THE Cockroach Janata Party may have started as a satirical takeoff on Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s unfortunate remarks of May 15th this year on unemployed youth. But in a few months, it has transformed the national political space in a way that we could never have imagined a few months back. A witty response from Dipke to the Chief Justice’s remarks the next day, "What if all cockroaches come together?" drew a huge response. Dipke followed it up with a form to be filled out by people who wanted to join the satirical “Cockroach Janata Party”, leading to 50,000 people signing up in the first 24 hours and ballooning to millions in just a few days!

Jantar Mantar is one of the few spaces left in Delhi for protests. Initially, the number of people going to Jantar Mantar to join the sit-in protest started by the CJP was not large, but there was a slow build-up. The CJP and other student organisations declared a march to Parliament on July 20th. The police responded with a lathi charge, tear gas, and gratuitous violence on peaceful protestors, including the use of pellet guns.

The police also thought they could isolate the protestors by blocking the internet in and around Jantar Mantar and cutting off all metro services to the area. As we know, this backfired spectacularly, with the internet being flooded with social media posts. These posts literally brought home to us the violence unleashed on the students—young boys and girls—by police, almost all without nameplates. The police were joined by others who were either plainclothes police or goons who work closely with the police. We even saw a senior police officer attack a young girl without any provocation whatsoever. The movement was no longer in Jantar and its surroundings but was playing out in real time in the virtual space of the internet.

The police dispersing students and youth with excessive force/violence is not new to Indian democracy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. This time it not only failed but failed spectacularly! It not only brought out huge numbers who flocked to Jantar Mantar, but also sparked off protests in different parts of the country. Soon, the internet was awash with visuals from Bihar, UP, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, asking for Pradhan’s resignation. It was not simply a demand of a few students in Delhi had become a demand of the youth across the country. The Modi government had lost its grip over the public narrative, all in real time.

Most of the time, the news headlines in newspapers and TV news can be “controlled” by the Government and big business. We still remember how the newspapers post-independence were called the “jute press”, as major news organisations were founded by the capital of jute barons: Birlas, Dalmias, Sahu Jains and others. They effectively controlled what was news, particularly news of strikes by workers. The government control of radio meant that radio in India was not commercialised in the way other mass media were. For those who will remember the 60s and 70s, Radio Ceylon capitalised by broadcasting Hindi film songs for which there was a mass market, capturing a chunk of ad revenue. Given this potential, with “liberalisation” in the air in the 80s and 90s, TV was commercialised early on.

After taking over the Prime Ministership, Modi has been able to control the narrative. What changed this time? One, of course, is the growing frustration with centralising all exams under the central government’s control, creating a single point of failure in the education system. The other was that not only were NEET exam papers being leaked, but many others. Estimates indicate that over the last 10 years, about 150 papers have been leaked, including NEET, IIT-JEE, and various state recruitment boards (Girish Chodankar in https://x.com/girishgoaINC/status/2078788430801367123). A complete lack of accountability has compounded this. Not only have no heads rolled, but a central minister went so far as to say that leaks have even helped students, as it gave them more time to prepare! Clearly, she has no idea what a competitive exam is, and no understanding of not only time, but money and energy that the students and their families have to spend for such examinations!

What was different this time in the protests is that this generation of students, unlike earlier generations, knows not only how to mobilise in physical space, but also in cyberspace. They are also alienated that this government continuously preaches to the youth and students what they should do, but appears to take no responsibility for its own failures.

Gen Z, or the generation following the millennials, is the first native digital generation; unlike the millennials, who followed our generation, the boomers (post-World War generation). Boomers grew up with newspapers as the source of news. The millennials switched to television: the news was what the major platforms decided in their 9 PM broadcast. The newspapers followed TV’s lead the next morning. For us boomers, the day’s news started still with the front-page headlines of leading newspapers. In India, radio did not play as big a part as in other parts of the world, as it was regarded primarily as the government’s voice. Even with this constraint, we remember how our parents, in the 60s and 70s, still dutifully listened every evening to the 9:00 PM radio news.

Today, social media, not the newspapers or the television, “decides” what is news. And it happens continuously, decided not by those who control the platforms, but by the mass of people who use them. News is not what the platform decides but what goes “viral”. Of course, the platforms still have control: virality can be partially controlled. But as we saw during the GenZ protest, sheer numbers will overcome whatever bias the algorithms on such platforms may have. After all, for the platform, the more eyeballs, the more the chance of ads being seen. Like all other media platforms, the money for digital media also is primarily from the advertisers, not from the readers or subscribers. Yes, the platforms can tweak the algorithm, filter out certain things, but if the numbers of those tweeting, posting reels in real time are large, then the feeds that people will see is very difficult to control. After all, the biggest bias that any such algorithm has is to maximise eyeballs, so that the platforms can maximise their ad revenues.

I am not arguing that this is the only takeaway from the CJP agitation and their huge victory, forcing the Modi government to accept their demand. There is a much bigger achievement, forcing the state to accept accountability for their mistakes. The Modi government was forced to concede what earlier was the norm in political life: if your ministry has failed on a crucial issue, you take responsibility and resign. When a major rail accident took place, this is what Lal Bahadur Shastri did as Railway Minister. Nobody held him personally responsible, but if you are a leader, you also set the standard for public morality. Under this government, all such precedents have been jettisoned: all failures are to be laid at the door of our first Prime Minister, who headed independent India during its most difficult time, the partition, and laid the foundations of our nation: a democratic and secular union of states.

The generation that took to the streets in the last few weeks, not only in Delhi but across the country, has brought a new generation centre stage. A generation that understands the current reality as their felt experience, has passed the first test of facing up to the state rallying larger and larger numbers, and shown a maturity well beyond their years. They have kept their cool despite grave provocations, shown courage to face up to whatever the police threw at them, and drawn in numbers that many had written off as an apolitical generation. Just because they did not use the idiom of politics familiar to us. Quite often, the girls were at the forefront, stopping police vehicles and facing up to their lathis.

That brings me to my last point. I have written in these columns that apart from truth, what the left has is our analytical abilities to explain what is really happening; how to relate the past to the present; and of course our humour. And all of this has to be tested in the crucible of practice, through our lived experience. For Gen Z, this agitation and their experience has taught them far more than any number of lectures on political science. Speaking for my generation, I feel at peace that a new generation has now picked up the baton.