Will Brehm 1:10
Susan Ann Samuel, welcome to FreshEd.

Susan Ann Samuel 1:17
Thanks Will for inviting me to the podcast.

Will Brehm 1:20
So let’s start with the protests that have sort of rocked India. In late July, something like tens of thousands of people were marching on India’s parliament in New Delhi. For listeners who probably might not have read too much about it or don’t know too much about it, what were people actually demanding and wanting from these protests?

Susan Ann Samuel 1:41
Before I begin to answer that question, let me give an overlying understanding of what is happening. So the headline image people may have seen was the late July tens of thousands of people at the parliament, near the parliament, marching in New Delhi and being met with so much of latis, we say, like sticks, batons, tear gas, alleged use of pellet guns. And all these happened during the protest, even though the march was very peaceful. But that was the crescendo of something that had been building up for years, I would say. Something that had to literally awaken a spirit of democracy, also to the extent of how and what it means for an educational reform. So what happened over those few weeks was that there were three demands that were set forward. First, that the young people, when they gathered together, the main thing that they demanded was the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. The second, the compensation of the families of the students who died. And I’ll come back to that later, because that was the emotional heart of the whole protest. The third was that all the charges against the protesters be dropped, together with an apology for the police crackdown or the excess. Now, on the scale, the big march to the parliament on July 20th, that’s when it happened, the scale of it was like 50,000 people. And across the whole episode, we’re talking of tens of thousands out on the streets. With something like, when the protest movement actually started, and that too, it started with six words: how can all cockroaches come together? The sheer scale of it was like, in a few days, the Instagram hit 22 million followers. And the online platform had so much attraction that when it came to that physical presence of being on the ground and pushing for reforms, this was actually a reawakening of democracy, I would say. And it’s so timely, because it had to be done. And there have been reciprocal effects, positive effects for the same too. So that vehicle of democracy has been moving forward.

Will Brehm 4:08
So before we get into whether the demands were met, and more around what cockroaches mean and how that term came about and became sort of a rallying cry in many ways, you mentioned something around that this has been building for years in education, and that something had to happen. Can you give us a quick sort of prehistory of what was building for years? What was the sort of the pressure, the tension that was building up in the system, in the education system, that in some ways this protest, this movement, this political party that has come out of it, results from that pressure from that five-year buildup, as you’ve been saying?

Susan Ann Samuel 4:50
Yes, well, I have to clarify one thing on this — this has not become a political party per se yet. So it’s a political satire movement, where the young people came together for demanding something, right? So as a young person myself, anyone who is age 35 and below, that’s the heart of India, if you can see. And what has been happening for years was also kind of like back home, we used to say we were put in a pressure cooker, in the sense like we get into this whole gist of like, we need to write the exams, we need to climb the ladder, we need to achieve something. Maybe that’s the only way out towards unemployment, also a way out from the miseries of whatever common people face, at the pretext of inflation, or the pretext of geopolitical instabilities that affect India, and many sorts of things. And the only way out is through education, and that too, by cracking exams. Now that’s where it all happens. Now, I need to clarify also, in the sense like, the protest movement, though it was for educational reforms, it’s kind of like it didn’t start like that. The very word didn’t start because of that. So how it started was that the word cockroaches didn’t originate with the protesters. On May 15th, the Chief Justice of India, while hearing a case in the Supreme Court, compared certain individuals with fraudulent degrees to cockroaches. Now, the Chief Justice’s comment sparked widespread backlash. Young people were like, we are the lazy and unemployed, we can professionally rant for hours. And that kind of satirical, sarcastic inflow of thoughts was what actually made young people channel their energy for something more than a protest. It was more like demanding what was rightfully theirs. And the whole CJP party or the movement became kind of like that channeling ground where that anger was actually built around in humour. And so the very next day, on the 16th of May, the six words were posed by the 30-year-old student called Abhijit Deepke, who was studying at Boston University. So his response was, what if all the cockroaches come together? And he posted it on Twitter. And that single line does something very clear. It takes an insult meant to isolate and diminish people, and it kind of reframes it as a question about collective power. So what it built was that the slur was reclaimed as a slogan. Instead of denying it — you’re cockroaches — it says like, fine, what happens when all the cockroaches organize and come for the country? So again, I must say that the Chief Justice of India later clarified that his intention was to address something entirely different, like the fraudulent degrees of people whom he was addressing during an oral hearing, and that the young people didn’t understand him. And this was kind of like wholly based on a misunderstanding. Yet, what happened happened. And the result of it was this huge response, or the energy in which young people were like, this is our country too, and we have a say in it. And I love how even the government aligns around it in time to make it happen. So India’s vehicle of democracy was more or less like saved and made visible that it’s still active and ticking.

