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From Cockroaches to Criminals: How the Indian State turned Protest into a Crime
In July 2026, India - the world’s most populous democracy - celebrated the resignation of an Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, after more than a month of student-led protests with tens of thousands of protestors - organized under the youth-led “Cockroach Janta Party” movement” - amassing in the national capital, New Delhi.
The protest received international recognition because of its somewhat unusual origins: the Chief Justice of India compared certain unemployed young people and activists to cockroaches and parasites. A satirical call for cockroaches to unite led to mass mobilization of students across the country. The students and their supporters demanded the resignation of the minister under whose watch the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) medical examination was leaked several times, as well as compensation for the families of students who died by suicide (at least 14 deaths formally reported due to exam related stress and pressure). The protest became bigger than anticipated as the internet exploded with memes, reels, videos, songs and protest signs rooted in satire. It was Gen Z’s first collective effort to seek government accountability, publicly demanding their rights and engaging in political mobilization.
The revolution was momentarily televised, by those at the centre of it. We watched with bated breath as throngs emerged in support across the country. While their sympathy emanated from solidarity with the immense pressure on students sitting for highly competitive entrance examinations, it also carried an undercurrent of resistance to the BJP's politics of division — the hateful, vengeful rhetoric that has long pitted community against community along lines of religion, ethnicity, and caste. We saw slogans, posters, and discussions critically questioning caste discrimination in the education system, decentralization of education, vindictive arrest and detention of student activists, and corruption and apathy across government institutions. While the protestors constituted mostly men and boys, many women and young girls joined to the surprise of onlookers. Many ran away from home without their parents’ knowledge to join the protest to exercise their right to dissent. They braved public scrutiny, slut shaming, harassment, media hounding and online targeting, even putting their bodies on the line and suffering violence themselves. It perhaps became harder to mock and belittle the protestors when women and girls brilliantly articulated their disappointment in the state that pretended to protect them, while violating their rights.
But the protestors were soon and violently reminded that their right to freedom of expression and assembly was conditional. It could be snatched away just as easily. For older generations familiar with the carrot and stick paternalism of our patriarchal government, this was nothing new. Gen Z bravely faced violence inflicted by police forces, and reminded us, more importantly, that we cannot afford defeatism, resignation, and cynicism.
For a spontaneous movement that had millions of online followers and spectators, the violence unleashed on protestors could not escape accountability. For those participating in a public protest for the first time, seeing the violence meted out by police forces was a matter of shock, hurt, anger and genuine fear. Police officers in diverse colours - in uniform and civilian clothing, with nametags and without - used water canons, tear gas, batons, electric shock batons (illegal), batons with nails (illegal), pellet guns (illegal), threatened to use an AK-47 (illegal), and slapped and kicked people of all genders and ages (including lawyers), detained protestors, threatened to file formal charges and in some cases did so as well. Police officers exhibited creativity - they welded barricades together to prevent protestors from moving forward, confiscated and blocked food sent as aid to the protest sites, stopped and diverted auto rickshaws from reaching the protest site, shut down public metro stations, threatened to ‘cancel’ passports of protestors and spent time deciphering who had sent food and aid to the protest side through receipts and wrappers gathered on the ground.
Shaken by the rude realization that offering roses to police officers and befriending them to make reels would not protect them, protestors’ collective anger shifted from individual officers to the authority figures legitimizing this violence. It was evident that the police were not there to protect people nor to maintain ‘public order and security’. Instead, the police were meant to protect the interests of those in power - the state and its actors. The anger also arose from the sheer impunity of it all. In particular, there was shock and outrage from even those in opposition to the protest, when the police sexually assaulted and beat up women and girls - exposing the state’s hypocrisy of protectionism. Women and girls will be ‘protected’ if they abide by the rules, ‘bad’ women and girls will face consequences and do not deserve protection. All instances of police brutality had been documented by protestors. Yet, even as they escalated, the courts did not intervene until several days later.
Protestors were not the only ones documenting what was happening. Students discovered the labyrinth of surveillance that tracked them everywhere, particularly, facial recognition technology (drones, CCTV cameras, mobile command and control vehicles, hand-held devices and even Meta glasses).
