ISJ: What were the origins of the Cockroach movement?

AA: The movement was unprecedented and, because it was not a traditional, union-led movement, a lot of things were not even planned. It was chaos. But things really started with the NEET exam paper leak. Anger over this was compounded by Chief Justice Surya Kant’s calling all the youth “cockroaches”. Many people thought the reaction to those two issues would die down and would not translate into any real activity on the ground. Some on the left were intensely sceptical because they had experienced a similar anti-corruption movement back in 2011. Back then, during the Congress Party-led government, an anti-corruption crusader called Anna Hazare began a campaign for new laws following a series of scandals involving government contracts.3 But the movement ended in disappointment as it became clear it harboured right-wing elements and had corporate backing. So, when the NEET paper leak and Cockroach slur started trending, many on the left had a feeling of déjà vu.

Abhijeet Dipke, who became the leading face of the cockroach movement and helped to found the Cockroach Janya Party (CJP)—a dig at Modi’s BJP—was previously unknown, beyond his very active Twitter account. He had briefly handled social media for the Delhi-based Aam Aadmi Party but had since gone to Boston to pursue a degree.4 So, we had doubts, but the AISA realised that the biggest mistake we could make would be to not participate in the movement that was emerging.

In hindsight, we can see that the NEET/Cockroach crisis was the spark that ignited massive frustration, disillusionment and economic distress among young people in India. Price rises and unemployment obviously impact the Indian masses, but also the Indian middle class—which is very vocal about its own experience of distress. Here, the specific impact of Surya Kant’s cockroach slur lit a fire, pushing many young people into opposing the system and becoming, at first, social media activists.

I think one of the movement’s main characteristics is the way it has resisted repression. Every time the far-right BJP regime has tried to crack down on protesters, we have fired back immensely. The right’s response to it is a miscalculation. For example, when the state shut down the Cockroach Party’s Twitter account, everyone sought refuge in Instagram—and it is here that the social media of the movement really took off.

The next big staging post was 6 June 2026, when the movement moved from being solely online into a real, physical street movement in the Jantar Mantar area in the centre of New Delhi. It is the site of an 18th-century astronomical observatory and is one of the most famous areas in India for democratic protests. Dipke flew in from Boston to be there. Still, we on the left were a bit sceptical. We were damn sure that the police would not allow us to protest at Jantar Mantar. People were saying it was the wrong time because universities were closed for the summer holidays. Nevertheless, we knew we had to be there and were making mental preparations for being detained by the police. Surprisingly, that did not happen. But at Jantar Mantar, it was chaos. There wasn’t even a stage or PA system, yet around 10,000 people were there. Now, it became clear that there was a movement. The NEET exam paper leak had certainly lit the fuse.

The next milestone came when we decided to launch an indefinite sit-in on 20 June at Jantar Mantar. Again, we made mental preparations for being arrested and detained, and again, that didn’t happen. The masses were in such large numbers that the police was unable to detain or arrest any of the movement’s leaders.

ISJ: What role did the middle class play in the movement?

AA: The eruption of our social movement showed that the petty bourgeoisie was, in addition to the poor, facing a crisis of their own. Many of them crave an idealised life—the Indian Dream, if I can put it that way. It is a dream about your children doing well in their exams and degrees, getting secure government jobs and having a nice car—and because of that, your boy easily getting a bride.

That’s the dream of many medical students and other professionals. So, when the exam paper got leaked, it created a crisis for the whole education system and revealed widespread corruption in which the rich were buying success.

The middle classes could see the crisis at hand. Modi had told them they could ride out their economic problems by limiting their spending and making sacrifices. Here the rising cost of gas cylinders is significant. Most Indians cook with liquefied petroleum gas and as imperialist war shut down the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices rocketed and cylinders became scarce.5 This shut down lots of businesses, including restaurants. During all this, resentment against the Modi regime grew.

ISJ: How did the movement decide on tactics?

