The ‘Cockroach’ group in India emerged until the education minister resigned | Political Affairs

New Delhi, India – Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z political group born out of humor and frustration, have set up camp in the Indian capital to demand the resignation of the education minister, defying police orders.

The summer heat of June is sweltering in New Delhi, where many protesters spent the night on the streets and sidewalks, while more people joined the second day with heavy police presence.

Abhijeet Deepke – leader of the viral movementwho just graduated from Boston University in the United States – returned to India earlier this month to expand protests from the Internet to the streets, addressing the growing anger among Indian youth.

More than half of India’s 1.4 billion people are under the age of 25. Frequent leakage of test papers and inconsistency of tests it has caused widespread anger among young people who are already overwhelmed by the pressures of studying and looking for work.

Dip it in Cockroach Janta Party (Cockroach People’s Party, or CJP) has been channeling anger and frustration, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Until recently, it was all jokes and digs on social media. In May, comments by India’s chief justice comparing youths to cockroaches sparked outrage. Dipke simply wrote on X at the time: “What if all the cockroaches were together?”

Soon, it went viral – and Dipke launched an official website, and her Instagram followers broke the mark of 22 million, double the number of India’s ruling party in the last 12 years.

Since the party’s first protest in New Delhi on June 6, Dipke has done they staged the protests in several Indian citiesincluding Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Nagpur, attracting hundreds of supporters.

At midnight in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a protest center in the capital, 18-year-old Sachin Kumar was lying on the road, sharing wired headphones with a friend he made there, Shubhankar.

Kumar studied hard for a year and last month appeared in India’s top medical exam, which was later canceled after the paper appeared to have been leaked.

“Students have become depressed, and no one cares about them,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that since then he has not taken his books.

On Sunday, around 1.7 million students took the exam again, but Kumar remained at the protest site.

India has temporarily suspended its Telegram messaging app in a bid to tackle the leak – which has been criticized by government critics as a “Band-Aid solution”.

In the days between the two exams, more than a dozen students in India died by suicide, prompting the resignation of the education minister.

“I no longer believe in the fairness of this exam, or any other competitive exam for that matter,” Kumar said. “Everything in India has been corrupted by incompetent ministers who believe that power is their inheritance.”

It was the first show that Kumar and Shubhankar had ever participated in. They were all sleeping on the streets, against their parents’ wishes, and were not planning to return home anytime soon.

For millions of young people like them, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu regime is the only political era they have experienced since he took office in 2014.

Since Saturday evening, the Delhi Police have tried a number of coercive measures to dislodge the protestors from the barricaded area, including briefly cutting off water and food supplies.

At midnight, some of the rest danced to hip-hop music, while others sat around discussing politics.

Dipke and her supporters insist that they will not leave the place until Pradhan resigns. This, if it happens, would be a first in Modi’s 12 years in power.

Dipke is sure that retirement is imminent. “If the government thinks they can tire us out, they are wrong,” he told Al Jazeera. “We’ll stay here.”