Will Brehm 8:45
It’s so fascinating that this notion of cockroaches was being used in terms of fraudulent degrees. But it seems like the way you’re explaining it, fraudulent degrees is another way of saying the promise of education wasn’t being met. And that seems to have resonated so widely among youth. But it also seems, the protest movement, the pictures that you see, it seems to be an intergenerational movement as well.

Susan Ann Samuel 9:14
That is very true. I would say the intergenerationality in this was the main factor. And that was different or unique to India, because we term it like a Gen Z movement. But if we do so, it actually misses the point when it’s kind of like elsewhere around the global movement where people call it the Gen Z movement. It’s kind of like siloing an age group into some sort of a behaviour. This was like the very reason of the grievance of the paper leaks. So chronologically, this was what happened. So on May, this terminology during an oral hearing comes in. And the next day, this was posted online: what if all the cockroaches come together? And then there was like an overwhelming response, but nobody knows how to channel what. And when things were rising, the founder of CJP, Abhijit Deepke, travels from Boston to India. So the first thing that he proposes was a remedy to the paper leaks that happened for a medical entrance exam.

Will Brehm 10:29
Can you explain that? What do you mean by leaks of an examination? Give us some context there.

Susan Ann Samuel 10:34
What actually happened was, and this is the core emotional thing in the whole protest, because the demand was set to remedy paper leaks for a medical entrance exam. Now, on 12 May, the government cancelled India’s medical entrance exam, an exam that had been sat by 2.28 million students, if you can understand that figure. This was actually conducted by the National Testing Agency. And they kind of like exposed how a paper very similar to the one which the students had sat to write had already been circulating online. So the whole exam had to be scrapped. Now, for context, for a lot of these students and their families, that single exam is kind of like years of preparation. And that’s what I meant when I said it was kind of like the pressure cooker, like when rice is being boiled in a pressure cooker for fast cooking. That’s the image of how students were facing throughout enormous financial sacrifice, because it’s kind of like the parents invest everything that they can ever earn for a child’s education. And it’s kind of like a gateway to a future not just for the child, but for the family. So the pressure for a child growing up is immense — they have to sit for an exam. And here for a medical exam, it’s even more because it’s tough in the competition. Like if 2.28 million students are writing each year, you can imagine, and there are people repeating also twice, thrice. So it adds up. Personally, growing up, my own elder brother and friends have sat on these exams. So I know how much it can be depressing and mentally agonizing. So the cancelling of the examination would then mean that none of the students who sat the exam would get into medical school that year. It meant that another exam would then be conducted. It’s like, say for instance, a student performs well on these exams and the child gets to know that the paper is scrapped. The pressure on that child to write again just becomes enormous, that some children might give in to it. Like what happened — and this is the tragic fact — 21 students were reported to have taken their lives the next day in India. And this was the reason why there were reports about the mental agony around students in the educational structure because of the pressure to get into employment as well as to get into the best colleges and universities available in India. Like not everyone can go abroad, not everyone can actually stay where they are staying if the seats are less. It’s kind of like thousands competing for like one or two seats. So that’s the scramble.

Will Brehm 13:45
I mean, it’s quite amazing to just get the chronology. So May 12th, the examination is cancelled. You then learn of 21 students who died by suicide because of the anxiety, the pressure. So many more people were probably let down, frustrated with the system, sort of thinking that you spent your life trying to work in a meritocratic education system and then having that all kind of crumble in front of your eyes. And then to hear a judge, a Chief Justice, saying something about cockroaches and fraudulent degrees, you can see how that would be like this spark that would galvanize so many people around a common frustration. And it just boiled over, to keep using that pressure cooker terminology and metaphor.

Susan Ann Samuel 14:37
That’s right. It was kind of like the pressure points were always there. It’s just that Abhijit Deepke channeled it, nothing more, that the CJP channeled it very strategically for something good. And the state recognized it. So the order came first, eventually.

Will Brehm 14:57
This is the tricky part, isn’t it? When these protests were first starting, the response by the government, by the state was pretty repressive, pretty brutal. And those are the scenes that were circulated around the world.

