Founder of India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement and hundreds of others detained ahead of major protest
By Ayushi Shah and Deepak Rao
New Delhi (CNN) — Indian police have detained the founder of a surging youth-led political movement and hundreds of protesters in a crackdown ahead of a major planned protest in the capital New Delhi.
Abhijeet Dipke was detained along with other leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party as their plane landed in New Delhi, according to the group. Footage shows Dipke shouting “go ahead and arrest us! Victory to Mother India! Long live the revolution!”
The CJP started out in May as a Gen-Z internet joke that went viral. In July, it forced the government into its biggest climbdown in years. Now the party is back for what it is billing as Season 2 of its political movement.
This time its target is the 62-year-old chief of the Election Commission that holds the keys to India’s democracy – the world’s largest – and who, the CJP alleges, is responsible for disenfranchising tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Supporters of the movement gathered in New Delhi Saturday despite the capital turning into a fortress to keep out protesters. Mobile internet was also blocked. Many people at the protest site were detained by police, CNN witnessed.
The party quickly condemned the detention of its founders and leaders calling it an attempt to “cripple the leadership of today’s peaceful demonstrations before they even reach the protest site.”
In a separate statement, the party said highly popular influencer and activist Dhruv Rathee – who has 33 million subscribers on YouTube alone – was detained at the protest site.
But Nitin Nabin, president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on Saturday lambasted the CJP.
“You cannot bear to see India moving forward as a self-reliant and empowered nation, and you are attempting to destabilize it at the behest of foreign forces,” he said on X.
The CJP takes its name from an off-the-cuff remark by India’s chief justice, who in May allegedly used the words “cockroaches” and “parasites” to refer to groups of unemployed youth in the country. He later claimed he was misquoted, but CJP founder and Boston University graduate Dipke ran with it, hailing the titular insect’s stubbornness and indestructibility.
The movement then joined nationwide protests demanding the removal of the education minister over an exam paper leaks scandal, harnessing widespread anger at the lack of opportunities for young people and sparking moments that captured India’s internet.
Reels captured everything from dancing and DJ parties at protest sites to songs mocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Other clips played on FOMO and nudged friends to get off their phones and join the protests.
And there was free food. So much free food that organizers eventually had to ask supporters across the country to stop sending it.
Then, after weeks of sit-ins and marches, Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister, stepped down, a rare blow to Modi’s government, and one that more established opposition parties had been unable to land.
The focus of Saturday’s planned protest is Gyanesh Kumar, the head of the Electoral Commission that’s currently in the middle of a gargantuan exercise to remove dead, duplicate and otherwise ineligible voters from its rolls. Opposition parties say the commission is stripping out eligible voters to benefit Modi’s BJP, claims the BJP and the commission deny.
CNN has reached out to the election commission and BJP for a response.
More mainstream political parties are calling for the same thing, but Dipke had called supporters of the CJP back to Jantar Mantar, the historic protest ground in the center of the capital New Delhi, for “Season 2.”
In a statement released in the wake of Dipke’s detention, the party confirmed the march would continue. It orders its supporters, “If your movement is blocked by barricades or police personnel anywhere on the streets, do not stop—start your protest right where you are stopped.”
Organizers had been hoping tens of thousands would come out, but such crowds are yet to materialize – perhaps because of extraordinary measures taken by the government.
The CJP said on Friday police in several states were detaining thousands of its supporters, while India’s interior ministry ordered an internet blackout in central Delhi until 10 p.m. local time Saturday.
Central Delhi was sealed, with thousands of police and paramilitaries on the scene. Reuters reported that some long-distance trains to Delhi were canceled on Friday and more than 50 metro stations shut.
Muskaan, 19, a video editor based in Delhi and veteran of the first round of CJP demonstrations, was weighing whether to go again, she told CNN Friday.
Attending the first round of the protests, she had been expecting the police violence she had seen on television, she said, asking only to use her first name. She’d only gone because her friends had, she said.
“But when we went there, there was a lot of fun… People were playing songs, dancing, and really good memes on banners.”
Once she was there, she learned much more about the exam leaks and how they had affected people’s lives.
Muskaan said she was pleased when Pradhan resigned, but also disappointed that the protests ended so quickly. “I felt that it was too soon, that we should have got another chance to go again,” she said.
Chief Election Commissioner Kumar is a very different target.
Removing him would require a formal parliamentary process and a special majority in both houses. The opposition doesn’t have the numbers.
That leaves the CJP facing a different test. Its first campaign showed that an online joke could become a street movement and generate political pressure. Season 2 is asking whether that formula can work on a much bigger issue: India’s electoral system.
For a movement born from memes, this second wave of action will test whether that irreverent energy can translate into pressure on an institution at the heart of India’s democracy.
The-CNN-Wire
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