The ‘cockroaches’ marching on India’s government

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the cockroaches marching on India's government.

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0:54The Guardian South Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Peterson was at home in Delhi on Sunday when her phone started blowing up. I'd actually been receiving WhatsApps all night by lots of young people I know just saying, come down, it's amazing here. Here was the heart of India's capital, where protesters were gathering in a park in New Delhi's government district. And so I set out around 7am and I headed down into central Delhi. Already the roads were closed. By the time you got to the centre of the city, your phone internet stopped working. As I drove around the city, you could just see people pouring in from everywhere, from the metro stations.

1:35People were using auto rickshaws to get around the police barriers. You know, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

1:49Protesting in India can be a risky business. But this time, the demonstrators were too furious to care, demanding changes to India's flawed and often corrupt education system. The main thing that these protests were demanding was the resignation of the education minister.

2:04Hannah Ellis-Petersen:We want him to resign and take the accountability so that a better person can take the position. And then also, more broadly, a kind of reform of an education system they feel is failing them. We are the absolutely crazy corruption that's so blatant. So I think it's all those issues and more that's just coming together. The members of this movement refer to themselves as cockroaches. And they turned out in their droves. I've never seen this many young people in particular out on the streets. I'd say 50 ,000 and 100 ,000 is the estimate that people are now going with. All the Gen Z's of India is here.

2:39Hannah Ellis-Petersen:I am a working person. I have taken a day off and I have coming. Because today is the time I have to spoke, we have to spoke, that please, government, have some accountability. And in a country that has really seen a kind of crackdown on dissent, I haven't seen this kind of level of protest in the seven years I've been in India.

3:02As the protests spread across India and even to the UK, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is coming under increasing pressure. I mean, there's 600 million plus young people in India. So when they actually came out as a collective, there was a sense that actually we do have some power and we do have a voice. We are the future of India. Yes, we are the future of India. And the government should be afraid of. The government is already scared of us.

3:32While the Modi government remains extremely powerful, ignoring 600 million plus young people is something that could genuinely become a real problem for them if this continues. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. From a leaked exam paper to a mass movement. Meet the cockroaches.

3:59Hannah Ellis-Peters and welcome back to Today in Focus. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? I'm very good, thank you. Lovely to be here. So we've seen this recent movement of young people in India taking to the streets, and they've called themselves the cockroaches, which I think is a very intriguing name. Talk us through the origin of the cockroaches. It was really just started as a satirical joke, but based on something that really was very serious, which was the Chief Justice of India, one of the most senior, most powerful figures in the country, during a Supreme Court hearing, made a comment about young people and how they didn't have any jobs, and they were just, you know, activists and cockroaches and parasites on society.

4:39The Chief Justice later denied making these comments and said they'd been taken out of context. But nonetheless, the line still really caught fire online. You know, young people who have had a lot of frustrations were really angry about this. And Abhijit Dibke, an Indian student who was studying in the US, just put out a line on social media saying, what if all the cockroaches came together. And the response was huge. So many people replied to him. And so he decided to make a website, make a satirical party. He called it the Cockroach Janta Party, which is a play on the ruling Bhatia Janta Party.

5:13And it had a very funny, very dark manifesto, which kind of touched on a lot of things that really were true, which is about young people being ignored, about a suppression of the media, erosion of democracy. But it was just kind of a joke website. And the party has a tagline, right? A political party for the people the system forgot to count. Why has that touched a nerve among young Indians? Because it's true. You know, on both sides of the political divide, there is a sense that young people's issues are just going ignored. They're not seen as important voters. And so it was interesting. So, you know, he built this satirical website.

5:48They put on an Instagram page. You know, within two weeks, it had 22 million followers. Abhijit Dibke realised there was something more here. that actually he had tapped into something. That is when I realised maybe the youth here is trying to send a message. They told me that they are really dissatisfied with all the existing political parties and it's because nobody listens to them, nobody even talks about them. And so he looked at what were the issues that really young people felt really strongly about and the thing he seemed to land upon was this issue of education and specifically this issue of exam leaks.

6:21This is an interesting issue because it is a very specifically Indian issue. It's often difficult to explain to people exam leaks. What does that even mean? But in India, it's critical. There are these specific exams that get people into higher education to study things such as medicine, to go into the civil service, to go into other high profile jobs. And these exams are so competitive. And families will put their whole life savings, put themselves into debt to pay for their children to go to schools that help them pass these exams. And the competition is crazy. It's more than 2 million students each year applying for 130 ,000 places to study medicine.

7:00And the pressure on the students is huge to perform because their families have made such huge sacrifices for them to get there. And so what happens is when these exams then get leaked, which they have done on multiple occasions where, you know, basically people make money by selling them. So they're sold to the highest bidder. So that completely destroys the level playing field. and it also means when the leaks get exposed, these students have to retake these extremely grueling exams all over again.