Susan Ann Samuel 15:15
I would like to clarify a little more on that, because we need to nuance it further. So protests usually happen in Delhi. It’s not new. Every time, like when there are problems around reservations, when there are problems around farmers’ rights, or there are other CSOs running together, it all happens in Delhi, because that’s the capital. So when CJP did the protest, it never anticipated that it would come to such a scale. And when it did, when things got a little out of hand, was when the climate activist and engineer Sonam Wangjut started the hunger strike. A big name starting a hunger strike. Now that’s the most revealing part of the whole episode. So he was forcibly removed from the protest site to a hospital on the 20th day of his fast. And that angered the young people. That actually brought them together to the chalo sansa, like walk to the parliament, where the young people wrote down messages, and the entire country responded. And 50,000 people just came to Jantar Mantar. So the image that came with it was like a huge influx of people in Delhi, and the state had to control it. But the way it controlled it was actually what got out of hand.

Will Brehm 16:45
So you visited the protest sites on July 28. What was it like when you visited?

Susan Ann Samuel 16:50
So I was having a conference in Delhi. And my main motive was actually to speak at the conference on climate change, which is what I actually research and work around. It so happened that I was there the day after everything was called off. And there was an eerie silence around the place, because the police were still there. And they were monitoring anyone coming in or going out. So when I walked through the streets, everything seemed so normal. People were out, it was oddly quiet, like in a good way perhaps. The police and the riot control vans were still parked there. So the memory of what had happened like a day or a couple of days ago was very present. But life just came back. Like street vendors and small businesses were open again, people were out there drinking tea in small earthen cups. And I’m so fascinated by it. It’s called the kullad. So what they do is it’s an earthen cup — it’s not like a paper cup, it’s like a small earthen cup in which they drink tea and they smash it later on. And I joined them and just listened in. I don’t know Hindi because I’m from the south. So I couldn’t fully grasp what they were saying. But it’s like nothing ever happened, to be honest.

Will Brehm 18:18
Why do you think that is?

Susan Ann Samuel 18:18
I’m not sure, to be honest. There were competing narratives about what actually happened in those few short weeks. Like the education minister’s resignation a few days earlier seemed to have satisfied a lot of people. There was a sense of like, the demands are now met, of accountability delivered. But others were more skeptical or were still processing the violence or weren’t sure whether anything fundamental had really changed or if at all it needs to be changed. So there were a lot of different strands of feeling. That’s what I felt like when I was talking to a security guard actually, who was guarding a complex. I kind of like, because I don’t know Hindi, I just asked him what he thought about the protest. And he was like, oh, children. That’s it.

Will Brehm 19:12
When the education minister resigned, how did he explain it? What was the rhetoric around the resignation? Was it actually from the protest movement? Was that acknowledged by the minister of education during the resignation?

Susan Ann Samuel 19:25
Well, for that, I’m not fully sure, to be honest. So the resignation was made, the demands were met. So nobody probed further. And nobody provoked further either. And so the other two demands were met.

Will Brehm 19:40
So we started the conversation, you outlined the three demands: one being the resignation of the education minister, which happened. The second one was the compensation for the families of the students who died by suicide. And then the third one was around dropping all the charges of the protesters who were picked up by the police, let’s say. Did the other two demands get met?

Susan Ann Samuel 20:02
Yeah, so the machinery of accountability revived itself in a really promising way, because the fact that the education minister resigned itself was something huge. It meant that the students’ voices were heard, and that further actions will be met. And now what happened after that was also something noteworthy, because Prime Minister Narendra Modi put out video messages to young people, set up an expert task force, and announced faster courts. So on July 29th, the parliament passed a bill bringing in stricter penalties for leaking exam papers, which is now the Public Examinations Prevention of Unfair Means Amendment Act. It’s a long fancy word, but that is now a law. And on the 3rd of August, the Supreme Court said the state governments could withdraw complaints, the first information reports, the FIRs, against protesters, except in the most serious cases, and that it would frame a new protocol around the use of pellet guns, to monitor the police itself, which was really good. On 18th of August, the Supreme Court again consulted — the Chief Justice Suryakant appointed a retired judge to a five-member high-powered inquiry committee, headed by a former Supreme Court Judge Justice R. Subhash Reddy, to look into the allegations of police and paramilitary excess on students. And during the last months, like July is the moment — it was also interesting because the CJP, because it’s the Gen Z kind of young people’s wide movement, a lot of them had their own cameras and selfies. So they themselves recorded so much of the police action, which was so good that they compiled it and the movement gave a platform to upload these. So it was kind of like that check and balance system where the young people had — nobody could deny the police didn’t do this because everyone worked with their cameras.

