Episode 411: The Cockroach Movement: Can India’s Youth Challenge Modi?

In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, Dominic Bowen speaks with Vinay Lal about the youth-led protests sweeping India and what they mean for the future of the world’s largest democracy.
The discussion examines how the “Cockroach Janta Party”, a movement that began as an online joke, has grown into a serious challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. 

The conversation explores:
 -The controversy over the removal of 130 million names from India’s voter lists
-What is happening in India, and how an insult from India’s Chief Justice sparked a youth movement
-The two waves of protest: from leaked exam papers to the fairness of India’s elections
-How protesters are drawing on Gandhi and nonviolence

Vinay Lal is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on Indian history and politics, nationalism, colonialism, human rights, and the history of Gandhi and nonviolence. He is the author or editor of around 20 books, including Political Hinduism and The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, and is a regular public commentator on Indian affairs.

The International Risk Podcast brings together global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers to explore the forces transforming our world — from geopolitical instability and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and one of Europe’s leading experts on international risk and crisis management. He advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across Europe on how to prepare for uncertainty, navigate crises, and build strategic resilience in an increasingly volatile world. 

#Geopolitics #India #Modi #Democracy #Protests #GenZ #Elections #SouthAsia #PoliticalRisk #InternationalRisk #Strategy #HumanRights

Transcript

Dominic: India is often called the world’s largest democracy. But right now, thousands of young people are on the streets asking whether that democracy still works for them. A movement that started as an online joke, the Cockroach Janta Party, has become a serious challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and its target is the Election Commission, which has removed 130 million names from India’s voter lists. The government says it’s cleaning up the rolls, but protesters call it theft. And the response has been a sweeping crackdown, with thousands of protesters detained so far. I’m Dominic Bowen, and today we’re asking what’s really happening in India, what this means for the health of its democracy, and what governments and business leaders watching from abroad should make of it. Our guest today is Vinay Lal, Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA, who has written widely on Indian politics, nationalism and nonviolent protest. Vinay, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.

Vinay: Pleasure to be here.

Dominic: Vinay, I’m in New Delhi today and we’re going to be talking about India, but you’ve actually just left. Where are you today?

Vinay: I’m in Los Angeles. So the tables are reversed. One would have thought that the person interviewing me would be in the West and I’d be in India. But I just returned to LA a few days ago, after nearly a two-month stint in India.

Dominic: I was very disappointed when the production team told me you’d just missed each other. I was hoping for a face-to-face interview! But this will still be a great conversation, so thanks for making the time. You were in Delhi when some of these protests were unfolding. For listeners who might not be following the protests in India, what did you see, and what background do we need to understand?

Vinay: Let me clarify at the outset that there have been two waves of protest since late May. I was not in India during the first wave. It started in late May, early June, and ended, more or less, with the resignation of the then education minister in late July. I arrived in India in August, and I was very much there for the second wave. The second wave has been less conclusive, we might say.

I did speak to people about the first wave, including members of my family. My wife’s niece was present at the site, which is called Jantar Mantar. Jantar Mantar is an 18th-century astronomical observatory, where strangely shaped buildings were used to measure time. It was rather apt that the demonstration took place there, because the time was up for the government, so to speak. That’s how the youngsters took it: time is up for this government, and it’s time to move on to something new.

But in the second wave, the government was much better prepared, because it had been caught on the back foot in the first wave. This time it became almost impossible to even enter the demonstration site. That was no longer Jantar Mantar, because the government had “denotified” it as a protest site. The protest was held nearby, in a different part of Connaught Place.

Dominic: The movement’s name comes from India’s Chief Justice comparing unemployed young people to cockroaches. In most countries, calling a large share of your voters cockroaches would not be seen as a good political move. The youth movement turned it into an online joke, and it has now become a challenge to the Modi government. What does this tell us about the frustration of young people in India?

Vinay: It’s a frustration of the young everywhere. There are student-led and wider public protests happening in many parts of the world. We all saw what happened in France a few days ago, and let’s not forget that it also began with students protesting about the condition of schools, something the Cockroach Janta Party also made one of its campaigns.

The frustrations of the young are unquestionably a crucial part of this movement. Even if you use measures like GDP as a sign of progress, the unemployment prospects are huge. You graduate, and you’re basically looking at a future of unemployment. Among the educated, the unemployment rate in India is close to 30%. Ironically, among those who are much less educated, it’s closer to 3 to 4%.