7:26Hannah Ellis-Petersen:A couple of years ago, I was preparing for these entrance exams too. And I've seen the amount of work students put in. Study for 12 to 14 hours a day for years together to build their entire future around one entrance exam. And lots of students just simply can't do it. And some of them have taken their own lives or just had complete breakdowns in the process. As a proud cockroach myself, I demand the resignation of the Education Minister of India, Mr Dharmendra Pradhan. It is because of your incompetency and corrupted ministry, which have led the death of 17 cockroaches in India. And you have also played.

7:57And viewed from London, it seems quite surprising, actually, that what might seem to be a niche issue, this one medical exam that got leaked, even as you said, it has happened in many years in the past, that this is the thing that has got people out on the streets in numbers that have not been seen for many, many years. Is it really just about the medical exams or is that a kind of proxy for a wider dissatisfaction? Absolutely. It has become a much bigger issue than that. Certainly, you know, there weren't 100 ,000 people protesting because of the exams. The leaking of the exam is this idea of kind of the way in which this government seems to be kind of very careless about the future of young people.

8:37I would also say that one of the crucial figures that has got involved in this protest is this activist and educationalist and very world-famous engineer, in fact, called Sonam Wangchuk, who is from a North Indian state in the Himalayas called Ladakh. And he kind of dedicated his life to education in Ladakh. You know, he could have gone around the world with his incredible inventions, but he stayed and he dedicated himself to a school that he's built there. Last year, he was jailed for his activism. He was tarnished as a terrorist, has happened to a lot of people who've stood up against the Modi government.

9:11And after he was released this year, he has pledged his support to the Gokraj Danta Party. And at the end of June, he basically said, I'm going to go on hunger strike.

9:27Until the education minister resigns. And hunger strike has a lot of history in India. It's very associated with Gandhi, the independence movement. So this is a real kind of big symbol of commitment by Sonam Wangchuk. And over the course of weeks, it gained a lot of momentum, a lot of attention.

9:46Hannah Ellis-Petersen:While you scroll past this video, a man named Sonam Wangchuk is putting his own body on the line, demanding accountability for millions of students like you. A man has been sitting on a hunger strike for weeks together, along with a lot of other young students who are disappointed. And somehow this is still not enough for the government to respond and take accountability. And the government didn't make any comment. This man was essentially slowly starving to death and there was no response from the government. Until on Saturday morning, very early in the morning, the Delhi police sent in officers and forcibly removed him from the site and dragged him to a hospital.

10:19And the video of him being forcibly removed went absolutely viral, went across Indian social media. And for students who felt like this is a man who'd put his life on the line for them, when a call was made for students then to come out on Monday and march to parliament. They felt, you know, we owe this to him. All your life, I'm assuming there was a point where you were suppressed by someone or something and you wish that you spoke up, but you could never. This is and this can be a point in your life where you are no longer being suppressed. And so a lot of the students that I know, not just students, young people, actually even older people who came out on Monday had also been driven there because they said, you know, this is not what a democracy does.

10:57and this is not how we should treat someone like Sonam Wangchuk. And he's not a person that you can tarnish easily. You know, he has a pretty immaculate reputation. So the fact that he's come here, he's been fasting, people can, he's a figure that people can actually get around. So how do you feel about what they've done to Sonam Wangchuk, how they've treated him?

11:15Hannah Ellis-Petersen:Sonam Wangchuk, he's an Indian scientist, a brilliant brain. But a brilliant brain is coming on street, having a hundreds, right? It's a shame on India. He's just speaking for the student, he's speaking for us. So we are here walking for the Soda Bangchuk. And a lot of people were repeating the core demand that they wanted the education minister to resign. He's the education minister of India and he's not educated at all. Yeah, this is the contrary of the India. So yeah, go Pradhan, go. And is it a big deal in modern India to take to the streets? I mean, India always prides itself on being the world's biggest democracy.

11:50But is it a dangerous thing to put your head above the parapet and go onto the streets and have your voice heard? It can be, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the most prominent protesters of the last 10 years, most of them are in jail. They've had police raids against them. They've had police cases filed against them. There is an enormous amount of fear. And that was the thing that was very interesting because on Monday there didn't seem to be the fear. People actually were raising all different kinds of slogans about the government. We have been seeing that anyone who tries to question this government, they try their best to silence them.

12:25There's fear in the minds of people that they think a lot before, you know, speaking up. It just shows that they are not fearful anymore. They want justice. But what then happened was towards the afternoon, it shifted. There started to be police retaliation against the protesters. There was tear gas. They started to lati-charge and use these police batons against them. They pushed back barriers against them. They have dragged the students on the roads. They had beaten them on their heads. Blood was spilled everywhere. And what had been a real protest of kind of joy and solidarity became scenes of kind of chaos and violence.

