The Complete Cockroach Uprising

Main Thread

CHAPTER ONE

The Insult and the Satire

Judges say a lot of things from the bench that never leave the courtroom. This one did. On 15 May 2026, hearing a contempt

case about senior-advocate designations and fraudulent credentials, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant reached for a dismissive

aside about unemployed youth who "become social media, RTI activists, and other activists." Cockroaches, he called them,

parasites who couldn't find a place in any real profession. It was a throwaway line in a case about something else entirely.

Within a day it wasn't.

Abhijeet Dipke noticed. He'd spent three years, from 2020 to 2023, doing meme-based digital work for the Aam Aadmi Party's

social-media team, including a stint advising Delhi's education department before he left the country to study. On 16 May he

registered something called the Cockroach Janta Party, a pun sharp enough to sting since it borrowed the ruling party's own

initials, with a tagline that doubled down on the insult rather than fighting it: Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed. He never filed

anything with the Election Commission. This wasn't a party. It was, in his own words, a platform for young Indians who felt

locked out of the ones that already existed.

It worked faster than almost anything comparable in Indian digital politics. Three million followers in seventy-eight hours. Ten

million within five days. By 22 May, six days after the account existed at all, it had crossed twenty million.

The account crossed 3 million followers within 78 hours and stood above 20 million by Day 6. Growth then held broadly steady near this level through the protest.

None of that explains why it mattered. A joke travels; it doesn't usually hold a crowd for two months. What held this one was

something that had nothing to do with the CJI's remark, and had in fact already happened before he made it. NEET-UG, the

single exam that decides who gets into an Indian medical college, was sat by more than 2.27 million students on 3 May. Within

days, a "guess paper" that had circulated beforehand turned out to overlap with roughly 120 of the exam's 4,101 questions. On

12 May, three days before the CJI ever opened his mouth about cockroaches, the National Testing Agency cancelled the result

outright. This was not a new story for Indian students. In 2024 the Supreme Court had already found 155 candidates directly

benefiting from a leak, though it declined to order a full re-exam, ruling the failure wasn't systemic. Two years on, it had

happened again. The CJP began keeping its own count of NEET aspirants it said had died by suicide over the exam's collapse:

21 names, by its tally, a figure that comes from the movement itself and has never been independently checked case by case.

A government response that predates the CJP. Ahead of the NEET-UG retest on 21 June, and for reasons that had nothing to do with

Dipke, the central government blocked the messaging app Telegram across the entire country, citing a need to stop fake leak claims

from spreading. The NTA maintained the original claims were themselves misinformation. Whichever account is more convincing, a

nationwide block of a major communications app over exam anxiety is not a small thing, and it happened before most of the country had

heard of the Cockroach Janta Party.

The CJP's own founding document went well beyond an exam and a minister. It wanted any Chief Justice barred from taking a

Rajya Sabha seat after retiring. It wanted the Chief Election Commissioner arrested under an anti-terror law if a single vote

turned up deleted anywhere in the country. It wanted fifty percent of Parliament and the Cabinet reserved for women without

adding a single new seat to make room. It wanted the broadcast licences of anything owned by the Ambani or Adani groups

cancelled outright. Read those four demands next to each other and the picture that emerges isn't a modest, single-issue campaign. It's a wish list that treats due process and press ownership rules as obstacles rather than protections, and no fair

account of this movement should pretend otherwise.

NOT EVERYONE WAS CHARMED

The RSS's own mouthpiece went after the CJP hard in the early weeks: "politically engineered," tied to a "freebie-centric, Left-leaning political

ecosystem," its manifesto dismissed as a blueprint for institutional collapse dressed up as youthful rebellion. That framing softened later, once

the movement had grown too large to write off. Both versions were real reactions from an influential source, and there's no reason to print only

the flattering half.

Somewhere in the first few weeks, the government suspended CJP's original X account, citing a threat to national security.

Dipke opened a new one the same day. Its bio read: cockroaches don't die.

CHAPTER TWO

Encampment

Jantar Mantar has been Delhi's designated protest ground since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a near-total ban on

demonstrating there, ruling flatly that regulation cannot become prohibition. The CJP's sit-in began there on 6 June, with about

a thousand police personnel on hand and volunteers running clean-up drives in cockroach costumes between rounds of

sloganeering, theatre built for a phone camera, and it worked as one. Some contemporaneous reporting instead dates the

protest's "start" to around 19–20 June, possibly describing a separate and larger gathering once the encampment had grown;

this account uses 6 June because it's the earliest and most specific claim on record, but the disagreement is real enough to note

rather than paper over.

Sister protests reached Mumbai, Bengaluru and Nagpur within days. Students from the All India Students Association, the All

India Students Federation, and the Students Federation of India folded into the crowd in overlapping waves, not one organised

bloc so much as several arriving at the same place from different directions. On 21 June the NEET-UG retest finally happened,

nationwide, for the students the May cancellation had displaced.