Why? Because the only jobs fundamentally being created in India are lower-paying jobs: gig economy jobs, delivery jobs. Delivery apps have mushroomed by the dozens, and you can get everything delivered to your doorstep. That’s what large numbers of people are doing, and you don’t need a college degree for that. So what are the prospects for the young?

Centralised examinations are one of the main roads to upward mobility, especially for those from poor or underprivileged backgrounds. If that system is deeply compromised, as it was, we are talking about a whole series of problems. To put it more broadly, the question is: what does it mean to live in a democracy if you’re young in India? You can speak about constitutional rights, but what do they really mean in everyday life? I think that’s the fundamental issue for the young, and indeed for everyone else in the country.

Dominic: In mid-October, the protest leaders were arrested and held in custody for about a week. They’ve been released now. I’m moving around Delhi and there are police barricades everywhere, which I didn’t see a few months ago. What’s the next move for the protest movement? Will it fizzle out, or do you expect more protests and political campaigning? Their online presence is huge, with over 20 million followers.

Vinay: The first wave caught the government completely off guard. They had not anticipated anything of that magnitude. The resignation of the education minister is a very good sign of that, because this is a government that took pride in the fact that none of its ministers had ever resigned.

The second wave is a very different story. Some people like to see a seamless continuity, but I don’t think there is one. The movement is, to some extent, a movement in search of itself.

The initial issue was the slur, and more fundamentally an exam paper leak. This is a very big matter in India. Around 2.3 million candidates sit the NEET, the national exam you must pass to get into medical and dental school. The exam was compromised, so it had to be cancelled and rescheduled, after 2.3 million people had already taken it.

Once they won the minister’s resignation, they moved on to another issue: repairing the schools. Social media was flooded with pictures of the dilapidated condition of public schools in India. It’s horrific.

Then came the issue on which the second wave was organised: the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner. Everything in Indian politics is known by an acronym — India is a country of acronyms, as I call it — and this one was the SIR, the Special Intensive Revision. In a nutshell, 130 million people were removed from the electoral rolls, and protesters believe the Election Commission, which is supposed to be an independent body, was totally complicit with the government.

Now the question is: what next? Even if they get his resignation, what will they campaign on afterwards? Look at the education minister: they got his resignation, and the person appointed in his place is, if anything, worse.

But we should understand the importance of a resignation. Politics is not simply a matter of rational calculation. Symbolic gestures can be monumentally important. When Gandhi went on the Salt March, the British thought he was literally a lunatic. So I would ask a different question: what was achieved in the first wave of protests? That will help us understand what the future might look like.

Dominic: 130 million names removed is a phenomenal number, more than the entire population of most countries. The Election Commission says it’s removing dead, duplicate and ineligible voters, but critics call it flat-out theft. Then there’s the exam leak and the poor state of schools. How should outsiders make sense of these different stories and understand what the truth is?

Vinay: The government claims the exercise was wholly legitimate. It says it removed, first, deceased people who were still on the rolls, so someone else could vote in their name; second, duplicate voters; and third, non-eligible voters, meaning non-citizens. On all three counts, it’s a largely fraudulent claim by the government. There are enough independent studies showing how fraudulent these claims really are.

I’m not saying there weren’t a small number of deceased people or duplicate voters on the rolls. But the claim that many votes are being cast by non-citizens is absurd, because there are safeguards in the system. I am an Overseas Citizen of India, and even I can’t vote. And exactly the same argument is being made by the Trump administration in the United States, while scores of studies show the number of non-citizens who have ever voted in a US election is so tiny it’s barely worth talking about.

Now look at it from the point of view of the Cockroach Janta Party, to understand the real stakes. The Indian Constitution guarantees equality of opportunity and status. But fundamentally, India has not achieved anything close to equality. However, the Constitution did something extraordinary from the start: it gave universal franchise. The idea that the poorest and the richest person each get one vote introduced a certain kind of political equality. It may be nominal, but on that one day when you vote, you’re equal to everyone else. What the Special Intensive Revision did was strip away even that nominal equality from Indian political life.

Dominic: In 2020–2021, the farmers’ protests were one of Modi’s most consequential domestic challenges. After about a year of mobilisation, Modi withdrew all three farm laws, which few people had predicted. Right now, the cockroach movement doesn’t show the same sustained organisation or leverage. Beyond the education minister’s resignation, can the protesters force more concessions, like real independence for the Election Commission or more funding for education?

