A youth-led protest movement in India is demanding an end to the country’s status quo. Sparked by the leak of national exam questions, tens of thousands of young people have taken to the streets. They are protesting under the banner of the Cockroach Janta (People’s) Party — a new party named to reflect the words of India’s chief justice, who compared unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. The movement has only swelled in response to a violent crackdown on protesters. Although the protesters’ initial demands were for the resignation of the country’s education minister, “everything has shifted to directly attacking [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi,” says Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who joins us from New Delhi, the physical center of a movement that first found exponential success online. The erosion of democratic principles under Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party is being contested on a large scale for the first time, says Roy. “It’s really a generation whose parents and grandparents wore those Modi masks and chanted 'Modi, Modi, Modi,' and got him into power. It is their children now who are saying the emperor has no clothes.”
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We turn now to India, where massive youth-led protests are spreading across India. On Thursday, thousands of young people staged another sit-in in New Delhi in defiance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has violently cracked down on protesters. The protest movement is being led by the newly formed Cockroach Janta Party. The party was formed after India’s chief justice compared India’s unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. Protesters have been demanding the resignation of Modi’s education minister. They’re blaming him for the leak of national exam questions that were circulated on social media, forcing millions of students to retake the exam. Some students ended up dying by suicide after studying for the exam for years. One prominent Indian activist, Sonam Wangchuk, ended a 26-day hunger strike today that he began in solidarity with the cockroach movement.
This is Abhijeet Dipke, who founded the Cockroach Janta Party, speaking earlier this week after authorities violently attacked protesters in Delhi.
ABHIJEET DIPKE: [translated] Today, what the Delhi police have done, the way they beat students, the way they hit them in their heads, it was very shameful. Due to this, the country’s reputation is being damaged worldwide. And we all know why Delhi police did all of this: because they received orders from Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to New Delhi, where we’re joined by the prize-winning Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy. She has a new piece for Wire headlined “Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous.” Arundhati begins her piece by writing, quote, “For the first time in years, it feels wonderful to be Indian. Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain.”
Arundati Roy, take it from there. Talk about what’s happening in the streets of India and the movement adopting the name of the justice who called them “cockroaches.”
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, what’s happening in India, what’s happening just kilometers from my home, where I will be shortly, is not thousands, Amy, but tens and tens of thousands of young people who have just flooded into the city, and now this has spread to cities all over North India, basically. And it started off as students, of course, as you said. You know, Abhijeet Dipke, just as a joke, wrote on Instagram, “What if all the cockroaches came together?” And they did, first online, and now in physical form. They’re out everywhere in India, young people protesting and demanding, officially demanding, the resignation of the education minister, under whose — I mean, in the last — since 2014, the opposition says there have been 152 paper leaks, not a single conviction for anybody doing that. But more than that, the undermining of the entire system of education in India, which was and used to be a good system. But now the whole thing has — I mean, if you listen to the slogans and if you see the chanting, everything has shifted to directly attacking Modi. And this has just never happened since 2014, when he became prime minister, or 2002, when he became the chief minister of Gujarat.
So, it’s really a generation whose parents and grandparents wore those Modi masks and chanted “Modi, Modi, Modi,” and got him into power. It is their children now who are saying the emperor has no clothes. And the mockery and the humor, it’s just believable. It’s unbelievable, what’s going on, the dancing, the singing. That old, you know, really boring Gandhian protest style has gone. It’s just so exuberant and joyful.
But as I said in the piece that I wrote, there are two things. One is that this is the — the protesters, there are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists. It’s a sort of demonstration of what we would like India to be. But the fact is that the majority of them, the great majority of them, are the children of Modi’s, you know, Hindu right-wing constituency, and therefore, there is a certain protection. You know, they are not Muslims, they are not Sikhs, they are not Christians, they are not Kashmiris. So, is the police going to just shoot them down? I mean, things are coming to a stage where you almost think that they’re going to call out the army. But will the army agree to kill their own children? I don’t know. So, it’s a very tricky situation right now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Arundhati, how would you compare the cockroach uprising in India to recent other youth-led movements in nearby countries, in Nepal, in Bangladesh, in Sri Lanka? And also, this is coming at a time when the more traditional Marxist or left-wing parties in India, in some of the states of India where they long had major power, have suffered electoral defeats, so that the left has been left sort of reeling from these defeats. I’m wondering if you could respond to that, as well.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, how would I compare it to Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka? You know, I don’t think those comparisons would be correct, because India is too vast and diverse a country for, you know, a simple sort of student-led coup to take over. It’s just — like, for example, the whole of South India, although they are supporting this movement, they have largely been unaffected by Modi, you know, and so the rage against him isn’t there, because he doesn’t exist there. So, India is too large a country for something like that.
But you’d have to ask — you know, of course, the left, the left has been pushed back. The traditional, what we call the parliamentary left has pushed back. You know, it only really exists in Kerala as a proper party. But the left is certainly inside this protest. You know, the young left student unions are in there. And initially, they were the ones who stabilized the protest, because they know how to do it. A lot of young people were coming in, and there are people from everywhere. You know, like, Sonam Wangchuk, who was on hunger strike, was initially very much a supporter of the BJP. You know, now he’s called off his fast. But the thing is that the protest is way beyond its individual components right now.
