6 min readJul 19, 2026 08:08 PM IST
First published on: Jul 19, 2026 at 06:41 AM IST
Tomorrow is the day that protesting cockroaches will march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament, so I have no choice but to write about the Cockroach Janata Party’s protest. I have said before in this column that they should be heard because they are raising important issues. They are right when they say that the education system is defunct and failing our future generations. They are right to demand that the man most accountable for the mess should resign. And, if you spend an afternoon wandering about Jantar Mantar these days, you will meet many young people who speak of the despondency and defeat spreading through the ranks of young Indians. This is true in the cities, and it is true in the villages. But nobody in the exalted echelons of Lutyens Delhi seems to be listening.
This privileged enclave, in which only the most powerful Indians have always lived, is now occupied by a new class of people. They are not descended from the traditional ruling class. They despise us ‘elitists’ for having been born privileged. They pride themselves on being low of caste and humble of origin, so they should be able to better hear the voices of people who have been protesting in Jantar Mantar for more than two weeks. Judging from the silence of the Prime Minister and his ministers, it appears they have chosen to remain deaf and to allow their battle to be fought by their own cockroach warriors on social media.
This lot is linguistically challenged and bereft of ideas. So, they make their case by hurling accusations at the protesters. They are propped up by foreign agents. They are working with the same toolkit as the ladies of Shaheen Bagh. They support Khalistan. They are anti-national to the core. These charges reminded me of how little has changed in the Indian political discourse since I first started covering politics when Indira Gandhi was prime minister. She was so obsessed with the ‘foreign hand’ (CIA) that it became a joke among foreign correspondents. Then a KGB spymaster defected to the West in the nineties and revealed in his memoir that several ministers in Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet and several venerable leftist editors were in the pay of the Soviet Union.
It is ironic that Narendra Modi’s supporters and social media combatants are as obsessed with the ‘foreign hand’. What I find curious is why our strongman prime minister is allowing these ‘foreign agents’ to spread across our beloved Bharat Mata with ‘toolkits’ in hand to destroy the great successes he has wrought in the past twelve years. The ‘foreign agent’ they seem to hate most is Abhijeet Dipke, who founded the Cockroach Janata Party. Number two on the hit list is Sonam Wangchuk. I pray that by the time you read this, he is still alive. I believe that fasting to death is less effective than staying alive, so I hope he breaks his fast.
If you have been following the way in which the Modi government handles dissent and dissidence, you would have noticed that the standard operating procedure is to launch a smear campaign against those who dare to dissent. The strategy appears to be that if you damage the reputation of dissidents, then whatever they say will be treated as garbage. And it will act as a warning to future dissidents. They will think twice about challenging anything that the government does because they know that if they do not end up in jail, they will end up in disgrace.
Meanwhile, what happens next? If Sonam Wangchuk is still with us, there will be a march to Parliament tomorrow, and there is every likelihood that the government will pretend it did not happen and the opposition will do its best to exalt it. Instead, would it not be a real act of nationalism for both the opposition and the government to come together and set up a parliamentary committee with the task of suggesting reforms from the primary school level to the university level? I have said it before, and I shall repeat it over and over again, that the economic reform India needs most urgently is a total restructuring and re-imagining of our education system.
A number of studies have shown that children who can only afford government schools come out barely able to count and read. How long can we allow our politicians and bureaucrats to build third-rate schools for the people while sending their own children to private schools? How long will we tolerate the ugly truth that every political leader and bureaucrat who can afford to would rather send his children to mediocre foreign universities than to the best Indian universities? How long will we allow coaching centres to replace colleges? How long will we tolerate examinations that get cancelled at the last hour because someone or other manages to corrupt them with leaked papers?
If a bi-partisan committee is set up to examine these things and bring real reforms, then the Cockroach Janata Party would have achieved something truly significant. Until then, let us pray that Sonam Wangchuk remains alive and strong enough to join the march tomorrow. He has said that if he dies, his ghost will be on this march. We do not need any more ghosts than we already have. We need political leaders brave enough to disagree and dissent against the government when it is clearly wrong.
Activist Sonam Wangchuk, who has been on an indefinite hunger strike for 21 days, is shifted to a hospital from Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi. (PTI Photo) 
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