By Hera Shakil
What happens when social movements resonate across radically different contexts? Reading the Cockroach Janta Party Movement (July 2026) alongside two other social movements, this article asks who gets to recognize these resonances and how the socio-material contexts that shape performance determine what counts as meaningful.
On June 6, 2026, Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, the designated protest site in the center of the Indian capital erupted with a hodge podge of political slogans. The protesters chanted Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution), Vande Mataram (I Bow to Thee, Mother) and Jai Bhim (Victory to Bhim, honoring Dr B.R. Ambedkar). These slogans belong, ordinarily, to three distinct political traditions in India: the communist left, Hindu nationalism, and Dalit politics. Nobody in the crowd seemed to mind the contradictions. Abhijeet Dipke, the leader of this particular protest is the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical youth party born a month earlier out of a meme. It picked its name in response to the remarks by India’s Chief Justice, widely read as comparing unemployed Indian youth to cockroaches. By late June, Dipke was camped permanently at Jantar Mantar, refusing to leave until the education minister resigned over a national testing scandal, and young adults in cockroach masks were explaining to reporters why an online joke had become the only political language left for them under decreasing space for dissent in the Hindu Nationalist regime.
As the protest escalated, many students and activists went on a hunger strike. By July 20 a large contingent of young Indians had descended at Jantar Mantar for a march to the Parliament with their demand for resignation of the education minister. This march and similar other protests across the country were met with police brutality and repression, however by July 25, the education minister had agreed to resign and in exchange the space at Jantar Mantar had been emptied out by Dipke and his co-organizers. This achievement was quickly deemed a success by political commentators.
The protest at Jantar Mantar worked in the sense that matters most in Indian public life right now: it got the attention of the middle-classes. Within weeks CJP had become a national story, discussed on television, quoted in the foreign press and became viral on social media. None of this theatricality is new in Indian politics.
Political anthropologists and theorists have traced a much longer genealogy of “political drama” in Indian democracy, from Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha, through the 2011 India Against Corruption (IAC) movement (out of which the opposition Aam Aadmi Party was born), to Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign. Using the language of drama and theater, Lisa Bjorkman defines the drama of democracy as, “the aesthetic and affective resonances of representation, where embodied political performances are encountered and evaluated in real time, from within the socio-material landscapes and contexts of enactment.” In this article I discuss two other social movements in parallel to the CJP to argue that the grounds on which these resonances are enacted, and performances are evaluated are limited to the audiences that can identify the socio-material contexts at stake.
With the advent of 24/7 television broadcasts and the more recent short-form social media content, a movement’s constituents have become its audience rather than its participants mainly focused on attracting news watching, social media consuming middle classes.
CJP looks like the social-media-native of that same shift, a movement built to be watched as much as joined.
The question essential for the dwindling space of protest in Indian democracy under rising authoritarianism is who gets to resonate with these forms of representation, and which kind of protests find an audience.
Looking at the long history of the theater of political protests, few essential elements come to mind in the grammar of Indian middle-class protest. It includes a nameable villain (mainly corruption), an ideologically amorphous crowd, and a moral vocabulary everyone already speaks. These elements long predate the advent of social media.
In comparison to the protest that unfolded at Jantar Mantar, consider what else was happening this spring in India. In April, about twenty miles away from Jantar Mantar, Noida’s industrial belt saw a protest of roughly 45,000 factory workers across electronics units, garment plants, and auto-ancillary units occupying roads and halting production after a wage dispute spread from neighboring Haryana. It turned violent on its fourth day, when vehicles were torched, and tear gas was fired, and roughly 300 protestors were detained. Coverage of Noida protests largely sorted it into a law-and-order story rather than a political one; local police even floated the claim that misinformation from Pakistan-based social media accounts had reignited the violence.
Elsewhere in central India, in Madhya Pradesh’s Bundelkhand region, far from the political center of the country, tribal communities have been resisting the Ken-Betwa river-linking project for months, in scenes considerably more visually dramatic than anything at Jantar Mantar. In April, hundreds of Gond and Kol women lay down on mock funeral pyres on the banks of the Ken River, their bodies smeared with mud, in a ritual protest called the Chita Andolan (funeral pyre protests), to convey that displacement without fair compensation amounts to death. The Daudhan Dam at the heart of the project will submerge eight villages outright and absorb sixteen more into a tiger reserve, displacing thousands of families who say they were never properly surveyed or consulted. The protest has resumed since, most recently July this year, after residents said the administration failed to honor earlier compensation commitments. In May, police filed an FIR against roughly 150 protestors, including named organizers, on charges as serious as attempted murder. This long protest has never become a sustained national story.
The comparisons between the fate of these protesters should trouble any straightforward account of political theater working in Indian democracy. Incarcerating protesters to squash social movements has been a trademark of the current Modi government. Many leaders of the Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act remain incarcerated awaiting trial nearly 6 years after their arrest. It would be easy to conclude that CJP protests gained an audience because it staged itself skillfully and because the other two are not inarticulate protests by any means. They also belong to a recognized genre of Indian demonstrative politics, deliberate and symbolically dense, arguably more visually arresting than teenagers in cockroach masks chanting slogans.
What they lacked wasn’t stagecraft but a middle-class audience with anything at stake in the outcome of their demands.
CJP’s grievance that a national exam system meant to reward merit had been compromised by paper leaks is a stake the middle class already sees itself being affected by. It is, not coincidentally, close kin to the corruption politics that built the Aam Aadmi Party out of the IAC movement in the first place: a clean, nameable villain, a demand (resignation) rather than a redistribution, and a grievance framed in the vocabulary of fairness and accountability that urban, education-anxious India already speaks fluently. The displacement of thousands of Adivasi families for a dam most of urban India will never see, or the wage floor variations of contract workers most of elite-urban India will never encounter are issues that the middle-class audience has no reason to own no matter how well the protest is staged.
This is the gruesome reality of political theater and its audiences this summer’s protests make visible about Indian democracy. Political theater isn’t failing when tribal citizens or factory workers go unheard; it’s working the way theater works, rewarding performances that the audience already has an investment in.
The danger isn’t that Indian democracy rewards theater but that the online public sphere of the audience of this theater has shrunk to a middle-class and increasingly upper-caste segment that only privileges certain grievances that are legible enough to become theater at all, while everything else gets sorted into “unrest.”
Dipke says the Cockroach Janata Party is still in its “early phase,” planning to formalize into a structure across states. Whether it can hold onto the audience it has captured or extend the stage to grievances that don’t already look like its own, will say a great deal about what these new actors and audiences of Indian political theater can achieve.
Hera Shakil is a PhD candidate in Comparative Human Development, at the University of Chicago, working at the intersection of Political Sociology and Social Anthropology. Her research employs ethnographic and historical methods to examine the dynamics of political inequality in post-colonial democracies.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