AA: Mostly through a loose coordination of several individuals. The CJP had, I think, four spokespersons, and a volunteer team. AISA contacted them to say that, as a left-wing student organisation, we really wanted this movement to go far. Comrade Neha Bora, our president, was travelling around northern Indian cities spreading the initiative. So, we were already on the move for a broad campaign—and, unlike some other student left-wing organisations, we were prepared to put our resources and our comrades into the struggle.

Everything was building up to the 20 June 2026 protest. We had permission to use Jantar Mantar until 5pm, but the police started trying to push us out an hour earlier. We had to take a stand if we were going to force Dharmendra Pradhan to resign. If the Modi government had been smart, they would have given in on this much earlier. Keeping him in office was a major miscalculation and allowed the movement to keep a radical edge. So, even after the police attacked us, we stayed in Jantar Mantar, even when they cut off our mic and our electricity. We jumped their barricades and surrounded our stage so that we could defend the leaders who were sitting on it. The Delhi police tried from various sides to enter the area, but each time their plans were foiled by protesters forming human chains, telling them, “We Will Not Let You Cross!”

We were surprised at ourselves that we were able to do it. It was a surprising moment even for us as revolutionaries. The biggest factor in the success of 20 June was that the masses were there—the working masses—they brought a certain radical energy. They were banging steel pots and plates and raising absolute hell against the police and the paramilitary Rapid Action Force (RAF). The presence of the masses was the reason we were able to make a stand. And if we hadn’t done so, the movement would have withered away. Instead, we collectively learned that the emperor had no clothes.

ISJ: What impact did the movement have on Modi?

AA: It was certainly not the first time that the Modi regime had attempted to brutalise dissenters and peaceful protesters. There is an endless list of brutalities—the lynching of Dalits and Muslims for allegedly slaughtering or carrying beef or cow carcasses, for example.6 The victory lifted the blindfold from the eyes of the masses. Even people who had been BJP voters actually came to meet us during our hunger strike. They told us that they were sorry for demonising us in the past, and they apologised for voting for the BJP. I had tears in my eyes.

The father of an aspiring NEET student who died by suicide visited us carrying a photograph of his late son. He said that he was from Gujarat—a BJP stronghold—and that he was privileged and had all the resources. “I voted for the BJP blindly, without even thinking for a second”, he said, adding “and now look what they’ve done to my son!” That kind of awakening is the biggest victory of our movement. The fact that the people woke up, the people blindfolded by religious bigotry and other hatreds. Since then, I’ve heard of students in Rajasthan who suffer from speech disability organising a protest of hundreds to demand better conditions in school. In Patakpur, Uttar Pradesh, young women students, below the age of 16, fought against their school principal by organising a protest. They locked the school gates, demanding proper teachers and proper facilities. It’s this kind of awakening that really warms my heart.

There’s an economic and political aspect to our generation too. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the vision of an egalitarian socialist world led to a very predatory, neoliberal regime.7 In India, it promised that we’d be kings and that the sky would be the limit. But what was happening on the ground was vastly different. People worked hard but faced systemic failures time and again; that experience brings a political and social aspect to our generation. A disillusionment with neoliberalism.

Growing up, I was told that I would live in a secular India and have endless possibilities, a great career, and that when I have children, they too will be prosperous. Instead, what we see right now is a divisive, communal India, where you can lynch a Muslim child on the premise that they carried beef on a train, and where police with lathis beat people protesting. So, disillusionment is actually a weak word to describe what we feel now.

And yet, time and again, the political right asks us: “why do you read Karl Marx? Why do you read Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar? Why do you read Lenin?”8 They think these authors are what radicalised us. At the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai recently, some students were charged with having raised slogans for political prisoners sentenced under terror laws. The judge noted that Mao Zedong’s writings were found on their laptops. So not only are we accused of being deliberately unemployed and lazy, but they also say that our reading of Lenin and Marx and Mao is what is radicalising us. Of course, what is actually radicalising us is the kind of oppression that we face. Marx, Lenin and Mao have only helped us to contextualise that oppression. We would probably have turned into gangsters and thugs and killed each other were it not for theorists—and revolutionaries, such as Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar.9 They helped to cool down our anger and preserve it for a longer struggle.

