— ✍️ Aishwarya AVRaj & Harshul Singh

“…I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognise that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words… The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.” (James Baldwin, 1962, community church, NYC).

A sentimentality for change is forming across India, with Delhi (for obvious reasons) as one of the strongest centres of the constitutive becoming of this transformative shift. The masses have spoken and taken to the streets; clearly, Indian democracy is, to say the least, witnessing something worth noting. The more-than-a-decade-long crisis of a far-right regime is (again) disrupted by the demands of accountability and action. As promising as it seems, we will have to wait to foresee the concrete outcome of these staged protests it would be too early to affirm their consequences. Indian history has cautioned us enough against romanticising 'the revolution'.

The Cockroach Janata Party's website describes the ‘Phase One’, named BharatX, of the ‘movement’ it is building as "about creating awareness, identity, and unity among citizens who believe India deserves a stronger future." It is this vocabulary ‘creating…identity’ and ‘unity’ that arrests our attention and takes us, briefly, into the past. Contrary (probably) to what Gen Z might think, this lexicon has been movement-tinted and floating in the air at least since the Indian independence movement. For a long time, the conversations of a unified nation thrived when there was, in fact, a “nationalism without a nation." Mention of such a unifying cause was expressed in Sri Aurobindo's words when he talked about a ‘common pressure’, as a sentimentality of common resistance; it was, however, against the colonial forces; the oppressors were people from outside. The elite upper-caste nationalists then projected a dichotomy against it: a unified nation where the “conflicting interests and differential perceptions” of different groups were flattened into homogeneity, as also pointed out by scholars like Dr. Ambedkar, G. Aloysius, Divya Dwivedi, and Shaj Mohan. The vocabulary of nationalist ‘identity-building’ and collective 'unity,' in that moment, did the work of erasure.

It is also worth observing that the leadership of the nationalist movement was, then, by and large, drawn from the upper-caste elites. In our case, Abhijeet Dipke is not a figure from that ‘traditional’ leadership of an elite caste position. Interestingly, when he disclosed his caste-location on the internet, it became a point of considerable public conversation following the casteist remarks that were flung at him. Some analyses of the CJP have taken this quite critically, citing his caste location as an important lens for reading the movement's formation as well as people’s responses to it. These are ongoing conversations. However, the purpose of this article is not to adjudicate those debates. Our purpose here is specific: to understand what drew the participation of different groups of people to this movement, how the anger, hope, and wait for a movement may be read here, and to ask what kind of political subjectivity is being formed (produced) and expressed.

Times have changed, as have the aspirational structures with which caste, class, and gender intersect in movement-building. The modalities of public anger have changed. To flatten the present onto the past would be to repeat the very mistake we are critiquing. Hence, we depart consciously and yet, the words return, so we must note them, even as we move forward differently. Perhaps, at the end of this caution (that we don’t intend to do away with completely), intertwined with the hopeful waiting of the people, lies something that puts one’s analysis in continuity with the nature of Indian democracy.

On June 06, 2026, hundreds of young people gathered at Jantar Mantar amid the scorching heat of Delhi as the Cockroach Janta Party (hereafter CJP), led by Abhijeet Dipke, moved from social media to its first street pradarshan in the aftermath of the NEET paper leak incident. Since mid-May, the CJP had accumulated and appealed to more than 22 million social media followers via Instagram.

Its supporters demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the recurring examination fiasco, from leaks to marking errors, which has affected millions of young Gen-Z students.

The grievance channelled through anger was concrete and had a material-phenomenological grounding: a prominent medical entrance examination taken by more than 2.3 million aspirants had been dismissed and then conducted again after a paper leak. But there is more to read here; the social ground was wider than this. Anger, frustrations, and shared fraught contentions were a part of the larger chaos that was being suppressed and passively stemming from unemployment, lack of infrastructure, wilful lack of standards and regimes, executive unaccountability, and the bleak lingering question of the future to come, many young qualified educated people remain trapped in insecure work that bears little relation to their capabilities and potentials. Youth unemployment stood at nearly 10%, rising to 13.6% in urban India, but even these numbers cannot measure the years, family resources, and expectations organised around the promise that education would eventually secure a life.

