In the summer of 2026, the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant unwittingly triggered the launch of a powerful peoples’ movement when he referred to the country’s unemployed youth as cockroaches.
Shortly after his remarks were reported in the press, an instagram handle calling itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) attracted millions of followers, creating a network of young people who have emerged as an unlikely bulwark of resistance against India’s authoritarian rightwing government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This once-online network took to the streets in early June after the CJP demanded India’s education minister take responsibility for the leak of examination papers for India’s gruelling entrance exams for medical colleges and universities.
Since then, tens of thousands of young people from across the country have flocked to Jantar Mantar, a historic protest site in the heart of the national capital New Delhi. Neha Bora, the President of the leftist All India Students Association, is part of this upsurge. She and her comrades went on a 23 day hunger strike to demand the Indian education minister’s resignation.
She spoke to openDemocracy hours after breaking her fast. While the education minister is still in his seat, the crowds of protestors at Jantar Mantar show no sign of abating.
Bora makes for an interesting interview subject in this present moment. For much of its 12 years in power — the Modi government has long laid claim to the politics of aspiration, and arm-twisted much of the media into tomtomming its talking points, even its policies have resulted in widespread unemployment and disenfranchisement. The Cockroach protests, and Bora’s analysis, suggest the regime’s spell on its people is finally breaking.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity
Aman Sethi: As we speak, you have just concluded your hunger strike after 23 days. That is an unimaginable amount of time for most people.
Neha Bora: It was not so much about the body as it was about the mind. The body adapts, but the body sometimes tells you that it has had enough, and what is the point?
It is the mind that keeps you going. We read about biopolitics, about how an individual is reduced to their bodies. So that’s what happened to us. Three times, four times in a day, our blood would be taken, blood pressure, sugar levels, everything. So we were reduced to a few numbers. We were reduced to fluctuating readings. One of our comrades, who once sat without eating for 21 days, would come every day and she would tell us stories of her hunger strike. She would tell us that you know, it’s about the mind more than it’s about the body.
This is a public place, so sitting here, having people constantly around you, clicking your pictures. People would come up to us to give us solidarity, support, love, warmth. It was all out of that.
Tell me about your political journey at a time when the media, educational and cultural institutions have all been captured by the regime. What was the political and intellectual journey that led you to sitting on this hunger strike on a street in Delhi to protest against this regime?
I think it was a journey similar to the journey of all other people who don’t come from politics in their life. I came to politics through theater. In my second year of university, I joined a theater group, which was a cultural activists group. That really brought me to terms with how politics is not just protests and movements. It’s the everyday of life. It’s the language. It’s the body. It’s how you express yourselves, the language you use, the causes you use. It was theater that told me that no matter how we survive, whether we choose to embrace politics by calling it politics, or whether we choose to embrace politics by constantly upholding our apoliticalness, politics happens to us, and if we wish to have any say in it, then we might as well understand what what’s happening around us.
Then, like all young people, 2019 came into our lives when the CAA movement happened, and when the CAA movement happened, it made ordinary people into something else. It was the same people. It was the same people waking up, sitting on a dharna, listening to songs, talking to each other, but the language changed. There were four, five-year-olds running on the street, talking about Bhagat Singh.
People extended support and solidarity to each other more, and it was not about the CAA protests. It was about the fact that when people come together, a different world, a different space is possible. And that was the moment I think that those of us who witnessed it, we can’t look back from it. We can’t look back from what happened, what it taught us, what it made us realize about our own selves and the world that we live in. And then the farmers’ protest happened, and now this is happening.
People say that the time of fascism is a time of great repression. It is a time of great cruelty, great hatred. But history, the same history, also tells us that times of great repression are also times of new definitions of resistance and that is what is being done by the people of this country.
The people are braving such repression, a lifetime of imprisonment, braving police torture. People are fighting for nothing but just because they want the truth to not die, and that means a lot for us as a human society that we are capable of this, that we are capable of something greater than our immediate needs, than our immediate reactive emotions.
When you talk about the CAA protests of 2019 or the farmers protests of 2020 you are drawing a lineage to previous acts of resistance. [The Citizen Amendment Act protests were a massive upsurge in 2019 against a law introduced by the Modi regime to disenfranchise India’s Muslim citizens. The protests were ultimately violents disbanded and several students were imprisoned, with some still held in prison without bail, even as their cases are yet to be heard.] What is it about this particular protest that jumps out at you?