Early on it was mostly the joke talking, mock pride in being the nation's cockroaches. By late June the chants had hardened

into something plainer: resign, and insaaf, justice, over the leak. You could hear the shift in register happen in real time,

weeks before Wangchuk gave it a name.

CHAPTER THREE

Wangchuk

Sonam Wangchuk sat down at Jantar Mantar on 28 June and stopped eating. Most Indians already knew his face: the Ladakhi

engineer who inspired Phunsukh Wangdu in 3 Idiots, a real-life education reformer who had, by his own count, gone on hunger

strike five times before this one. Five days. Ten days. Twenty-one days in Leh in March 2024. Thirty-five days beginning

September 2025. All for the same cause, Sixth Schedule protections and statehood for Ladakh. That last one hadn't ended well.

When protests over it turned violent on 24 September 2025 (four dead, over a hundred hurt, a BJP office and the Hill Council

building burned), the Home Ministry blamed his "provocative statements," and he spent months in Jodhpur jail under the

National Security Act before his eventual release. He was also, separately, under CBI scrutiny at the time over alleged

irregularities in foreign funding to his organisations, a complication that has nothing to do with NEET but belongs in any honest

account of who he is.

This was, in other words, his sixth fast, not his first, and it wasn't only about an exam. Talking to The Quint from the protest

site, he described two failures of governance at once, India's testing system and the government's years-long stall on Ladakh,

and said he'd keep going "for six weeks or death" unless Parliament's Monsoon Session addressed both. Most coverage

flattened him into a NEET solidarity figure. He didn't see himself that way, and said so.

What started as satire has become genuine outrage.

Anjali, Delhi University student, to SBS News

Students from AISA, AISF and SFI folded their own fasts into his. Retirees showed up. Civic groups that had kept their distance

from a party literally named after an insect started showing up too, and so did opposition politicians who'd been waiting to see

if this was going to be a real thing or a viral moment that would fade by August.

By 16 July, Day 19, the BBC had him at 9.1 kilograms lighter, and doctors were publicly telling him to stop. Yogendra Yadav

wrote it up in the Indian Express as a "new turn in democratic politics," India's own Occupy moment, organic mobilisation that

had leapt past party machinery entirely. Separately, he was quoted saying Indian democracy would now be decided "from the

streets." That line did not land as a compliment with everyone. A pointed op-ed in OpIndia accused him of dressing up mob rule

as civic virtue, of ranking permanent agitation above Parliament itself. Both readings describe the same crowd. They do not

describe the same country.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Hospital and the Court

Mid-July, under new leadership at the top of Delhi Police, the barricades that had sheltered the protest site for weeks came

down. Then, on 18 July, Day 21 of the fast, with his blood sugar, sodium and potassium all sliding toward dangerous territory,

police moved Wangchuk by force to Safdarjung Hospital. Plain-clothes officers, an ambulance, no warning anyone at the site

remembers clearly. His supporters called it an abduction. The government called it medicine that couldn't wait any longer.

Dipke, watching the movement's best-known face disappear behind hospital doors days before the planned march, announced a

brief fast of his own in response.

The full sequence, from the Chief Justice's remark to the resignation, 71 days later.

His wife, Dr Gitanjali Angmo, went to the Delhi High Court. In a Sunday sitting that court staff aren't usually asked to work,

Justice Mini Pushkarna heard her request to move him to a private hospital of the family's choosing. She said no, for now,

finding no evidence he'd been treated against his will (doctors had actually withheld IV fluids specifically because he hadn't

consented to them) and accepting that close government monitoring was a legitimate way to honour the state's constitutional

duty to keep him alive. Neither side left that hearing with a clean win, which turned out to be the shape of almost every ruling

in this story.

From his hospital bed, through Angmo, he released a handwritten note calling 20 July "India's second freedom movement,"

1947's vocabulary borrowed for a fight about entrance exams and his own confinement. Overreach, if you want to call it that. It

also worked: it gave the next day a name that "protest against NTA mismanagement" never could have supplied. Overnight,

Delhi Police imposed prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the new criminal code across the New Delhi district, citing

Parliament's Monsoon Session and VVIP security. Barricades went back up. The Rapid Action Force moved in.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sansad Chalo

Thousands were at Jantar Mantar before dawn on 20 July, many having slept on the pavement. By the CJP's own account,

serious talks with the government hadn't even started by sunrise. The crowd was already moving toward Parliament Street by

the time a meeting with Union Minister J.P. Nadda got confirmed, close to midday. Samajwadi Party MPs led by Dimple Yadav

walked the route the other way in solidarity. Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule showed up at the protest site itself.

Then the barricades. Police held the line near Parliament Street; part of the crowd pushed forward; lathis came out, and the

Rapid Action Force fired tear gas. AFP's people on the ground watched some protesters throw stones once the gas landed. NPR

described baton strikes that connected with people's heads. Five metro stations along the route, Janpath, Rajiv Chowk, Patel

Chowk, Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, shut mid-clash, trapping commuters who had nothing to do with any of this.