These conditions did not suddenly appear with the CJP. The movement neither manufactured this anger nor exhausted it; it gave scattered injuries simultaneity, a common enunciation, and somewhere to arrive, allowing what had been privately endured as disappointment, inadequacy, or failure to apprehend itself as a shared political condition. Yet this recognition carries different and, rather, in some sense, unequal institutional and affective histories.

Delia Baldassarri, among other cultural theorists, argues that individuals do not arrive at collective protest through solitary calculation; rather, it is the relational networks, the concrete contexts of interaction among individuals, that produce both the cognitive and the affective schemas connecting any individual to a collective endeavour. It is precisely these schemas that interest us in the ongoing CJP protest. What interests us in reading these schemas and opening up this conversation is the recent anti-reservation mobilisation and debate that has sparked once again through a recent NDTV debate, where Harsh Dubey, a NEET aspirant, posed his sceptical attitude on the fairness of the exam compromised by reservations in examinations and admissions. The wagon was in time joined by Bollywood figures like Shilpa Shetty and even an Instagram page named ‘Reservation Hatao Andolan’, which has 140k followers (to date).

Two clips circulating from the protest site make the point vividly because they carry two schemas that must be read alongside one another.

A. In the first reel, a woman invokes the anti-Mandal Commission agitation in a conversation with Abhijit Dipke at the protest site as proof that protest ‘brings change.' The ‘Anti-Mandal Mania' became the site that uncovered and united “fundamentalist and secular, Marxist and Gandhian, urban and rural” (see ‘This Anti-Mandal Mania’ by K. Balagopal), and the forward-caste Hindus reinvented their solidarity through the revolution to sustain the merit myth and maintain the monopoly over the traditional ways and sites of knowledge production. The schema at work here is one in which the memory of defending the savarna monopoly over the institution is folded, without apparent friction, into the vocabulary of democratic protest.

Although the CJP is an important moment in reading India's social movements as whenever the leadership is located in Dalit or, for that matter, even the OBC/Shudra communities, it comes to be recognised (perceived and narrowed) down as caste-coded leadership which is/becomes incapable of attaining the kind of transcendence that savarna leadership has historically been granted it is also to be observed that such transcendence asks the leadership to accommodate 'Mandal Mania’ and the merit myth as reasonable (at least, this is what we learn from the aforementioned conversation from the protest site).

Precisely, recognition here has a “violent doubleness”; it may promise political intelligibility, protection, and commensuration while reproducing, structurally and psycho-affectively, the hierarchy through which subjects and their claims become unequally legible (Hota, 2024, pp. 5, 12; see also Coulthard, 2014). Without equating distinct social worlds, we therefore ask and contend: through whose disavowal does a collective become coherent? If the movement’s recognition as a universal Gen-Z public requires the merit myth to remain reasonable, the reserved-category student risks becoming the allegedly excessive or undeserving figure against whom the injured and deserving aspirant is rendered intelligible. The larger and more intimate question that remains for all of us from here onwards is this: what does it mean to enter a collective as an injured aspirant when the very language through which that collective becomes recognisable simultaneously recasts one’s constitutional protections as the source of another aspirant’s injury?

B. The second video makes the lived and affective consequences of this violent doubleness materially visible: Dalit Bahujan working-class participants are present within the same collective whose universal vocabulary may simultaneously place their histories and constitutional protections under suspicion. This presence is not incidental, because in India the working class is itself overwhelmingly constituted by Dalit Bahujan communities; caste has operated, in Ambedkar's phrase, not as a division of labour but as a division of labourers, and nearly four-fifths of Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC workers remain concentrated in informal, manual, and unprotected employment. This is the population that holds up the civil societies of the urban intelligentsia that may come together to write essays on the importance of ‘merit’. For these participants, the schema connecting them to the protest is routed through networks of labour, caste, and survival rather than through the memory of institutional privilege. What the CJP protest is thus staging is not a single collective actor but the co-presence of divergent schemas, generated in different relational worlds, momentarily assembled under one banner.

