Guest post by RASHID ALI

The Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar went beyond the traditional orotundity of electoral politics. Some political commentators view this through a biological optic, turning the ‘cockroach’ into a metaphor for resilience due to its ability to survive nuclear radiation. This immediately echoes Salman Rushdie’s famous line: ‘we are radioactive with history and politics.’ Others leaned toward literary history, pointing to the infamous insect in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis.’ Written over a century ago, the novel opens with Gregor Samsa waking up transformed into a giant bug – or Ungeziefer, as Kafka originally wrote in German. Ultimately, the plot tracks Samsa’s desperate struggle against alienation, sudden dehumanisation and systemic social exclusion.

The performative nature of the Cockroach Janta Party protest makes a Kafkaesque comparison tempting. Yet, the movement moved far beyond simple societal embeddedness. I argue that it fits squarely into Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, conceived nearly eighty years ago. As a Russian scholar, Bakhtin routinely clashed with the totalitarian dogma of Soviet socialism. In fact, as India gained independence in 1947, Soviet authorities were busy denying Bakhtin his doctoral thesis. The Soviet state back then was formidable, much like the Indian state today. When his seminal work, Rabelais and His World, finally emerged, it brought with it the concept of the carnival. This is a site where established hierarchies crumble. Discourse is upended. Through humour, satire, songs and the grotesque body, the marginalised reclaim their voice.

The CJP protest at Jantar Mantar internalised this carnival theory. Seemingly appearing as a simple youth protest, it dared the Juggernaut. It jolted a political power deemed invincible just few months back. Bakhtin’s theory had ultimately found its taker at Jantar Mantar with ordinary students thronging the streets right near the corridor of power.

When Bakhtin theorized the carnivalesque, he never thought of 2026 by any stretch of imagination. He, as if, waited for the Cockroaches to come forward and turn his theory into a fecundity.

Preamble to the Protest

The CJP march began in an unconventional way. In the heat of the movement, a satirical poster appeared humorously making the Chief Justice of India as the ‘co-founder’ of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), right alongside activist Abhijit Dipke. This was a direct response to the Chief Justice’s controversial comment comparing the country’s vulnerable youth to cockroaches. Instead of taking it as an insult, Dipke flipped the script. He flipped the metaphor on its head with sharp irony and launched the Cockroach Janta Party on Instagram. What started as an online joke exploded. Within an astonishingly short span, the digital canard took on a life of its own, drawing millions of followers. In fact, multiple reports noted a stunning milestone: the movement’s digital footprint actually eclipsed the social media following of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Traditional street protests used to depend on the physical presence with limited online campaigns to mobilize people. But the CJP movement flipped it entirely. A political community started from a scratch, purely on digital sphere. Within siesta, this virtual anger descended onto the streets of Jantar Mantar, fuelled by the sudden outrage over the examination paper leaks. Before confounded political analysts could even grasp how the movement functioned, the die was cast.

The CJP protest upended everything we knew about modern political organizing. It proved that even an irony can have the power to metamorphose into massive organizing force, turn jokes into real-world defiance overnight. The movement erased the line between simulation and real life. If Bakhtin were alive today, he would have called it a Digital-Carnival – or simply, a ‘Darnival.’

The protest also shattered Václav Havel’s famous line that politics is merely “the art of the possible.” By the time commentators scrambled to explain what was happening, the ‘impossible’ had already outrun their political horizon.

Young Girls Sang the Requiem of Power

The agency of young women was the most striking feature of the CJP protest. Historically, men have dominated public protests in India, leaving women with little room. This imbalance stems directly from patriarchal structures that impede political participation.

But the CJP protest flipped this script on this count too. Young women not only showed up, they also led the entire performance. Their presence changed the energy at Jantar Mantar, giving it an emotional and aesthetic edge rarely seen in traditional movements.

I have been part of countless protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jantar Mantar. It is tempting to make comparisons, and it would be naïve to dismiss those comparisons out of hand. Women were always essential to the Left student movements I joined. Still, their roles were usually boxed into rigid organizational structures. Plus, those protests rarely drew more than a few hundred people.

CJP was different in both magnitude and spirit. We saw an unprecedented wave of young women occupying public space with absolute confidence, spontaneity and flair. They danced without holding back. They shifted seamlessly from popular Bollywood tracks to iconic resistance anthems like Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge. Far from contradictory, this mix blurred the line between celebration and defiance. Dance became dissent. Music became political speech. Joy itself became a weapon.

In a Bakhtinian sense, this was pure carnival. Laughter, rhythm and parody replaced the usual solemnity of political protests. The youthful female body, which is generally restricted by moral policing, turned into a canvas for political expression. Through song, dance and collective action, these young women performed a requiem for power, exposing its fragility through the liberating force of the carnival.

