On June 6, Sakhi stood at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and did something that, for her, required a certain kind of effort. She showed up. She had seen this before. She had watched movements come together at a pace similar to that of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). She had witnessed the sudden groundswell, the surge of cameras, the clear slogans, and the inkling that something would change this time. A student of social work at the University of Delhi, she had watched movements lose momentum, seen friends run into legal trouble over protests the news cycle had long abandoned, and noticed the cameras move on.

She understood, from observation if not experience, how the state absorbs pressure through transfers, delays, and the bureaucratic skill of making urgency seem ridiculous in hindsight. She came anyway. Around her, at the first demonstration of the CJP, were hundreds of young people, including students, recent graduates, some in cockroach masks, a few carrying flowers, and school children who had arrived with their parents. Something that was sparked by the Chief Justice of India’s casual disdainful remark on the unemployed youth had surpassed 20 million Instagram followers in under three weeks.

But reducing it to a social media fad is to miss the point and to repeat the very condescension that created it. Sakhi was clear-eyed about where she stood and characterised her stance as—hope with cynicism. “I am very appreciative of what work they are doing,” she said. “They are at least doing something. But at the same time, I believe in being a little critical of them so that they also do not become a meme.” Glancing at the cameras around her, she posed a question that has permeated through every discussion since the CJP’s first protest. “How much of the 22 million on Instagram is translated here?” she asked. It is the question of a generation that has learnt to view political possibility from a specific perspective, which is neither the clean optimism of a first protest nor the paralysis of accumulated disappointment, but something more demanding than either.

The students who filled the CJP’s group chats, attended its demonstration, and shared its demands were simultaneously watching the movement with an attention impacted by its single-point manifesto to a systemic crisis, its male-dominated leadership against a manifesto calling for gender parity, its founder’s political past against its claim to independence, and its social media mass against the unproven depth of its ground-level organisation.

On May 15, 2026, during a Supreme Court hearing, Chief Justice Surya Kant described unemployed youth who drift into activism. The following day, Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist and former AAP volunteer, launched the CJP as “a platform for all the cockroaches out there”. Within five days, the Instagram account had crossed 10 million followers, overtaking the BJP’s official handle. The Chief Justice clarified that he had been misquoted and was speaking only of lawyers with fake degrees. The clarification changed nothing. The word had already found its mark.

Lipi, a first-year Master’s student in physics at the University of Delhi, had first heard about the CJP through group chats, through the cascade of links and screenshots that followed the Chief Justice’s remarks, through the general velocity of a movement that felt different from the usual social media flare-up. “I thought it was some kind of trend that would die away in a day or two,” she said. “But then I went to the website, and there was this manifesto, and I realised the founder actually intended to develop it further.” She was bound to get sceptical at first.

India has seen its share of viral political movements that have burned bright only to fade into obscurity. Perhaps the most accurate summary of how a generation raised on unfulfilled promises learns to interact with politics is with an instinct that is half dismissal and half curiosity, and with one eye always on the exit. “It is absolutely a systemic failure of an extreme sort. Everything is rotten. The new education policy, the paper leaks, and the public-private partnerships in examinations are all leading to education being capitalised on from every point. They are structurally ensuring that only a particular section of society gets access to it,” said Lipi.

Tarushi Singh, 24, pursuing a Master’s in Psychology from Manipal University (Bengaluru campus), had a more personal reaction to it. “I was really angered by that statement made by the CJI,” she stated. “Even I’m somebody who is currently looking for jobs and giving competitive exams. Anger was my first reaction.” Arjun, who is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in history at Hansraj College, read about CJP in the newspaper the morning after its launch, which is something that sets him apart from the vast majority.

His first reaction was not amusement. It was recognition of a pattern. “What just happened in Bangladesh and Nepal, with the youth who protested against their ruling governments,” he said, “I thought something was going to happen in India, too. I would have thought of it as a normal satirical page. But the way recent events have unfolded, I think there is potential for ground-level change.” That potential, in his view, lives or dies on a single question: education. He had grown up in a village and attended government schools before getting admission to Hansraj. This is the educational journey that is held up, in government rhetoric, as evidence that the system works.