The system now appearing broken before a mass public had long been lived through exclusion, suspicion, criminalisation, and abandonment by marginalised and minority communities. The crisis may be shared, but its histories are not equivalent. That unequal recognition is where protected consciousness begins.

As writers and researchers, we write this piece as an open invitation extended towards those like us, who intend to break off not only from the ‘ceremonial mnemonics practised as knowledge in the subcontinent’ but also from the common sense associated with understanding the world around oneself in general and the plane of education in specific, which is smeared, shaped, and maintained throughout the hegemonic constructions of caste, class, and gender. Our lived-livid casted realities, emerging from Dalit Bahujan positionalities that carry their own fraught contentions with the class politics of the left, right, and centre alike, hinder us from receiving the assembled public as a socially undifferentiated mass. Our refusal and contention begin when this affective injury is converted (rather typecasted) into a civil society-middle-class project to save the same order that had already excluded marginalised-minoritised-criminalised poor children, dispossessed landless labourers, working-class families, and generations whose futures never acquired public value. We cannot approach this movement-pradarshan that demands accountability and reparations as affectless observers. The anger, desperation, and restlessness searching for truth and hope (much like everyone who is joining these pradarshans across the country) are evidence in themselves, alerting us to what has been asked to accept (imposed) as ordinary. Held reflexively, these feelings expose our own located investments while directing attention towards the unequal distribution of injury, risk, recognisability, and hope. We recognise the labour that is violated when an examination is leaked: the finances incurred cannot be recovered by the aspirant or her family, and the years lost cannot begin again. (While returning from the protest site on July 18th, the Uber auto-driver asked Amritvijayraj whether they supported the protest. Amritvijayraj intentionally withheld a clear answer and instead invited a conversation. The driver, a native of Uttar Pradesh and a migrant worker who has lived in New Delhi for the past ten years, returned consistently to one question in his analysis: "Who would pay back the large amount of fees collected, and the lives lost?" He was speaking of accountability from a place of lived-livid experience an idiom that may never resolve into the polished, liberal language game maintained by the group discussed in Section A, and yet one that brings itself just as fully to the collective solidarity).

Politics and emotion are deeply interlinked in an affective sense. Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (2012) have argued that emotions are requisite to politics: they motivate action and become the very site of its generation. Similarly, across different contexts, emotions are linked both to value and to the nature of the identity-experience that motivates participation; in both registers, emotion remains central to the purpose and the process of organising. As stated in our premise, we still ought to know how this movement unfolds further. However, our aim is to make space or at least to initiate the conversation that would make space for reading how identity-experience motivates and participates, and what is at stake for the different schemas (the two, or possibly more) we have pointed out, which may well prove co-constitutive or intersectional in ways that exceed our present analysis.

Our interest lies specifically in creating room for an analysis of the sentimentality, the emotionality, of the carceral communities the Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, and Muslim participants leading the CJP protest in action. This is vital for us because these are precisely the people who were never afforded any cushioning against the consequences that routinely follow such protests the violence, the cases, and the economic ruin and who have always lacked it; and yet their participation (built on the ground of hope that risks their own safety whether the CJP was prepared for its responsibilities towards the police violence which was very probable given the history of protests and police brutality in India must be studied further) is instrumental if there is to be any hope intertwined with caution about Indian democracy becoming what it must (ought to) be.

About the Authors

Aishwarya AVRaj (Delhi) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at IIT Delhi and an independent media practitioner. Her public facing work bridges critical philosophy with contemporary discourse on the intersections of the persisting inequalities in the subcontinent.

Harshul Singh (Delhi) is an early-career researcher and graduate of SOAS University of London. His research engages with decolonial praxis, critical caste studies, and ethnographic inquiry, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is passionate about cultivating inclusive academic dialogue and encouraging epistemic and ethical reflexivity in research practices