Young people across India recently made international headlines for mass protests over the recurring leaks of entrance exams that help students qualify for medical schools and highly coveted government jobs. The Gen Z protesters won a major victory within a matter of weeks when Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25, 2026, bowing to their demands.
The student movement was triggered by an inadvertent insult by India’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant, who, in May, referred to unemployed Indian youth as parasites and cockroaches. Kant’s words caught the attention of a young Indian man in Boston, Massachusetts, named Abhijeet Dipke, who graduated from Boston University in 2025 with a master’s in public relations.
Dipke posted a question on X: “What if all the cockroaches come together?” Deploying his PR skills, he built an Instagram account under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party (“Janta” is Hindi for “the people”) and within days began to attract a following of disaffected Indian youth, angry over the reported leak of questions from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).
Illicit access to questions from the NEET medical entrance exam is part of a lucrative underground trade in a system designed to pit an estimated 2 million students against one another for only 130,000 available positions. When news of the leaks spread, an estimated 21 students took their own lives in despair rather than retake the exams.
Ahilya Majithia, a reporter based in New Delhi, documented the nascent movement and explained that while it began as an online protest, it quickly spread to the physical world, spurred by a sense of mass injustice felt by students.
“It’s one of the most competitive exams in India,” she said during an interview with me. “It’s basically an exam to get into a medical college. So, it obviously requires a lot of preparation, and people study for years to just give this exam.”
As anger grew, Dipke’s CJP offered people an outlet for their frustrations, and the satirical party’s online following ballooned into the tens of millions. “I think it did catch a lot of momentum because of social media, and that’s how the Cockroach Janta Party was also conveying their messages: through X, through Instagram,” said Majithia.
Soon, Dipke, who was living in the United States, flew from Boston to Delhi in early June. He arrived at the airport holding aloft a copy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography, a legendary Dalit leader whose writings were central to the anti-caste movement in India. “Coming from a Dalit family, Dr. Ambedkar obviously had a huge influence on my life,” said Dipke in an interview with Frontline magazine.
Although Ambedkar was a left-wing socialist, Dipke’s political sensibilities are not necessarily reflected in the movement he helped to spark, one that moved at a ferocious speed.
“This protest [gave] the people the sense of power that we can fight the government to change certain things,” said Majithia. However, she added, “I don’t think this protest was ever to weaken a government body or the BJP in particular; I think this was a very non-political issue.”
With Dipke and his fellow Gen Z activists leading marches, students spent weeks demonstrating and occupying public spaces to protest a system that increasingly squeezes young people out of stable careers despite spending years studying and incurring debt to qualify for exams.
They gathered in Delhi’s storied “Jantar Mantar,” a large-scale 18th-century structure of giant sundials and other astronomical observing instruments symbolizing India’s ancient tradition of scientific inquiry.
The “cockroach” protests spread from India’s capital, Delhi, to other states, including Assam, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Bihar, even as police brutalized protesters, as seen in widely shared online images and videos. Students were not only participating in protests but were also documenting their mistreatment at the hands of authorities with smartphones and social media.
Some of their key demands included that India’s education minister step down and that families of students who committed suicide receive financial restitution for their losses.
As far as Majithia knows, no member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has ever given into political pressure and resigned.
“It’s never happened,” she said. Kangana Ranaut, an actress and member of parliament, told the press that “no one can pressure the government into who to sack and who to retain”—a shocking admission of how much disdain the ruling party has for basic tenets of democracy.
However, soon after her comments, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, and even the international press noted just how significant the Modi government’s acquiescence was.
Since the protests ended, the CJP has also insisted that all arrest warrants against student protesters be withdrawn and threatened a resumption of actions over reports of government harassment of activists.
There have been so many failures of the education system, not just the NEET paper leak,” said Majithia. In the wake of Pradhan’s resignation, the next question is how the movement will navigate specific education and economic reforms.
Saurav Das, the CJP’s main spokesperson, who has a background in investigative journalism and is writing a book about the nation’s justice system, is in negotiations with the Modi government over the details of a longer-term education and examination five-point reform plan that includes more stringent standards for testing authorities, a contingency plan for reexamination, and better compensation for impacted students.
While the reform charter addresses the specific reasons why protesters are enraged with the government, the broader issue of economic justice for India’s youth remains in question.
An in-depth 2026 report by Azim Premji University on economic prospects for India’s youth concludes that the country has the largest youth population of any other nation in the world and that “[t]he transition from education to employment remains a major challenge, particularly for graduates.”
Specifically, the report found that “while approximately 5 million graduates were added each year, only around 2.8 million found employment, and an even smaller share entered salaried employment.”
It remains to be seen whether the CJP and its explosive entry into India’s political landscape will be able to take on the bigger problem of Gen Z’s poor economic prospects. At only a few months old, the movement has at the very least offered young people an outlet for their frustrations and a platform to flex their power.
“I think people have a lot of hope with the Cockroach Janta Party because they do think that they will work with the government to make changes and to get changes in the entire system,” said Majithia.
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press, 2026), Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025), and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and republished with kind permission.