13:09They brutally attacked everyone. It just shows how barbaric and how demonic the entire thing is. They're beating everyone they were seeing. and there was a lot of anger and a lot of sadness and a lot of frustration that that is how the government felt like they should be dealing with this many young people who were simply out there just to say, we have a voice too. And how were you received as a foreign journalist? Were they frightened of speaking to you? Were they happy that you were there? Oh, they were thrilled I was there. We are happy that you guys are here. Indian media, particularly mainstream TV media, did not cover this protest.

13:44They were not there at all. No, not really. They call them Gaudi media in India, which means lapdog.

13:56Everyone has something to say. People were happy to give their names, they were happy to talk, they were happy to give their experiences. They obviously have control of all the national media channels. They've made sure that those guys ignore this entire protest. Let's see, I don't see any of them around. but unfortunately you're in an age of dictatorship you're also in the age of social media there's tons of people here getting the message out and that's what's been able to mobilize so maybe they're 20 years too late for dictatorship let's see

14:33And so you were there on Monday and people said that they were going to come back on Tuesday what did you find when you returned? So I wasn't actually sure there would be many people on Tuesday, you know, given the level of police brutality, what people had endured. And I was actually really wrong. It's astonishing. There are thousands and thousands of people here. There are people with banners. You can't even get to the stage where the kind of main protesters have been camped out. It's an absolute huge wall of people. I can barely see it. And there were even louder singing, even louder chanting.

15:10and there was this real kind of sense that this had become not just a single protest but a long movement. I spoke to a spokesperson for the Kokritz Jantapadi, Ratna Singh, and asked her whether or not they had expected such huge turnout. The youth of this country is just done with how this current education system is. It is not just about need exams anymore. It is about colleges, It is about, you know, the fee structure. So I think everyone was so, you know, just angry about the fact that nothing is changing in this country. So since then, I've gone down to the protest on Wednesday and then again on Thursday.

15:49And there are thousands of people there. Every time I go, it's got bigger. It's really become the place to be for young people in Delhi. People are there serving food. There's been Sikh kitchens giving food every day. There's been a Muslim chef who's been down there every day. There are people from all different communities who have turned out. It's so hot and so grueling there. But when you go down, it feels like a festival. And there's just a sense of joy that's really there. And a lot of these posters are, you know, they're really poking fun at the government. But they're really funny. There's loads of memes.

16:21I was just walking around talking to people. And two guys rush up to me and they hold their phone. And it's a Photoshop photo of Modi riding a pig. And they say to me in Hindi, have you seen this man? This man is missing in action. And it's just, I've never had this kind of satire, this idea of poking fun at the government in this kind of way. But in this funny way, and in this very fearless way, there is this sense that people have a courage now to speak about the government in the way they never had before. And they're using internet culture to do it. And has the government responded in any way?

16:52So up till late this week, there had been an almost complete refusal by the government to get into a dialogue with these protesters, have any kind of conversation with them. There was a complete intransigence to engaging with their demands. But then on Thursday, in quite a, I would say, telling shift, Modi put out a tweet on social media which said that they would take action against the exams. They would implement fast track courts to punish those who were involved in the exam leaks, which is very significant because in his 12 years in power, Modi has almost never acknowledged any kind of movement on the streets and any kind of pressure on his government.

17:30But for the protesters, this was just him trying to pay lip service. He didn't acknowledge the key demand of their protest movement, which is the resignation of his education minister. And lots of people are saying to me, well, why doesn't he just sack him? It's such an easy demand to, you know, appease a mass movement, and then you can clear them off the streets. But for Modi, it's much trickier. You know, he operates almost as this court of loyal advisors. And the education minister, Damendra Paddan, is one of his most loyal ministers. and what he has done, the way in which he's politicized the education system, the privatization of exams, these are things he was actually asked to do.

18:04And so Modi is in a very difficult position here because he cannot fire a loyal supporter of his for doing exactly what he's asked him to do without undermining support of other members of his cabinet and possibly creating fractures within this very powerful institution of government that he has assembled and this very powerful, very loyal team of advisors he has around him.

18:34Coming up, can the cockroaches truly challenge Modi's grip on power?

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19:24Let's talk a bit about India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi because he's a pretty polarising figure, isn't he? His critics would say that he's weakened federal institutions, he's been silencing dissent, limiting press freedom, as you've already said. And also India's Muslim minority feel rightly, you may say, threatened under his rule. But at the same time, he does remain in enormous popularity, or that's how it looks from over here anyway. He's been prime minister for 12 years. How dangerous a moment is this for him? So you're very right. His government is very, very popular. The form of Hindu nationalist politics that he and the BJP subscribe to have gained enormous amounts of voters and support in a country which is 80 % Hindu.