To the Young People at Jantar Mantar: Thank You for the Gift of Your Courage. I Intend to Keep It

For the last twelve years, I have written about everything — A.R. Rahman and Wimbledon, movies, mangoes, and Messi, the absurdities of suburban American life, the dangers of authoritarianism in American politics, and the Indian movies I have loved — except the one thing.

This past week, a generation of Indian students marched on Parliament and were beaten with lathis for it. Somewhere in the middle of watching those videos late at night in Michigan — the tear gas at Windsor Place, the teenagers shielding their heads, a young woman holding up the Constitution like a talisman — I realized they had done something for me that I had been unable to do for myself. They gave me my voice back.

2014

When Narendra Modi was first elected, I was less surprised by the result than by my own circle. Many friends I had known since my school and college days, thoughtful and measured people, fell for the charisma with an enthusiasm that startled me. Some of it was understandable: the anger against corruption was real, and so was the anger against a Congress that functioned as a family firm with a country attached. Those were legitimate grievances. But they believed Modi should be that change — and the man Modi replaced was Manmohan Singh, an economist of genuine accomplishment whose personal integrity even his fiercest critics never seriously questioned. The fury never matched the man. It was borrowed fury, and it took me only a few months of WhatsApp forwards to understand what the anti-corruption anger actually was for many of its loudest voices: a cloak. The Islamophobia had always been there. Modi simply made it wearable in public.

What followed was twelve years of the most sustained propaganda project in independent India’s history, run through WhatsApp University — the only university in the country whose papers never leak, because there is nothing in them worth protecting. Its twin campuses — WhatsApp and Facebook — graduated two full generations: the parents on the forwards, the grandparents on the feeds. Its one enrollment failure: Gen Z, who live on Instagram. The curriculum offered a single degree — the divinity of one man, evidenced always by imagery, never outcomes: the staged cave meditation, the peacocks in slow motion, the foreign medals collected like stickers while his government told citizens back home that not even a passport proves they belong. And the tithe this god collected flowed to two Gujarati conglomerates and a priesthood of televised godmen. Whatever the Constitution says, the Hindu Rashtra has been functionally established.

Through all of it, I stayed quiet — not in my heart, but on the very platforms where I write about everything else, because more than ninety percent of my circle had crossed over, and I told myself I was preserving friendships. I am not proud of this. I am simply done with it.

The Cockroaches

Every movement needs an origin story, and this one’s is almost too perfect. The Chief Justice of India likened unemployed young Indians to parasites and cockroaches. A student named Abhijeet Dipke, sitting in Boston, posted a question on Instagram: What if all the cockroaches come together?

Millions answered. The Cockroach Janata Party — satire weaponized into a movement — gathered over twenty million followers in weeks. Its demand was modest: the resignation of an education minister presiding over a ministry so rotten that exam papers leak the way monsoon roofs do — around 152 leaks since 2014, by the opposition’s count. After the latest NEET leak, two million students saw their results scrapped. Twelve died by suicide.

The movement’s dead have a lineage, and its first name was from my Tamil Nadu. In 2017, S. Anitha of Ariyalur, daughter of a daily-wage laborer, scored 1,176 out of 1,200 in her state board exams — marks that would have made her a doctor under Tamil Nadu’s admission system. Her mother had died of an illness when Anitha was seven; that death was why she wanted to study medicine. Then NEET was made mandatory, and a seventeen-year-old who had mastered the state syllabus was told her mastery no longer counted. She fought — she became a petitioner before the Supreme Court, arguing that a single national exam laid over radically unequal schooling measures access, not merit. The Court declined relief. Days later, on September 1, 2017, Anitha died by suicide.

Her brother, S. Manirathnam, is at Jantar Mantar today with the CJP. “NEET has destroyed my family,” he says. I will say the hard thing plainly: the country ignored Anitha because her suffering was in Tamil, and treated NEET anguish as a regional grievance until the leaks began devouring futures in the north too. Tamil Nadu was not being parochial. It was being early.

