Last Saturday, as police fired tear gas at protesters in New Delhi, Dharmendra Pradhan announced his resignation as India’s education minister on the social network X. The news was celebrated as a victory for the generation that named itself cockroaches, hundreds of thousands of young people who had spent weeks demanding his head after a massive fraud in the medical entrance exam. Pradhan falls, and with him falls the most visible evidence of a corruption nobody could deny anymore. But what this episode settles is recent, a leaked question paper in May. What it leaves untouched is much older, a selection machine a century and a half old, and the certainty, pronounced this time from the country’s highest court, that those the machine discards stop counting altogether.
A word with a documented history
On May 15, during a hearing on the designation of senior advocates at the Delhi High Court, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, said something that would end up naming an entire movement. He said, “there are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession, some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists, and other activists, and they start attacking everyone.” He also called them parasites, people who had sneaked into the legal profession with fake and bogus degrees.
Days later, facing the backlash, Kant clarified that he had specifically meant those practising with falsified degrees, not unemployed youth in general. The clarification came late and changed nothing. By then an entire generation had already recognised itself in the phrase, fake degree or not, and had chosen to claim it rather than refute it. That generalisation, which the international press treats as a simple viral misunderstanding, deserves more attention than it has received, because it reveals something about how these young people already know how they are seen from above, without anyone needing to name them one by one.
The choice of word is not accidental. Cockroach has carried, for three decades, a precise genealogy in the vocabulary of political dehumanisation. Before 1994, Rwandan officials and media called the Tutsi population inyenzi, cockroaches. Researcher Gregory Stanton classified that kind of language as the third of ten stages that precede organised violence against a group, the stage in which a person’s humanity is denied as a prelude to making their elimination bearable. The Indian outlet The Wire was the first to point out the parallel, in June. No English-language international coverage picked it up afterward. It is worth being precise here, nothing indicates that India is heading toward genocide, and no serious observer suggests it is. What does exist, documented, is the use of a rhetorical category with a known history, spoken not by a marginal extremist but by the country’s highest judicial authority.
According to a report by Azim Premji University, nearly 40% of Indian university graduates under 25 are unemployed.
A machine a century and a half old
The exam that decides who gets to study medicine, law or public administration in India was not born with independence. It was born with the Charter Act of 1853, which introduced a competitive examination system for recruiting colonial officials for the first time, and it was consolidated with the first Indian Civil Service examination, held in London in 1855, with papers in classics, mathematics and law. Before that date, the British empire handed out posts through direct nomination by its directors. The exam arrived as a promise of neutrality against favouritism, the idea that anyone, regardless of origin, could get in by passing the right test. The promise carried a trap from the start, the age limit was lowered in the following decades precisely to make access harder for Indian candidates, and the exam was sat in London, in English, on a classical European syllabus that few Indian candidates could afford without travelling and without years of private tutoring. Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to join the ICS, in 1863, an exception that confirmed the rule more than it disproved it.
After 1947, India inherited that architecture and reinterpreted it as the opposite of what it had been, no longer a colonial filter but the great leveller of a society fragmented by caste, region and language. The exam came to represent the promise that merit, measured on a single answer sheet, could dissolve every inherited hierarchy. That promise is what sustains millions of families today who send their children to Kota or Sikar. And it is the same architecture, the exam as gatekeeper to prestigious professions, that produced both the judge who insulted young people from the bench and the legal profession he says is being infiltrated by fake degrees. Kant does not speak from outside the machine. He speaks from its summit, and his career is, in that precise sense, living proof that the mechanism still delivers, for a few, exactly what it once promised to deliver for everyone. ## The business that does not fall
The immediate trigger was different from the insult, though it ended up confirming it. The NEET, the medical entrance exam that more than two million candidates sit every year, was cancelled on May 12 after it emerged that around 120 of its 4,101 questions matched a leaked guess paper that had circulated before the test. Days later, Pradeep Manich, a 23 year old aspirant who had spent years preparing in Sikar, took his own life. His family had sold land and taken on debt to fund his classes and lodging.
Sikar and Kota, India’s two great capitals of exam preparation, together move several hundred million dollars a year in fees, lodging, food and study material. The coaching industry across the country is valued at around 16 billion dollars and keeps growing. The success rate of those who spend two years locked inside these academies hovers around 3%. In Kota, 57 students have taken their own lives in recent years within that system. None of those young people ever knew London, or the Charter Act, or the name Satyendranath Tagore, but all of them paid, with their time, their debt or their life, the bill for a promise written a century and a half before they were born.
