The protests of the CJP offer both a warning and grounds for democratic optimism
Originally published on Global Voices
Students from all over India protesting against the 2026 NEET UG paper leak at the Jantar Mantar observatory, New Delhi, on July 20, 2026, ahead of a march to the parliament. Photo by Sumita Roy Dutta via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
By Sahasranshu Dash
This post is part of Global Voices’ September 2026 Spotlight series, “Protest in Democracy.” With this spotlight, we seek to explore the many forms of protest, the tactics states use to delegitimize and suppress them, and the complex relationship between protest and democracy. You can support this coverage by donating here.
For more than three months, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a youth movement that began as an online joke, has become one of the most significant challenges to Indian President Narendra Modi’s government since his third term began in June 2024. What started as anger over educational corruption, such as the leaking of the NEET medical entrance exam questions, recruitment scandals, and the failures of India’s education system, grew into a nationwide campaign over unemployment, political accountability, and the dignity of a generation.
The movement began in May 2026, after India’s Chief Justice, Surya Kant, compared unemployed young people to cockroaches.
Political consultant Abhijeet Dipke turned the insult into a rallying call, inviting the country’s “cockroaches” to unite. The joke went viral, and the movement’s name, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), deliberately echoed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), showing how quickly an internet meme could become a vehicle for political organization.
The CJP’s first major victory came on July 25, when Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after a 36-day protest at the Jantar Mantar observatory over alleged examination irregularities, with the government also promising no punitive action against protesters. By late August, the CJP accused the government of reneging on its promises and announced a new march for September 5, demanding the withdrawal of all First Information Reports (FIRs), official police reports that mark the first step in a police inquiry, filed against participants. That dispute has since been resolved.
On September 1, the Supreme Court ordered all FIRs registered nationwide over the July protests be closed, after the central government and four BJP-ruled states, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, and Maharashtra, moved to quash more than 100 cases under Article 142 of the Constitution. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta also told the court the government would compensate the families of NEET aspirants who died by suicide after the exam was canceled. CJP co-convener Saurav Das then withdrew the march, though the government reserved the right to file a fresh FIR against nearly 2,900 people with existing criminal records who were present at the protest.
The episode shows that the CJP has grown from a single campaign over exam irregularities into a powerful political movement — one now able to extract concessions directly from the state.
The deeper importance of the Cockroach protests lies in the contradiction they expose about political mobilization in the digital age. The CJP shows social media still allows citizens to organize outside established parties, driven by satire, short-form video and decentralized volunteer networks rather than party infrastructure. But the same technologies have given the state increasingly sophisticated means of observing and classifying participants, an emerging model in which policing, artificial intelligence, and digital surveillance work together to suppress and monitor dissent.
From the lathis to the database
The most dramatic confrontation came on July 20, when thousands of CJP supporters tried to march from Jantar Mantar towards parliament. They were dispersed with water cannons, tear gas, pellet guns, and lathis, bamboo police batons used in South Asia. Hundreds were detained, and police cases were filed. Delhi Police defended the operation, alleging that people with criminal records had joined the demonstration and the escalation was necessary to preserve public safety. In August, the Supreme Court agreed to examine claims that police employed excessive force during the protest.
The physical violence was visible, but the more consequential development was what happened alongside it. Delhi Police deployed mobile surveillance vans, 360-degree cameras and facial-recognition technology around the protest site. One system, Ikshana, placed boxes around faces on camera feeds and matched them against police records. Delhi Police told the Supreme Court the system had flagged 2,873 people with existing criminal records. A subsequent investigation by Scroll.in found that at least 25 of those flagged, including people accused of murder and rape, were already in jail at the time the system claimed to have “spotted” them at the protest.
The technology’s significance lies less in efficiency than in how it changes the relationship between citizen and state. Conventional crowd control operates in the present. Police can block, disperse, or detain, and then investigate detained people after the fact. Digital surveillance instead lets the state reconstruct participation after an event ends, without the presence of the people investigated. A captured face can be matched against a database and linked to other information, creating a record of political participation that outlasts the protest itself.