The days of being apolitical are over. People now know that you have to take a stand. But this is only chapter one. It’s the beginning of the book, not the end.

ISJ: We know that in every mass movement there are arguments. Of course, there is a left-wing current, but there are often people who are quite conservative in their ideas. Were there many left versus right arguments in your movement?

AA: Oh, certainly. There can be no mass movement without diverse constituents—such as the CJP leadership, AISA, and other left-wing groups—it would not be a mass movement if we did not have such contradictions. One example of the tensions can be seen in the battle over political prisoners. Some people in the movement are uneasy about our stance on political prisoners in India. These include Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, two prominent student activists who have been languishing in prison since 2020 without trial. We raised their cases in the movement and demanded that they should be freed, but a certain section expressed displeasure. They didn’t want to talk about it, because they are too scared. That’s because the Modi regime accuses us of supporting these two activists out of a desire to “appease Muslims” or “cater to minorities”. But that is nonsense; we have also backed jailed activists from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds.

And there are day-to-day arguments about political strategy and tactics too. In the run-up to the 20 July 2026 protests, CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka insisted the movement stick to just four slogans. He said the movement would not raise radical slogans, known as Azadi(freedom) slogans. We certainly disagreed with that. But we stayed within the framework of the movement, while also dissenting with the CJP leaders. Separately, at some point, the CJP spokesperson Vijeta Dahiya made a very misogynistic, transphobic remark concerning the participation of women and queer folk in the movement. Our comrade Neha condemned him in front of a press conference he was addressing. That’s why it is important that we maintained our political independence within the movement.

Sometimes, the point of tension is not with the campaign leadership, but with the masses who have been drawn into it. For example, when Neha raised slogans of solidarity with trans folks, with queer folks, and raised the slogan of “my body, my choice”, we could see that the CJP leadership was OK with that. But we certainly received a backlash from other people who asked why we were raising such slogans. So, we had to walk a tightrope between our revolutionary ideas and those of the masses—we had to not go so far left that we lost sight of where the masses are. But we certainly deepened the movement, we broadened the movement.

ISJ: What was the role of women in the movement?

AA: That’s an interesting question. Left-wing women leaders certainly played a big and important role during the June 2026 breakthrough for the movement. But it is much more challenging for ordinary women in Delhi and elsewhere to join protests. Many women protesters, and those from minorities, are particularly scared of the violence that the Delhi police targets them with. The state is not the only problem. I remember that one of the Modi-backing, lapdog media companies here tried to troll two trans women protesters. And so that was also why Neha had to raise those slogans concerning transphobia. After 20 June, when the protests got a little more organised, then I think women started coming in large numbers. Some of them even came alone. A lot of them arrived at Jantar Mantar not knowing anyone. I think it took some time for us to prove to them that this is a movement for everyone and that no one will be excluded. Women, queer folks and trans folks then took part in decision making. Unsurprisingly, I think the women, especially women protesters and those from minorities, are scared of the kind of violence that the Delhi police can use against them.

ISJ: You have touched upon the right’s attempts to divide the movement. To what extent does the protest help us in the fight against Islamophobia?

AA: I think protests around questions of economic and material conditions are actually more useful in bringing people together and in confronting Islamophobia and religious bigotry than tackling them head-on. Our experiences fighting the government’s Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) were that the protests were really brilliant.10 But among the masses, there was polarisation. That’s because the movement did not sufficiently broaden and diversify. The CAA and the NRC bills also targeted trans people, women, and adivasis (tribal people). The fact that the movement was seen to be led by older Muslim women—the dadis of Shaheen Bagh—was a brilliant thing to start with.11 But later, it became a problem as it worsened polarisation and made it difficult to raise funds and support for the movements, even among some other Muslims.