But the real thing that I said is that, you know: Why is the prime minister refusing to make the small step of making the education minister resign? One of the reasons is that they rule like a cabal. They know too much about each other to, you know, be able to be sacked and so on. They know terrible things about each other. And the second reason is that the BJP has gamed the election system. It has reconstituted the composition of the Election Commission. It has reconstituted voter rolls, in which, you know, millions of people are missing, and millions of phantom names exist. The machines, the electoral voting machines, are tampered with. The courts look away. The police are not neutral. The bureaucracy is completely complicit. So, it feels that it can do anything. It’ll win an election, because it’s the richest political party in the world, and it is backed by the richest industrialists in the world. It can buy anything. It can break anyone.
And ultimately, you know, even these young people, they are just very young people. You know, they don’t know the forces that can come in and subvert them and beat them down and discredit them. All that is still to come. Paramilitary forces are being flown in. But the situation is very tricky, very fluid. We don’t know what’s going to happen.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the extent of the youth unemployment crisis in India today?
ARUNDHATI ROY: The youth unemployment crisis is beyond belief, you know? And I don’t want to quote figures to you, because those figures are rubbish. You know, for example, people who are selling peanuts on the road or somehow trying to survive are counted as employed people. Basically, there is a crisis of unemployment from the bottom to the top, because of AI now and so on.
So, really, the future of this country is so rocky. It feels like a — like a sort of decomposing corpse wrapped in tissue paper, and suddenly everything is beginning to leak out. And as always happens with governments like this, I mean, five days — 10 days ago, if somebody made a mildly off-color joke about Modi, they would be in jail. Today, you have millions of people mocking him in ways which I just can’t even explain. I mean, you cannot repeat those words on TV. But I don’t even know how the man can come out and make a speech again, because everyone just falls about laughing. You know, earlier, it used to be just a handful of us. Now it’s this whole young generation, who I just want to hug because they’re so hilarious.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, if you can talk more about them reshaping the narrative of the government-controlled media, challenging Modi’s carefully constructed image to the world, because they’re using Instagram, they’re using YouTube, as they reshape the narrative of these protests to a global audience?
ARUNDHATI ROY: So, I’ll start by saying that the most wicked element in India in the last — you know, since Modi came to power, has been the corporate-owned mainstream media. It’s not just that they are frightened; they are part of the project, enthusiastically a part of the project. We have this saying over here. I’ll first say it in Hindi. It says, ”Desh ko char log chalate hain: do bechte, do kharidte, charon Gujarati,” which means that four people run this country: two sell it, two buy it, and all four are from the state of Gujarat. And these four are the prime minister, the home minister and the two industrialists Ambani and Adani. Now, Ambani and Adani — Ambanis own something like 27 news channels. Adani just bought one of the most neutral news channels, called NDTV, and now that’s fallen, too. So, the news media are like the captains — I call them the screaming television, live-screaming TV, because they’re just like the captains of lynch mobs. They get people arrested. They dehumanize people. They discredit people. They lie.
And on the other hand, we have some incredibly brave YouTubers, both in English and in Hindi and in other languages. You have this and this young generation. I mean, Modi tried to jam the internet in Jantar Mantar, where the protest is happening. Now it’s happening all over. And these kids, you can’t mess around with them on the internet, you know? So, if you look at Instagram, all of us are just falling about laughing. None of us can sleep at night, because it’s so funny, what they’re doing. And in a second, you know, this man who goes around making these ridiculous speeches abroad and hugging world leaders, like, recently he was in Indonesia, and he was like, “January 26 is Indian Republic Day. Two plus six is eight. And the Indonesian prime minister’s birthday is 17th. So, one plus seven is” — something like this. You know, now everyone just — there’s nothing he can say and nothing he has said in the past years which is not just being taken apart. And people are just keeling over, laughing.
So, how do you correct that image? He can’t get that back. He may beat these people down. He may discredit them. Some of their leaders may sell them out. You know, the kids are like — you have to see those videos. They’re going to the police, saying, “Sir, it’s really hot. Can you put those water cannons on?” And then they’re dancing in the water cannons. And, “Please give me some tear gas.” And, you know, it’s just like, “Oh my god, your baton being taller than me,” you know, little kids, little girls are saying. And the girls are the most foul-mouthed of all. It’s just — I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just exuberance that’s making up a whole heaven for someone like me.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we don’t want to keep you from the protests, so, Arundhati Roy, thank you so much for being with us, award-winning writer and activist, her critically acclaimed memoir headlined — titled Mother Mary Comes to Me. Also, she’s received numerous awards, including the Booker Prize, for her first novel, The God of Small Things. We’ll link to her new article, “Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous,” at democracynow.org.
Coming up, we go to Puerto Rico. A Republican congressman wants to limit birthright citizenship there and in other U.S. territories. We’ll also look at a new documentary called Farmers of the Sea. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Tocando,” “Touching,” by Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical for their new collaboration, Helado Tropical.
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