5 min readAug 9, 2026 02:01 PM IST
First published on: Aug 9, 2026 at 06:27 AM IST
If I were young and Indian, I would be in the Cockroach Janta Party. Ironically, for the same reasons that I once became a Modi Bhakt. Having spent my entire life in the shabby, squalid, socialist country that was created under successive Congress prime ministers, I supported Modi because I thought he would bring radical changes to rectify what had gone wrong. Among the things that had gone most wrong was the inexplicable lack of investment in the human capital of this ancient land.
It should surprise no political pundit that the cockroaches made education their first cause. The trigger was the leak of NEET exam papers, but it was only a trigger. The condition of ordinary government schools across India is truly awful. Last week, if you were watching the news channels, you would have seen children in Madhya Pradesh leaping from one pillar to the next to cross a raging dam while going to school. This state has been governed by a ‘double-engine’ government for more than a decade.
After the Jantar Mantar protest, schoolgirls in another BJP state took to the streets to say that their school had neither teachers, toilets or drinking water. I have seen rural schools where barefoot children come and sit in classrooms bereft of desks, chairs and textbooks. They come just to eat the midday meal. These meals are often cooked on primitive mud stoves in hovel-like, rodent-infested kitchens and many children get very sick from eating their midday meal, but for millions of Indian schoolchildren, this is the only real meal they get to eat.
Modi and his ministers like to boast about the millions of Indians they have freed from poverty in the past twelve years. But keep in mind that 800 million Indians receive free government foodgrain rations, and you will remember that there are millions more still shackled by poverty and degradation. When they come to the cities in search of jobs, they are forced to live in shacks in squalid shanties. The jobs they manage to get are usually of a menial kind, even if they have learned to read and write. But life is better here because little girls do not have to spend their mornings searching for water for the family.
When none of these ugly realities changed under Modi, I stopped being a devotee. From the recent protests, it is evident that millions of young Indians have also lost hope. Many would have come from homes where parents placed their own hopes in Modi and voted for him in three general elections. But older Indians seem able to absorb despair. Not so, the young. So, if I had been an Indian between the ages of eighteen and thirty, I would have been marching in step with the protesters.
It now seems the RSS is also marching in step. It came as a pleasant surprise last week when its chief, Mohan Bhagwat, spoke out in open support of the protesters. He said,
‘If Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are protesting, it does not make them anti-national. They are more honest than older generations.’ I am always wary of the RSS, but Bhagwat made an important speech. And the Prime Minister would do well to call him for chai and a private chat to seek his advice on how to move forward.
In his own attempts to sound sympathetic to the protesters, Modi has ended up saying too many things the wrong way and has inspired many memes of much higher quality than anything produced by the BJP’s IT cell. The result is that the young people he is trying to reach continue to mock him with songs that are irreverent and hilarious. Nobody has laughed at Modi ever, so he has shown himself incapable of dealing with what is going on. His minions in the media are trying to help as best they can by mocking the Cockroach leaders on their nightly TV shows but to little effect. When minion anchor ‘numero uno’ screeched last week that he was proud of Modi’s ‘Indian accent’, he just ended up looking like a goof.
Then, as if the times were not bad enough, arrived that result from Bihar in which Prashant Kishor (PK), a hero of mine, ended up trashing the BJP in a constituency that was considered the impregnable fortress of the man who is now national president of the party. In the speeches he made after winning, PK talked of the need to improve education in Bihar. And he talked of the rampant corruption in our poorest state. The things he said could apply to most states in our proud and ancient land.
There is no question that for Modi, there is an ill wind blowing, but there is no sign yet that this will benefit the opposition parties when the next round of elections happens a few months from now. Every so-called leader in the INDIA bloc comes from privilege and entitlement, and every political party in it is little more than a private limited company.
If there is any hope in this dismal time, it comes from young people who are unafraid to publicly declare that they are sick to death of what their country has become and they are there to change it. Modi’s minions can screech about the cockroaches being funded by anti-India agents, but this rant is stale and old.
After the Jantar Mantar protest, schoolgirls in another BJP state took to the streets to say that their school had neither teachers, toilets or drinking water. I have seen rural schools where barefoot children come and sit in classrooms bereft of desks, chairs and textbooks. 
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