Vinay: I don’t think we can expect that, because these are structural, systemic problems. If you’re thinking about concrete outcomes, what the Cockroach Janta Party is doing will have very limited results. Will the government radically reform its exam system, or monitor exams to make sure there are no leaks? No. I think any such promises will be totally hollow.

Dominic: When foreign governments and businesses look at India, much of its value rests on its economy, its geography, its large workforce and its institutions. India is a crucial partner for the US and Europe, as a counterweight to China and as an alternative manufacturing and IT base for companies de-risking their supply chains. How should they read this moment? Is this a political risk they should be pricing in?

Vinay: It’s a complicated question. In principle, democracies around the world would want to see whether the Indian government is responsive to its citizens, and how India really measures up as a democracy.

The problem is that there is political turmoil in most parts of the world, including democracies. The United States is hardly in a position to lecture anyone today, though it’s used to doing so. And in France we saw protests with large-scale destruction, something we did not see in India. The protests here have been animated by the spirit of nonviolence.

As for risk for foreign investors: all states know that countries go through periods of political turbulence. The fundamental question is whether there is an underlying stability in India. And my view is that there is, despite the relentless assault on democracy by the Modi government over the last 12 years.

It’s certainly true that major institutions have been compromised. Every educated Indian will tell you that the Election Commission and the judiciary are in the pocket of the government, and yes, the judiciary has been too compliant. But there are also many instances where the courts have given protesters some room. So I think foreign governments will realise that, despite all the turbulence, India still has a kind of stability that is elusive in many other countries.

Dominic: Narendra Modi has been in power for about twelve and a half years, and by the next election it will be nearly 15. Will he stay in power indefinitely, or will this give him a shock? What’s your prediction for 2029?

Vinay: Forecasting is difficult, but I can make an educated guess. The BJP is alarmed, because what happened in Delhi started happening in other cities too. We’re still a long way from a nationwide movement. A movement needs discipline, structure and political organisation, and they would have to organise.

As for the BJP, I think they are genuinely alarmed in a way they haven’t been before, not even by the Shaheen Bagh movement or the farmers’ movement. This is a government that experiences all dissent as a threat; it cannot distinguish between dissent and actual sedition. And they know it’s the young who are driving this, and the young are everywhere in India, and across South Asia.

So I don’t think the Modi government, or the BJP more broadly, will get a free ride. It’s going to be a very difficult election for them. They might try to engineer something beforehand to create a scare, which they’ve been very successful at doing. But I remain somewhat optimistic that we will see a different kind of future in the years ahead.

Dominic: Vinay, the question we always finish on: when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

Vinay: That’s a subject for another conversation! So I’ll put it in capsule form. I recently gave a lecture, which I’m developing into a book, called “The Conjuncture of the Present.”

In every age, people tend to think they are living through the most traumatic times anyone has ever faced. Imagine living through World War II, with bombs falling on your cities, or being Jewish and sent to a death camp. Or imagine being a Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide, which, by the way, is where the word “cockroach” was used: Hutu extremists broadcast on the radio, literally, “kill the cockroaches.” Philip Gourevitch’s book describes that explicitly. You would think it was the worst of all possible times. The same with the Cambodian genocide.

Today, the young also think this is the worst of all possible times. Democracy is collapsing, there’s a slide into authoritarianism, job prospects are slim, and artificial intelligence might kill all the jobs. Whether it does or not, those are the fears. We’ve seen authoritarianism before; this isn’t the first time.

But it’s the conjuncture of the present: add to that global warming, artificial intelligence, and the enormously widening gap between technological development and our moral thinking, which frankly hasn’t moved an inch in decades. I identified 15 elements of this conjuncture, which together present a risk of a kind we have never seen in history. It’s the combination, not any one thing on its own. To understand the risks that people and states face today, we have to understand that conjuncture of the present.

Dominic: Thanks very much for explaining that, and for coming on The International Risk Podcast today.

Vinay: It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

Dominic: That was a great conversation with Vinay Lal. I really appreciated hearing his perspective on India’s youth protests, what they mean for the world’s largest democracy, and how protesters here in India are drawing on the country’s long history of nonviolent resistance, very different to what we’re seeing across Europe today. Vinay is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Marine Christ. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll speak again in the next couple of days.