None of this is new. Muslim, Adivasi, Dalit students and activists (among others) have been languishing in jails without trial, surveilled and persecuted online and offline, and demonized to such an extent that it is normalized or worse, overlooked and forgotten. States or regions within states that are legally termed ‘conflict zones’ have special laws that either enable state violence, or give impunity for officers inflicting such violence. For instance, take the pellet guns that generated furore during the Delhi protests - armed forces have been using them against civilians in Kashmir for more than a decade, despite immense criticism from international human rights groups.
While this protest was happening, several indigenous communities held simultaneous public protests for their land rights and against unilateral displacement projects, felling of trees, and construction of luxury hotels, amongst others. Those protests received much less media coverage or wider support, and were snuffed out by police officers without any room for resistance.
What is new is the revitalized questioning of whom the police serve, what is being protected, whom the media defends and accuses, and what it means to be a democratic country.
Securitization i.e. the creation of a threat to “national security” to justify extreme and emergency measures, is a playbook that the authoritarian state is working to perfect. Criminal laws and the process of criminalization are crucial to maintain a constant state of terror with the protector - i.e. the state coming in to rescue the ‘victims’ from a select few ‘perpetrators’. Surveillance is normalized as necessary, either to identify potential criminals or to convict those committing crimes. The surveillance is for our common good, they say, not to be questioned by those who have nothing to hide. That is until peaceful protest and seeking accountability is treated as a crime. This criminalization occurs within and beyond the criminal legal system through policing, surveillance, threats of legal action, and then the actual registration of criminal offences. Agents and supporters of those in power run their parallel form of policing, especially in the digital sphere. They target, dox, harass, surveil women, sexual and gender diverse persons and those from marginalized communities with far-reaching consequences into their physical lives.
Key players instrumental in normalizing a state of securitization are the press, media houses and journalists. While privately owned media houses have been acting as mouthpieces of state actors and stoking social division and hatred for over a decade, the outrageousness of defending the state’s treatment of protestors was too blatant to be ignored. Protestors were demonized, accused of being sponsored by foreign agents (ranging from Pakistan to China to USA), mocked for avoiding hard work and judged for being immature. They were told that the police brutality they had witnessed was either fabricated, exaggerated, or framed as necessary to protect them from unruly elements creating unrest.
What the mainstream media houses could have asked was,
Why did so many police officers, Rapid Action Forces and Central Reserve Police Forces have to be flown into Delhi, while the government refused to engage with protestors’ demands?
Who or what was being protected?
If this is the impunity with which violence is unleashed in the country’s capital in full view of thousands of students’ phones and international and independent media portals, what is happening in less public protests, less populated locations, with minorities?
As the country risks sitting too comfortably in fascism, this protest is an opportunity to remind ourselves that,
Securitization is not normal.
Surveillance is not normal.
Criminalization of dissent and freedom of speech and assembly is not normal.
While the protests marked an important moment of political awakening and engagement, these protestors are not the first to discover the use of violence to curb dissent. But for those who have experienced, witnessed and documented the state’s monopoly of violence for years, this vociferousness and anger is something worth sustaining. We must wedge this crack in the jailor’s armor to have broader conversations on how the criminal legal system and its enforcers are weaponized to serve the state’s interests (seizing and retaining power), which most often are in complete opposition to the needs of most marginalized communities (challenging structures of power).
And now, even though the protests have ended, surveillance footage is being used to hound students and their supporters, despite assurances that punitive action would not be taken. The Delhi Police has issued notices to social media outlets to remove content containing “objectionable language and offensive remarks about the prime minister.” A minor girl was harassed beyond measure, in person and on social media, because of a viral video clip from the protest where she spoke disparagingly of the Prime Minister. She faced criminal charges of insult with intent to provoke breach of peace, statements conducing to public mischief and defamation. She was coerced to publicly apologize, and her torment is far from over. The harassment, abuse, doxing, and rape and death threats of a minor are consequences of her own wrongdoings, it seems. We have been informed by the Prime Minister that he has forgiven her and other protestors for their vulgarity, and our patriarchal country- family order has been restored. This is criminalization’s true face staring straight at us. We cannot continue to look away.
This is yet another opportunity to expose criminalization for what it is - a coercive project to control populations and expand state power at the expense of those already marginalized. Increasing training of police officers, or suspending or transferring a few actors will not change who is policed, what is policed, and how aggressively. The demands for accountability should lead to radical pushback against the use of criminalization to silence dissent. Our first step is to extend solidarity with political prisoners who have been imprisoned for their activism, political consciousness, and dissenting opinions. You walked so that the cockroaches could fly.