The youth of India are angry, entitled and unemployed. They turn to activism and social media with anti-national sentiments, defaming the government, ultimately existing as purposeless “parasites” and “cockroaches” of society. These remarks have echoed throughout the subcontinent since they were made by the occupant of India’s highest judicial office on the 15th of May 2026. While the context can be debated, the intention and implications are unambiguous: individuals in positions of power are shielded from accountability and disregard their obligations toward the citizens they serve. They possess an unearned feeling of ownership and entitlement toward their office and correlate it with superiority over the general public.
In what began as a satirical response to these comments, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was created (The Cockroach People’s Party), which soon turned into a mass movement with over 25 million social media followers and one million members. Their vision extends from political and electoral safeguards to protecting independent journalism. Central to these goals exists a mission to “build a party for the young people who keep getting called lazy, chronically online, and — most recently — cockroaches.” The issue that spearheaded the series of protests over the last few weeks was a battle against the education system and its incontestable failure that was apparent after the answer papers of a major entrance examination, “NEET”, were leaked in the early days of May.
The NEET exam serves as a standardised assessment, analogous to the SAT or Leaving Cert, but specifically for students seeking to enter education in the healthcare sector. Every year, over two million students appear for this highly competitive examination, fighting for a spot in India’s top undergraduate medical programmes. There is immense pressure on children who choose to sit this assessment, due to the vastness and difficulty of the syllabus, costly negative marking, and a meagre 200 minutes given to answer 180 complex questions. However, the burden of this exam is truly held by the scarcity of seats that are available for students– only 2% are able to secure admission in colleges. To put this into perspective, individual Ivy League colleges have acceptance rates of 4%-7%. NEET, on the other hand, has a lower rate despite being the only gateway to enter the medical field in India. This has created an inequitable, high-stakes environment amongst young Indians that has deeply impacted their mental health and has emerged as a significant factor in suicidal ideation, with data linking 93 cases of suicide over the last five years due to the stressors of this examination.
Furthermore, following the paper leak this year, the exam was cancelled, and a re-sit was organised. This disruption placed further strain on students, with more than twelve reported suicides linked to the immense pressure of having to sit the examination again. Such a failure of the education system and the authorities responsible for overseeing it fuelled widespread outrage among students, with protesters demanding (and succeeding in securing) the resignation of India’s Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan. The CJP mobilised tens of thousands of students across major cities in India through social media, offering a glimpse of what a truly youth-centric democracy could look like.
While on the surface it may appear that the protests were fighting the immediate issues, the truth is that the anger and dissatisfaction within Indians have grown over decades of negligence and lack of consideration by the government. I speak from experience when I share that there exists a tragic normalcy of inequality within the institutions of India. Due to examinations like this, which reflect the lack of high-quality educational resources, children grow up with an embedded scarcity mentality. Over time, aggressive competition has become increasingly praised and sought after, transforming what should be a period of nurture and growth into one defined by relentless comparison and self-doubt. I have observed parents and families begin to involve themselves in the battle to score the highest possible grade, enrolling their children in supplementary tutoring for hours after the school day ends, sometimes from as young as seven or eight. It is therefore the widespread acceptance of these systems that makes the situation almost comically dystopian. I could take a moment to blame India’s colonial past to rationalise our blind acceptance of authority, even if it is so evidently dysfunctional. Further, it has also become glaringly obvious that since Independence, each generation of Indian youth has been reduced to a convenient political slogan, invoked by those in power to secure public support – only to watch that power inevitably give way to corruption. However, it appears as though Gen Z’s admirable ability to fight for a voice in an increasingly muffled world has pushed citizens into the reality that India is no longer under the confines of an authoritarian regime (depending on who you ask), and is in fact the largest democracy in the world.
This story is not unlike those unfolding across the world, resurrecting and reminding us of democracy’s true meaning: the rule of the People. Our generation has inherited much – but our task is greater still: to dismantle broken systems, to shatter outdated norms, to defend hard-won rights. The revolution is no longer on the horizon. It has arrived.