I think it’s my first experience of this kind of protest. A maximum number of people who are here are first-time protesters, and they come here every day, and they tell us in, and they tell us in dozens that you know this is our first protest.
These are all people who would sit at home and call us anti-nationals. [Normally] if the television told them that those sitting here were a leftist, cabal of George Soros or whatever, they would have believed it. But it was this protest that made it possible for them to not believe such things.
We tell them: You have to learn that every person who’s been called anti-national before this, and who you accepted as anti-national, whose public trial you watched on television and believed, whose public trials you participated it, who you trolled on social media — all of those people who were called anti-national and you believed, you are that person. And if today you don’t believe them because you are being called anti-national, then perhaps they are not anti-national either.
The way the state tells you to view the “other”, to view the other citizen, perhaps it’s time that we review it because in today’s times all definitions are being rewritten. It’s being rewritten what the state can do to common people, it’s being written the kind of torture that can be excused. I think Israel writes new definitions and presents new examples to repressive states about what should be done and what can be done to people, while the entire world watches. And our country is learning from it. Our country has been learning from Israel for a long time in the northeast and in Kashmir. It has been learning, and it has been learning, and now it is practicing it on its own citizens. This protest has made it possible for that to not be the case anymore. And that is new.
Until now it was the same group of people who could talk, who would talk. But now the fact that common young people are coming and they’re speaking up, they’re talking. That is important for us. That is what makes this movement relevant, despite all the criticisms that the people might have. This makes it important for us.
There is a sense right that the Modi regime has never been more powerful than it has before, but also never more fragile. How do you read this moment?
I read it precisely like you put it. The more repressive I believe, the more cruel a regime, the more afraid that government is internally, because it knows what it is doing. It was true for all other repressive fascist regimes before this, and it is true for this regime as well.
The government and the people in the government who today justify violence against people, against common citizens; they know what’s in store for them. They know what the history books will write about them. They know what history will do to them, where they will stand when they are judged.
So I completely agree that while it is more consolidated, more repressive than ever before, it is also so fragile that people hungry for 23 days — you are afraid of them. That’s how fragile your government is.
How does one find purpose and meaning in times like these? How have you found purpose?
One of our comrades was saying that the times that we are faced with today, we have to exercise hope like a muscle. We are not going to find it. It’s not going to be omnipresent. We have to find it in the little things and exercise it, hone it, make it so strong.
So when we see the incarceration of equal-citizenship protesters, when we see the indefinite incarceration of people of Kashmir, when we see the immense torture of the people of Palestine and everywhere else in the world, and we see more than that the complete silence in the face of such torture and violence, and we see even justification of this torture — when we can’t find hope, we can exercise that muscle not only for ourselves, but for the people around us.
People have been trained to be cowards by this regime. Because when there’s nothing else on stake, it’s your life. It’s simply your life. Nothing less than that is at stake. It’s simply your life. If a Muslim man wearing a cap, selling watermelon on the streets, can be beaten up just because he is existing, then he’s being killed for existing. So they’re training us to be cowards. They’re training us for a genocide. They’re training us that when they commit mass murder in this country, everybody is so afraid that nobody can speak for the other.
And that is why movements like this are so important because it reminds us constantly that we are not cowards. They’ve trained us into being cowards, but what has been trained can be untrained. It can be unlearned. And every moment that we get, every chance and every opportunity that we get, we must unlearn this. We must unlearn this bit by bit. We must stand for each other. It doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be on social media. It doesn’t have to be on the news. But we have to stand for each other in the small ways that we can, and that’s the only way hope can be alive.
It is so important to keep hope alive. I was a student of theater. Brecht says the solidarity of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable, it is the world’s one hope.
Therefore, people in this country-Dalits, women, transgenders, Muslims, Adivasis-all of those people who’ve been divided into different sections and told, “You are alone, you are the target, you shut up, or you’ll be in place of them.”
Everybody who’s been told this has to extend a hand to the other and build a solidarity so unbreakable that the government breaks, and not our solidarity.