And think about what this spark means. Not religion, not caste — employment, dignity, the expectation that an exam should be an exam. Hindutva cannot feed the stomach with flags, and when nearly 40 percent of graduates under 25 are unemployed, the limits of majoritarian distraction get found.

The State’s Answer

On July 20, the day Parliament opened, an estimated twenty thousand marched — one of India’s largest anti-government gatherings in years, with Sonam Wangchuk on hunger strike alongside them until police carried him into detention. The state’s answer: lathi charges that broke children’s heads, tear gas, pellet-like injuries the police deny causing, plainclothes men with clubs, young women in Delhi reporting they were groped by policemen, detained students in Mumbai threatened with fabricated drug charges, trucks of stones pre-positioned for a riot that could be blamed on the unarmed. And still they marched — and when the police withdrew that night, the protesters gave them a standing ovation.

For the past 12 years, I stayed quiet — not in my heart, but on the very platforms where I write about everything else, because more than ninety percent of my circle had crossed over, and I told myself I was preserving friendships. I am not proud of this. I am simply done with it.

The internet was cut around the protest site, by an order the government never officially published. But this crowd was raised online and came prepared: as phones died, they switched to Bluetooth mesh apps like Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat, where messages hop phone to phone through the crowd itself. The state cut the internet; the students made the crowd the network. The regime’s response came at 11:16 on Wednesday night, July 22 — an order to GitHub to delete Bitchat’s source code within three hours. Read its justification and no unlawful act is alleged at all; the crime, in the government’s own words, is that the app “impedes lawful interception.” Translated: the crime is that we cannot listen. Students using Bluetooth to find friends in a tear-gassed crowd are filed, by official taxonomy, alongside “terrorist organizations.”

And that is the playbook, which my American readers will recognize in English. The students will be called terrorists; a Pakistan angle will be produced; the opposition will be accused of “politicizing”; the anchors will amplify nightly; and the algorithm will finish the job — watch one reel that accepts the premise and the recommendation engine handles your radicalization from there. The uncle in your WhatsApp group is not lying to you; he is reporting accurately from his feed. We watched this script run on the anti-CAA students in 2020. We watched it in America, where the January 6 mob became “tourists” while unarmed protesters became terrorists. Same playbook, different flag. When the terror-funding graphic arrives in your family group this week — and it will — remember that you read its script here first.

The Fear

For weeks the Prime Minister said nothing — a man who has not held a press conference in twelve years. Then came the address, and the takeaway is not what he said but how: not live on the news channels he perfected into an amplifier, but a vertical video, formatted for Reels, aimed at the algorithm rather than the republic. The man who commandeered every screen at 8 p.m. to demonetize our currency — reduced to making content for the one generation WhatsApp University never enrolled, in their aspect ratio. The same week his government deleted the CJP’s account, it auditioned for the CJP’s platform. And the substance? Fast-track courts for leak cases — as though the disease were judicial backlog and not a ministry rotting from the head. No apology. No resignation. But everyone I know noticed, whatever their politics: the swagger was gone. Mark this ratio: the farmers’ protests took months to extract Modi’s last major retreat. The cockroaches got their first concessions in a week.

Chickens and Celebrities

Preity Zinta, so effortlessly voluble online about so much else, broke her silence only with a carefully vetted statement that showed neither where she stood nor what she stood against. Anushka Sharma explained she hadn’t had internet to catch up on the news, and quietly walked away — an outage you are free to believe. I don’t. But the biggest names in India — Sachin Tendulkar, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan — did speak, and managed to say nothing at all. The empty statement is worse than silence: an impersonation of speech, engineered to read as sympathy to the students and loyalty to the regime — grief with no griever, violence with no agent. And with Sachin we have proof the emptiness is a choice: in 2021, handed talking points by the external affairs ministry after Rihanna’s farmers-protest tweet, he published his synchronized #IndiaTogether post — fluent, specific, on time. Scripted by the state, he speaks beautifully; facing beaten students, he produces fog. Meanwhile Shabana Azmi, at 75, physically marched with Prakash Raj, and Pooja Bhatt, Sonakshi Sinha, Swara Bhasker and Vir Das found their voices with the same careers to lose. History will remember who stood where in July 2026.

