobs, they are not finding any good jobs. Bloomberg's analysis of the labor data collected by the Indian government showed that out of every 100 graduates, only four, and I repeat, only four had been able to secure a job with a contract, a paid leave, and social security benefits. Imagine you are among the very privileged in India, and you have gone for your higher education in US, UK, Europe, Australia, you know, one of the foreign countries, and you graduate from there.

18:22First thing, you run into immigration curves, right? And this is a world of hard borders, and they're encountering this very difficult position. Then you have just below them are the graduates of these extremely prestigious educational institutes, and they are failing to find jobs, you know, that they think they should deserve after going through that rigorous education. Third of those are people who are trying to, you know, find jobs in state governments, you know, lower level, but salaried jobs in police and railway and postal departments and things of that nature. And at the bottom end of this pyramid are the people who cannot access any of those things, who are at the desperate end.

19:06And they are thrown into this gig work. So is this set of protests and all of the other issues that have been raised, is this a setback or a threat to Modi? Well, it has dented his image. This is Narendra Modi taking a step back. And the people know that If they protest, if they protest meaningfully, if they protest peacefully, and if they have a genuine grievance that they would like to raise with the state, and if they stick to their ground, they can make the government bend its knee to them. That is how it has changed. But not enough, Fatul says, to pose a significant threat to Modi's Bharatiya Janta party just yet.

19:48Electorally, the BJP is doing very well. They just had a landslide victory in West Bengal, but they have numbers to show for their majority in the parliament. That is why they had set themselves a really ambitious legislative agenda for this session of the parliament that began Monday before everything got taken over by student protests. But these protests have changed something. Now, how does that reflect electorally in the coming elections? It's too early to tell. Some of these grievances around protesters and young Indians, especially around jobs and economic opportunity, don't have quick fixes.

20:29So realistically, what options does the government actually have? That is a very good question because the problems with the Indian education system are structural and they will take years to address. what the government needs to do is to take it seriously and set out a plan and then follow that plan. Because this is a big problem for India. The median age at the moment is, hovers around 29. And all these people, if nothing else moves the needle for this government, they have to remember that all these people are going to vote. We have seen these Gen Z protests emerging in Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia in recent years.

21:13How does what's happening in India fit into that broader trend? Well, the way I see it is that India is in a much more secure position. This is a government that commands, you know, with absolute authority, almost every arm of the state. This is not a weak government. It is also a very popular government that won its third election and just won a state election with a landslide victory. But to the larger point of how does the situation compare with Nepal or Bangladesh, the language that I heard in the streets and the kind of slogans that were raised in the street and the kind of grievances that they were airing and the way they spoke about the opportunities that they do not find access to, you know, anymore.

21:59It sort of conveys that there is a social contract between the young people of a country and its government. And what you're seeing is that that is beginning to collapse in India as well. But I think we are far from a situation like in Nepal. The reason these protests took place in the first place, I mean, it was already the fraying of that social contract, right? why are young people coming to the streets demanding to be heard? They do not feel like they are being heard by the government. And that was the situation that they were trying to remedy. And now they have secured a victory. Does this embolden them or does it allay their anxieties for a little bit?

22:42I don't know.

22:48This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca Chung-Wilkins. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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