Over-interpreting the youth

COCKROACH Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke revealed a crucial fact about himself to Newslaundry’s Manisha Pande. He said he had seen Shahrukh Khan’s 2002 movie Swades (‘My country’) many times over since he was a child and he finds it inspirational. So, I too switched on YouTube and saw it to the extent one could.

The story is about an Indian engineer at Nasa who misses home and goes on a visit to meet the lady who raised him upon his parents’ death in a car accident. The journey takes him to a village facing chronic power outages and where he also meets Kaveri Amma’s pretty ward Gita who is struggling to run a village school. So, the hero, while living out of a caravan trailer, builds a water reservoir from a tiny stream seeping from a rocky slope to ply a turbine he has assembled. The villagers get their steady power, leaving the hero to canvass support for the underprivileged children to join the struggling school. They do so by defying entrenched caste- and poverty-related odds.

The turbine event comes across as a band-aid for a country that has handed early dreams of affordable and universal healthcare to private buccaneers.

The state-run National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) where corruption is rampant — which triggered Dipke’s Cockroach campaign — produces 137,000 doctors against 20 million applicants. Many who succeed go abroad to follow their dreams.

The phenomenon was seen as brain drain during the early years of India’s independence and there’s a news clip of Nehru on a US visit urging Indian professionals there to return home.

Dipke may have picked up the cue, but many others have returned to India over the years to work for the country’s progress.

The US-born human rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj was jailed for working among Chhattisgarh’s tribespeople to empower them with legal advice and moral support. Bharadwaj, currently out on stiff bail conditions, exchanged her American passport for Indian citizenship. She was arrested along with several young activists in 2020 for the crime of organising the Dalits and tribespeople to challenge the injustices they endured with the state’s connivance.

Rev Stan Swamy was an Indian Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist, the oldest person to be accused of terrorism in India. He died in a Mumbai prison at 83, a year after his arrest.

Dipke’s movement faces inevitable challenges ahead. Ground-breaking political changes are seldom if ever a clean shot.

Dipke may have seen Richard Attenborough’s award-winning movie Gandhi. Did he notice that B.R. Ambedkar or Bhagat Singh didn’t even get a walk-on part in the movie? That Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh featured in the Cockroach protests was reassuring. They had a well-grounded prognosis about what ailed Indian society.

Ambedkar, together with Periyar and M.G. Ranade had forcefully argued that social transformation must precede or accompany political freedom, famously maintaining that political independence without social equality was incomplete or a ‘lie’. Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and Surendra Gadling are among the current crop of youth jailed for holding the torch passed on by an amazing generation of leaders.

Dipke’s movement faces inevitable challenges ahead. Ground-breaking political changes are seldom if ever a clean shot. It’s almost inevitable that there’s a Trotsky lurking to challenge Stalin in a leftist upheaval, or an Ernst Rohm paying dearly for over-interpreting his Fuhrer’s bloodlust. Likewise, leading the French Revolution, Robespierre sought to cleanse the leadership of opportunists. They ganged up to guillotine him instead.

Closer to home, Z.A. Bhutto was barely finished with Ayub Khan’s military rule when he waded into a far more momentous challenge from an estranged kindred spirit, a democrat this time in faraway Dhaka.

Indira Gandhi sought a clean break from corporate-feudal satraps within the Congress and garnered the left’s support against avaricious private bankers and assorted British-era princes. Then she was nudged by communal bigots still lurking in her party into a needless feud with the minority Sikhs, a grievous error that would eventually lay her low.

Rajiv Gandhi sought to lead India into a perfectly viable technology-savvy 21st century. He ended up balancing the party’s advice that thrust him between Hindu and Muslim communalists, one seeking to turn mythology into history, the other bent on stealing small change from a female divorcee.

Two earth-shaking upheavals in the 20th century nicely frame the context and reality of the youth-led Cockroach movement. The movement has already forced Narendra Modi’s education minister’s humiliating exit, rattling the bones of the faux muscular religio-fascist rulers. But what lies in store ahead for the lot when the exigencies of politics serve up crucial state polls next year in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab? Politicians would want to harness their energy to purposes that can neither be ignored nor trifled with.

The two important examples to better understand the Cockroach phenomenon perhaps rest in movements that led to India’s 1947 independence from Britain and Iran’s 1979 freedom from American control of the country.

The landmark events occurred barely 32 years apart. The Indian movement was set into motion in 1885 by professional ornithologist A.O. Hume. The Indian National Congress remained an elitist body until Gandhi turned it into a mass movement in 1920. It brought together a cornucopia of contradictions. Bhagat Singh and Lal Lajpat Rai were opposed to Gandhi’s nonviolence. While one was a votary of scientific socialism, the other was a staunch Hindu revivalist.

The Iranian Revolution was similarly led by competing groups of diverse ideological origins. The spine belonged to the experienced pro-Soviet Tudeh Party. The street craft was shored up by the Maoist Mujahideen-i-Khalq, but the masses were directed by highly politically savvy and well-read clergy. After the overthrow of the Shah, the clergy took charge. They used the CIA’s files to decimate the Tudeh and uproot the MeK. Given these proven propensities, would Dipke’s worldview remain true to the promise of the dreams Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar dreamt for India?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2026