But when the farmers’ movement broke out in 2020, we actually saw those same people who had turned us away now open their gates for us and give us whatever support they could. That movement against Modi’s planned new legislation asked fundamental questions about land and agriculture—and the way corporates are taking them over. And it tapped into anger at the massive scale of crony capitalism and privatisation. During the farmers’ movement, we saw that people got together. In Ghazipur, on the eastern edge of Delhi, most of the farm protesters hail from western Uttar Pradesh, and a great many were Muslims. Those protesting in Punjab were largely Sikh. Those from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan were Hindus. So, fighting on that material front is actually a better weapon to confront religious bigotry. When the government tries to divide us, the Hindu majority has to take a stand and say that Muslims are our brothers and sisters, and so are Sikhs—they are kin to us, and we will not let you divide us.

We saw similar processes during our Cockroach movement, where previously conservative Hindus, and even some former BJP supporters, were so shaken up by the scandal and our protests that they began to understand that the Modi regime is dividing us. That’s why I think that, when we talk about minority rights, and when we build vital movements around that, we need to think about how we diversify them. That means also building on material economic questions because that is the most powerful way of confronting religious bigotry.

ISJ: You seem to be saying that we need to combine the class struggle with the struggle against oppression. But is your argument that the left must fight to combine the two issues, or do you think that happens automatically?

AA: If you had asked me this question before the Cockroach movement, I would have answered that this process happens automatically. But now I think there’s no automatic formula for it. Any form of class struggle must be able to envisage a society where differences of religion or creed or race are accommodated. Although, let’s acknowledge that race is scientifically a misnomer—differences among the people do not mean a divergence of economic or material interests.

What the fascists have been able to do very expertly is convincing a section of the masses, even of the Hindu working class in India, that because they follow a different faith to Muslim working-class people, their economic interests are essentially divergent. They basically communalised the secular interest of working-class unity—and that is why they’re winning. That is why they have paramilitary groups within the working masses and a prime minister who accuses Muslims of being “infiltrators”. Facing that kind of political discourse means class struggles must address the differences of religion and caste.

ISJ: Where does the Cockroach movement go from here? Has the movement concluded? Will it return? And what might trigger that?

AA: The movement is definitely continuing. Look at what is happening in Jharkhand, in the north-east of India, where students are protesting against the exam paper leaks and massive corruption. They are furious that the children of the rich can bribe their way into a prized government job. So, against that, the common masses have risen up. That’s proof that the movement is continuing. For us, the key task is organisation, because the movement and organisation are symbiotic. But AISA leaders are going from place to place, addressing people’s movements wherever they arise. There is absolutely no dearth of mass movements based upon education and employment. It’s only our limited organisation that sometimes means we are not able to reach out to them. We’re trying to change that.

ISJ: What are the key lessons of the struggle so far?

AA: The first is around social media. We on the left have often attempted to discredit and downplay the importance of social media—we often describe it as a “fad”. That’s understandable given that we are comrades who work on the ground, and that arena is far more important to us. But I think we are witnessing the power of social media as an activist tool. Earlier revolutionaries would use the printing press to publish leaflets and so on, and they would physically distribute those handouts to factory workers, to students and to comrades. I believe social media is today a much more powerful tool for us to use to educate, agitate and organise. We have to take hold of these technologies and the new possibilities they offer.

The main thing we’ve learnt is that the left must acknowledge that these are unprecedented times, and that, at times, there will be chaos. There are times when we enter struggles in a rather apprehensive, sceptical manner, we have to accept that we do not know everything. Even as revolutionaries, as people who are supposed to theorise struggles and theorise the world, there will be times when we must confess that we don’t know everything. When the large mass of people—the toiling masses—join movements and start taking the lead, then the unions and the organisations must run to catch up with them. We have had to learn, as a socialist organisation, to be flexible, to realise that we will make mistakes—and that we will be able to recover from them. We need to learn to survive in this chaos, and in doing so, we’ll also learn how to thrive in it.