Six weeks ago, a satirical social media page needled the political class with a joke about cockroaches surviving anything New Delhi could throw at them. By the time it ended, that joke had become the Cockroach Janta Party, a students’ movement had occupied Jantar Mantar for the better part of a monsoon, a Ladakhi engineer had starved himself for 26 days, and a Union Minister had resigned. What began on June 6 as anger over a leaked NEET paper and irregularities in CBSE’s on-screen marking grew, through Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike and a police crackdown outside Parliament on July 20, into the sharpest challenge India’s Gen Z has mounted against the state’s handling of its examinations, and of its dissent. The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25 closed one chapter of the protest, not the argument that produced it. The reports, interviews, and analyses collected here trace how a punchline outlasted the powerful, and what it revealed about the young Indians who kept it alive.