Everything Is Political

Somewhere right now, in a family WhatsApp group very much like mine, someone is typing: let’s not politicize this. I obeyed that sentence for twelve years, in WhatsApp groups filled with Modi bhakts, so I recognize the species of timidity it breeds — I was its specimen. “Don’t politicize it” is not neutrality; it is a vote for whoever holds power, cast while pretending not to vote. Exam papers do not leak by weather. A lathi does not swing itself. Everything must be politicized, because everything already is — exam leaks, women’s safety, crony capitalism, ED raids on critics, jailing dissenters without charges, one state favored over the rest, the names struck off electoral rolls. Stop the both-sidesism: a government and the unarmed students it tear-gasses are not two sides. Stop the whataboutery: the Congress’s sins of 2011 do not anesthetize a child’s broken head in 2026. Demand accountability, by name, from the people whose salaries you pay.

Liberation

This is no longer about the cockroaches; they were the trigger, not the fire. And the anger on the streets is not just about NEET paper leaks — it’s about twelve years of pent-up frustration with a government that has been selling gimmicks instead of jobs. In the four days since the march, the protests have leapt from Delhi to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kolkata — and, more telling, into the smaller cities: Surat, Patna, Lucknow, Chandigarh — crowds holding through overnight rain while the government shut sixteen Delhi metro stations and airlifted twenty companies of paramilitary into the capital. When even Surat, in the Prime Minister’s own Gujarat, is on the streets, the map itself has changed sides. The farmers are marching again, Adivasis are resisting the drowning of their villages, Manipur has boiled for three years, and at Jantar Mantar the students have been joined by parents and children — the separately-suffered humiliations finding a shared vocabulary at last. You can detain a leader. You cannot lathi-charge a mood.

I will not put these students on a pedestal — I remember 2011, when another Jantar Mantar movement against corruption was harvested by the RSS and converted into the mandate of the party that now sits atop everything. Vigilance is mandatory. But the signs are the opposite this time: the media is hostile to the CJP, not its cheerleader; no party waits in the wings; and its Dalit founder said that if his name had been Khalid, he would already be in jail. The cockroaches have my voice back. They do not have my worship.

And a word for those sharing jokes about the protesters this week — calling them losers, from the upper floors of gated communities, between crores: I know what this is for you. An inconvenience — a traffic diversion between the tower and the office. But hear yourselves. You won the exam game back when the papers did not leak; your towers stand on the very meritocracy these kids are begging someone to restore. When you laugh at broken heads from the eleventh floor, you are calling them cockroaches too. You have simply outsourced the word to a judge.

And to the Indian diaspora in America — my own people; I know who reads this magazine, because I am one of you. Many of us left India to escape exactly what these kids are protesting: the rigged scarcity, the exams that decided everything, the jobs that never came. The American passport in the drawer is the trophy of that escape. And yet so many of us now cheer the Hindu Rashtra from here — demanding secularism in Texas and majoritarianism in Uttar Pradesh, enjoying minority protections in one country while applauding their demolition in another. Our children will never sit NEET; we made sure of it. So when a daily-wage laborer’s daughter asks only for the fair exam we once fled, and your first instinct is to berate her as a pawn or a rioter — hear yourselves too. The word cockroach sounds no better in an American accent.

And to the young people at Jantar Mantar, most of whom will never read this: thank you for the gift of your courage. I intend to keep it.

The cockroaches are out and about. At last, so am I.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” — Politics, Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.