A petition challenging the use of facial recognition and biometric surveillance at the protests, alleging data was collected without consent and hosted by private companies, has reached the Supreme Court. India’s legal framework here remains fragmented. Delhi Police originally acquired the technology to identify missing and trafficked children, but it has since been used for crowd surveillance at political gatherings. Tools built for narrow public safety purposes have acquired broader functions without a matching expansion of legal safeguards and privacy protections.
The distinction between identifying a suspect in a violent offense and identifying everyone attending a demonstration is crucial. The latter turns the exercise of a democratic freedom itself into a basis for state observation, creating a searchable record of who chose to participate and a chilling effect that can make the formal right to protest hollow in practice.
When civic participation becomes data
What is new about digital authoritarianism is not cameras or databases, which governments have used for decades, but the ability to combine them into systems that identify and analyze people at scale. Once political activity becomes a searchable data point, the line between policing unlawful behavior and monitoring lawful participation is harder to hold. This raises questions about what police may collect, for what purpose, for how long, and with what oversight.
The debate is not unique to India. The United States and democracies in the European Union have also confronted controversies over facial recognition technology and the expanding use of AI-enabled surveillance by law-enforcement agencies.
The EU has responded by restricting real-time biometric identification in public spaces, while the United States has seen growing concerns over police use of facial recognition and other automated surveillance tools. The problem is especially acute across the Global South, where governments are acquiring sophisticated surveillance capabilities while institutional oversight remains weak. India matters here not because it is uniquely authoritarian, but because it shows how quickly the boundaries between policing, mass surveillance, and political monitoring can blur.
Yet, describing the CJP simply as a case of digital repression misses half the story. The movement exists because digital technology also expanded ordinary citizens’ capacity to organize. At its height, its Instagram following reportedly exceeded 26 million, more than the combined following of India’s two main national parties. It converted online attention into physical mobilization and, evidently, into political leverage, as the government’s reversal over the FIRs demonstrates.
This is the paradox at the CJP’s heart. The digital age does not simply strengthen the state at citizens’ expense, nor does it automatically democratize politics. It can do both simultaneously. The same platforms that let a young person in a small town join a national campaign also make that mobilization easier for the state to observe. The CJP has rejected becoming a conventional electoral party, operating instead as a pressure movement whose trajectory, from examining grievances to a broader demand for accountability, met by a mix of concessions and continued surveillance, illustrates that tension clearly.
A problem beyond India
The Indian experience is part of a broader shift in how governments exercise political power, as governments worldwide acquire technologies that identify people in public spaces and connect their behavior to existing databases. The question is not whether such technologies can make policing more effective. They can. The question is whether states can also implement rules that can constrain their use to political contexts, preventing public safety tools from becoming instruments of political surveillance.
Democratic freedoms depend not only on protection from direct state violence but on citizens being able to organize without assuming their participation is permanently recorded. Freedom of assembly means little if joining a protest automatically creates a durable record of political activity that can harm individuals after-the-fact. But the contest runs both ways. The same infrastructure that helps the state monitor protesters lets protesters document police conduct and challenge official narratives, as seen in reporting on pellet-gun injuries and the Supreme Court’s scrutiny of the July 20th crackdown.
The Cockroach protests therefore offer both a warning and grounds for democratic optimism. Their trajectory shows India’s young citizens can convert online culture into sustained collective action and extract real concessions, resignations, promised compensation, and now the quashing of FIRs, from a government with substantial institutional power. But their treatment by the security apparatus shows the costs of participation now extend beyond arrest or violence to the creation of digital records whose scope and future use may be invisible to those being monitored.
For democracies, this is a constitutional problem that better technology or public safety justifications alone cannot resolve. The more powerful the technology, the greater the need for clear limits on what the state may collect, how it may use that information, and how citizens can challenge its misuse. India will have to decide whether technological efficiency determines the boundaries of political freedom, or constitutional principles determine the boundaries within which technology may be used.
The CJP began as an attempt to turn an insult into a joke. That joke turned into a movement capable of forcing a government’s hand. Its ongoing confrontation with the Indian state illustrates a deeper transformation. In an age when political participation can be converted into data, the freedom to protest depends not only on whether police permit citizens to gather, but on whether they can gather without fear.