His assessment of the National Education Policy (NEP), which he had experienced during his college years, was unsparing. Skill and ability-enhancement courses had been introduced with 200 students in a class and no practical infrastructure to support them. “After six months or one year, I realised it was nothing,” he replied. He wasn’t exaggerating. He was reporting an experiment that had failed.

Lipi comes to a similar conclusion from a different angle. “The syllabus is getting changed, history is getting tweaked, public-private partnerships in examinations—all of this is a result of NEP,” she claimed. “They are structurally making sure that only a certain section of society gets access to education.”

For Animesh Ojha, a Master’s student in Economics at Ashoka University who had been sitting NTA-conducted examinations for six to seven years, the system’s failure was not abstract. He recounted appearing for a computer-based test in which students at one centre in Shakti Nagar began the examination a full hour later than everyone else. This was followed by no accountability, no official explanation, and no compensatory offers. “How can there be a technical glitch?” he said.

“You are conducting the exam for 20,000 students for a particular economics course. How can a centre fail?” He concluded that, in his decisive opinion, “I don’t think a single exam is fair in India.” Dev Maurya, a postgraduate student at the Centre for Informal Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), described the infrastructural reality of the country’s top institution. “There is no functioning water cooler; we have to go to the school of biotechnology to fill the water. That’s the problem in real life, real institutions. No one is getting asked about that problem.”

The demand for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, which is the CJP’s most visible demand, the one that fills the placards and the press releases, was the point that most of the students who were interviewed consistently and interestingly conflicted on. Not because they didn’t think he should be removed. But because they had seen what removal achieves. “Resignation becomes a popular slogan in current politics,” said Praveen Kumar, a first-year Master’s student in Political Science at JNU. “Everywhere we look, the opposition simply tries to demand resignation, regardless of what is happening. And we need to pay attention to what India is truly dealing with this situation,” he said.

To put it succinctly, Lipi stated, “The fight should not end at the resignation of the Education Minister. It should work towards systemic change.” She proposed that the CJP could set itself apart by developing a thorough and theoretically sound critique of the education system. “I think if the CJP has to do something exemplary, they should come to the national education policy and ask for its complete abolition. Because, as a student myself who has done everything under NEP, things are very bad,” she said.

Surbhi and Preeti, two JNU doctoral students who spoke with some caution, returned repeatedly to the NTA’s acquisition of examinations that had once been conducted reliably by the University Grants Commission and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. “Earlier, this was organised by the UGC or the CSIR [Council of Scientific & Industrial Research], and it was going really well. But ever since it has been handed over to the NTA, the papers have not been well. There is something fishy with the NTA.”

If the CJP were to ask its own followers what it should fight for, the answers would constitute a manifesto quite different from the one on its website. Arjun, a Hansraj student, felt that the party should refuse alignment with any established political force. “My first and foremost advice is not to get aligned with any other major political party.

It is best to stay as a normal youth platform.” Any such alignment, he argued, would hand the government the instrument it needed to discredit the movement. Tarushi wanted the CJP to leave Instagram and do fieldwork. “They should actually go and see how the students are living there,” she said of the coaching belts of Mukherjee Nagar, “and take all the problems from actual students and not just Instagram comments.”

Whether the CJP can translate 22 million followers into organisational density, a cohesive theoretical framework, and have the patience for the long structural groundwork that every one of its most thoughtful supporters is demanding, but it remains to be seen.

What is not open is the diagnosis. Across disciplines, universities, and degrees of political engagement, the students who comprise the CJP’s base described the same flawed system in different registers: the examination leaks, the hollowed-out NEP, the coaching-centre belts, as both aspiration and trap, the government job as the only credible security and the process for accessing it as the most reliable mechanism of exclusion. Sakhi put it simply: “I wish that this goes towards some more concrete decision-taking and an organised movement rather than just becoming a trend and a one-man army thing.” She was not optimistic. She had been precise about that. But she had been there. And at Jantar Mantar, on a June afternoon that the cameras largely missed, that seemed to count for something.

Vaishnavi Dixit is an intern with Frontline.

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