Key reported figures. Each comes from a specific, cited source; none has been independently re-verified by any inquiry as of this writing.

Dipke was detained, along with roughly seventy others. Delhi Police put the injury count at nearly 180 total, 118 of its own

personnel, 60 protesters, a number it disclosed itself, which complicates any story where the harm only runs one direction. The

CJP said Angmo had been dragged by her hair during the chaos, and that other women at the protest were assaulted too. Delhi

Police called the Angmo claim completely false and said no one had been singled out. Rahul Gandhi, visiting the injured days

later, held up photographs of a young man he said had taken a hit to the eye and a young woman with leg injuries, and alleged,

without independent confirmation anywhere in the reporting this account draws on, that some protesters had suffered pellet

wounds. Read that allegation as what it is: a political leader's characterisation of how bad the afternoon got, not a verified

medical fact.

CHAPTER SIX

Cleared, Then Not

Police tore down the stage and tents at Jantar Mantar that same evening. By the next morning people were back, camped under

heavy police presence anyway, and Dipke told reporters exactly what you'd expect him to: we're continuing. The CJP dropped

every demand but one, Pradhan's resignation, and said it wasn't leaving until it got it. Metro closures kept spreading rather

than easing off; by 22 July, sixteen stations across central Delhi were shut, three times the number from the day of the march

itself, even as the crowd on the ground had visibly thinned.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Fast Ends Badly

This is the part of the story that gets skipped most often, and it shouldn't be, because it's the one piece that doesn't fit a clean

narrative of a united movement marching to victory.

On 21 July, the Delhi High Court ordered Wangchuk moved immediately to Medanta Hospital in Gurugram, after Angmo went

back to court a second time. He would later say the transfer took nearly five hours longer than the order should have allowed,

and describe his time at Safdarjung as "North Korea-like": tight vigil, only three relatives permitted to visit. At Medanta, Nadda

and Minister of State Jitendra Singh came to see him in person on the day of the transfer. Two days after that, on Thursday 23

July, Day 26, having lost roughly eleven kilograms, he broke the fast. In front of the two ministers. Not in front of the students

who'd fasted and marched beside him for weeks.

And Pradhan had not resigned yet.

Wangchuk said he was ending it on the strength of assurances that peaceful protesters wouldn't face legal consequences, and

on a broader commitment to student welfare, not on any promise about Pradhan specifically. That distinction mattered enough

to some of his own supporters that he had to defend the decision publicly afterward, pointing to the conditions of his

hospitalisation as justification. The CJP itself didn't follow him. It kept the line on Pradhan's resignation for two more days,

which is exactly how long it took.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Resignation

On 24 July the Union Cabinet cleared a tougher amendment to the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act: up to

ten years in prison and fines up to Rs 10 crore for organised paper-leak syndicates, a mandatory three-month trial deadline, a

dedicated fast-track court at Rouse Avenue. By then the CBI's own investigation had already produced ten arrests across seven

cities, including a Latur coaching-institute owner and a chemistry lecturer, P.V. Kulkarni, who'd been working the exam process

on the NTA's own behalf and had direct access to the papers.

The next day, Rahul Gandhi met protesting students at Jantar Mantar and laid down three demands of his own: sack Pradhan

outright, not sideways into another ministry; hold someone accountable for how the police handled the crowd; get an apology

from the Prime Minister. "Pradhan has to be sacked. Period," he told reporters. Not long after, the government announced the

resignation anyway. Whether that was because of Gandhi's press conference or simply the government's own timeline is

something this account can't settle either way.

Pradhan told Modi he was stepping down in students' larger interest, so the country's youth wouldn't stay "trapped in a web of

confusion." President Murmu accepted it immediately, under Article 75(2). Pralhad Joshi picked up the Education portfolio on

top of Food and Consumer Affairs, which he kept.

Mobile internet had been down around Jantar Mantar most of that day. When word came through anyway, Dipke got on stage

and screamed into the mic: we have done it, we have done it. Thousands of people who'd spent weeks camped on that ground

erupted. "We are the people of this country, showing the government that its power is not absolute," he told them. Not everyone

there agreed it was finished. Eighteen-year-old Shruti Bedi, shaking a can of black spray paint, told Al Jazeera it was a win for

students but not enough: "There needs to be a total reform, a total takeover of the government in our hands."

That evening, at the Constitution Club, spokesperson Saurav Das announced the movement was standing down "in good faith,"

on the understanding that two more promises, compensation for bereaved families and withdrawal of FIRs against protesters,

would be honoured shortly. "The government has said it will share this with us by Tuesday," he said, which is a way of admitting

that part of the deal, even as it was being announced, was still a promise and not yet a fact.

• • •