The Right-Wing Narrative Punctured

Before the CJP protest, one of the recurring features of contemporary political communication was the ability of right-wing discourse to reframe diverse social and political issues through the binary of Hindu-Muslim antagonism. Television debates and social media platforms frequently privileged communal polarization over questions of unemployment, inequality or democratic accountability. This communicative strategy often succeeded because it offered a narrative that resonated with sections of the middle class.

The poem of Faiz Ahmed Faiz becomes an ample apostrophe to this. Whenever Hum Dekhenge was sung in the protest movements, television channels would debate whether the poem was inherently ‘Islamic’ because of its invocation of Allah and Anal-Haqq.’ Such debates reduced a complex poetic text to a communal marker. The invocation of Anal-Haqq (I am the Truth/God), historically attributed to Mansur, dissolves the separation between the human and the divine, while also echoing non-dual philosophical traditions such as Adwait popularised by Shankaracharya. Mansur was executed in 922 AD in Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate for uttering Anal Haqq. Haqq in Arabic is among 99 names of Allah. So, it was convenient for the religious authority to accuse him of heresy. It is said that he was imprisoned for 9 years where he was badly tortured. After his death, his body was mutilated and burned. His ashes were reportedly scattered into the Tigris River.

‘Anal Haqq,’ popularized in modern political imagination through Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry, has been a rallying cry across protest movements. Ironically, the current regime uses a political logic straight out of the Abbasid establishment, weaponizing accusations of contravention and irreverence. But the CJP protest completely broke this right-wing narrative strategy.

Hundreds of young women from all walks of life came together, singing ‘Hum Dekhenge’ as a shared anthem of hope. Every attempt to inject the usual Hindu-Muslim binary into the crowd completely fell flat. The carnival-like energy of the gathering was simply too overwhelming, swallowing up any effort to pivot the spotlight toward communal polarization. The CJP protest punctured a dominant narrative that had relied on religious hatred as its main political language for years. It was, as if, these women spoke the language of Bakhtin- ‘In the whole of the world and of the people there is no room for fear. For fear can only enter a part that has been separated from the whole… The whole of the people and of the world is triumphantly gay and fearless.’

The Old Poster Boy Became the New Dissenter

The CJP protest also uncovered traces of disillusionment among sections of the youth who had once blindly followed the Bharatiya Janata Party. An example could be the re-emergence of Gautam Singh, who had become a viral symbol of nationalist buoyancy nearly a decade ago. His famous riposte – ‘America kya kehta tha? Tu kya hai be?’ became a rage and he himself became a symbol of unwavering faith in the political establishment.

At the CJP protest, the same retort returned but with a different meaning. These words remained unchanged, but their political direction was reversed. To Gautam Singh, America still says the same thing- ‘tu kya hai be.’

What was once treated as an affirmation of political confidence was redeployed as satire and pun which exposed the distance between past expectations and present realities. The slogan itself became carnivalesque. The language of power was appropriated, inverted and turned back upon its original object.

This transformation reflected a broader generational shift. Many young people who were lured by the BJP’s promises roughly a decade ago had, by 2026, accumulated enough political experience to evaluate those promises against lived reality. Whether this disillusionment represented a temporary mood or a deeper political realignment, the protest unmistakably gave it public expression.

Divyaraj Amiya, Professor, Tubingen University (also a friend) once remarked that the very people who vote the BJP to power will eventually become the force capable of bringing it down. For Bakhtin, authority becomes most vulnerable not when it is attacked solely by its declared opponents, but when those who once celebrated it begin to laugh at it. The king loses his aura the moment his own subjects convert reverence into ridicule.

The Polyphony of Caste

The emergence of Abhijit Dipke as the main face of the ‘cockroach protest’ marked an important shift in the contemporary politics of caste. Unlike earlier mobilizations in which caste was either appropriated within broader Hindutva narratives or remained confined to other political formations, the protest drew support from students across caste locations. Young participants did not merely express solidarity with a Dalit leader, they provisionally suspended the normative expectations of caste affiliation to articulate a shared democratic claim. In Bakhtinian terms, the movement approximated a polyphony of caste – a dialogic political space in which heterogeneous social voices retained their distinct identities while converging around a common act of dissent.

Disclaimer

I don’t believe that caste or religious differences can be dissipated by such protests but it is equally true that carnival can be an optic to upend anything or everything. Bakhtinian theory will keep revisiting Jantar Mantar and elsewhere in search of such moments.

 Dr. Rashid Ali teaches Media Studies at the Central University of Jammu