That business does not depend on the exam being clean. It depends on millions of families continuing to believe that the machine inherited from empire, later adopted as a national promise, still hands out places in proportion to effort. The NEET leak was an anomaly inside a larger and quieter fraud, that of selling social mobility at a scale neither the colonial machine nor its democratic version has ever been able to honour. Pradhan resigns for the anomaly. Nobody resigns for the underlying promise, and that promise keeps selling for a higher price every year.
For two decades, India sold the world the idea of a demographic dividend, the promise that its population, younger than China’s, would become the planet’s next great pool of skilled labour. That narrative fed foreign investment, speeches at international economic forums and entire front pages devoted to India’s rise, and it rested, without quite saying so, on this same exam machine now wobbling. A demographic dividend with no jobs to absorb it stops being a competitive advantage and becomes a pile of expectations with nowhere to go, carrying an expiry date that keeps getting closer. The Cockroach Janta Party is, among other things, the sound of that date approaching. Other countries that have marketed their own youth as a demographic dividend, from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa, are watching an early version of the same arithmetic play out in Delhi and Kota, whether or not their own ministries admit it.
The architecture of the rage
The Cockroach Janta Party was born on May 16, a day after Kant’s remark, as a satirical account on social media. In under two months it gathered more than 22 million followers, a figure no traditional Indian party reaches in that span. Its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, is 30, holds a master’s in public relations from Boston University and has a past as a communications strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which governs Delhi. Dipke does not hide that past, but former officials and sections close to the ruling party have pointed to it as evidence that the movement is a covert political project. Dipke denies it, and he has also denied receiving funding from George Soros, an accusation that circulated without any reliable source backing it. There is, so far, no documented proof of party coordination.
What is verifiable is that the anger the CJP channelled comes from unemployment, from academy debt, from suicides, and predates any communications strategy. What a campaign professional could contribute was not that anger, which already existed and which the exam machine has been generating since 1855. It was the efficiency with which that anger found a name, an aesthetic and a follower count large enough to frighten a government that has held power for more than twelve years. No campaign strategist invents twelve years of accumulated grievance from nothing. Even the response to being called disposable had to pass through the filter of a viral brand for anyone to listen, and that brand, like any account with twenty two million followers, in turn generates data, advertising and value for the platforms that host it. The fury against a business that capitalises on despair ended up, without meaning to, feeding a different business, that of attention.
The Cockroach Janta Party went from zero to more than 22 million followers in under two months, a growth rate no Indian political party had ever reached. ## What changes and what does not
CJP organisers announced the end of the protests hours after the resignation, satisfied with what they had won, reforms to the exam system, financial compensation for the families of students who took their lives after the scandal, and a guarantee that no legal action would be taken against those who took part in the demonstrations. These are real concessions, not symbolic ones, and it would be unfair to deny them.
None of them touches the mechanism that made possible both the fraud and the insult that gave the movement its name. India’s labour market still has no place for four in ten young graduates. Kota and Sikar will keep filling up with indebted families betting on a 3% success rate, in the name of a promise of mobility that the Charter Act of 1853 itself never made to anyone except loyal administrators of empire. And the phrase a judge pronounced from the highest seat of that same inherited architecture, the one comparing an entire generation to an insect historically associated with the annihilation of another human group, was not withdrawn, it was merely qualified. Qualified, not retracted, and spoken by someone who will never have to stand in line in Kota. The distinction matters more than it sounds, a qualification leaves the underlying judgment standing, it only narrows who it is officially allowed to land on.
Modi gives up a minister. The machine London set in motion in 1855 to select loyal administrators, and which India later chose to keep and rename merit, keeps running tonight exactly as it did yesterday. The next generation of aspirants is already queuing in Kota, paying fees it cannot afford, to compete for places that arithmetic, and now history too, say do not exist for all of them…
G.S.
Sources
- India’s ‘Cockroach’ youth call off protests after education minister quits (Al Jazeera)
- The Chief Justice Called Them Cockroaches. History Knows Where That Language Leads (The Wire)
- CJI Surya Kant clarified his “cockroaches” remark (The Quint)
- Genocide Watch, Ten Stages of Genocide
- 2026 NEET controversy (Wikipedia)
- NEET-UG 2026 Paper Leak Scandal, Collapse of Trust, Student Suicides (Outlook India)
- The Economics of Kota, India’s Rs 800 Crore Coaching Factory (The Quint)
- Inside India’s Rs 50,000 Cr Coaching Industry (BW Education)
- Cockroach Janta Party linked to AAP? Founder Abhijeet Dipke’s past ties raise questions (The Federal)
- Colonial origins of modern bureaucracy? India and the professionalization of the British civil service (Governance, Wiley)