Will Brehm 22:23
I guess by way of conclusion, what do you think is going to happen to the Cockroach Junta Party, the CJP? I know it started out as more satirical, but clearly millions of people responded. Clearly there is power in a sense behind them and there’s something happening. Do you think this will sort of peter out now that the demands were met? Or do you think this CJP will sort of evolve into something else going forward?

Susan Ann Samuel 22:54
I would like to stress three things here, maybe. The first is how the CJP is, first of all, not just the CJP — the young movement. The very interesting factor of what happened in Jantar Mantar was that it was not just the CJP. There were so many other young people who belonged to different parties coming in together. So usually it’s like politically aligned, but this more was for the reforms and activism aligned. The first thing that I want to stress is how different this was from the other Gen Z movements, like whatever we saw in around a few years, like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, Philippines, Peru. The local triggers varied — like economic mismanagement, the main was the social media ban and the quota system in Bangladesh, like the water and power cuts in Madagascar. And for at least Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar, governments actually fell. Like there was active protest and violence in which parliaments were burned. But for this, it was like, let’s work together out of all this, but in a way that it’s strategically aligned to get results and also to understand the gravity of the tragedy that it evoked. So what had happened was that it flips the power relationship. So when the insult became kind of like a crown, a diadem, it became. And the second, it gave the young people identity. So that was a huge factor. Many of the young people, not just in India, across the globe, there’s so much craving to belong to something, something bigger than themselves. And so when there are channels of opportunity where they can know that their voice is cherished, they just align to it. And so that’s the main part. And the cost of participating in something was real too. So for most of these young people, they’ve seen in movies of like heroes bashing police and getting things done, but what it actually takes to lobby, what does it actually take to speak truth to power? So that was something very concrete. So first, the difference of the cockroach party movement in India from the Gen Z movement. The second, how it toppled the power relationship and made it more like a relationship between the government — let’s have a conversation, let’s get this done by speaking things out. And the way forward — now this is the most beautiful part — so that’s the third thing that I wanted to stress. Like it didn’t start as well as it didn’t end with just a paper leak. So the main target was educational reform as a basic human right — how was it being cherished or understood or progressively realized? And the movement has not slowed down or stopped, but it has decentralized further. So actively now the CJP has an organizational structure, though not registered with an election commission, and hence not targeting a vote bank per se, but its spokespeople are very active in social media and mainstream news, pointing things to what is actually the view of the young people among governance issues. And the legal representative or the people around it are constantly following up with the cases and legal measures needed. The energy of the young people is so visible that now the gaze has become so laser focused on the reforms to the granular level of villages, and that too amongst the marginalized people. So also to say, what is happening right now is that the founder of CJP, Abhijit Deepke, is seen walking through villages, monitoring government schools to investigate and document whether the quality of not just the education, but life among the children in these schools — like when they are at school, are they living, or is it just another tick in the box for how many schools are there, or what is actually being provided there? So the umbrella campaign of this going to the schools is called Fix the Schools. It’s like school thik karo. I think that’s what it means. So the CJP has asked all the supporters across the country — and it doesn’t need to be Abhijit Deepke or any of the founding or the organizing committee — it’s like anyone, any responsible citizen: please go to your nearest government school against a simple four-point checklist. Like, do the children have drinking water? Is there a working toilet? Electricity, is it stable? And do they have usable classrooms? Like, are there broken windows? Because there have been cases where wild animals can actually attack, or there can be snakes, and there can be cleanliness issues and things like that. And most of the rural schools get so unattended that students sometimes have to literally walk through flooded roads and jump through rivers to get to schools. So what are the basic practicalities? And as of just a couple of days ago, I’ve been even reading that the CJP has given a sharper focus on schools for the tribals and Adivasi students. So I’m glad because when Abhijit Deepke came, he came holding a book of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who was the architect of the constitution of India. Ambedkar and the founding fathers of Indian independence were actually looking to see just this — there will be strong governance, there needs to be check and balance of the people. That’s how we run a country. And I think that’s happening now. There’s so much that is hopeful. India is a work in progress. So I wouldn’t say just because of the protest, everything is good and better. And not that it is not progressing also, because it has been progressing for years. Like the way in which economic stability, the way in which many other things are actually done across India — so that now the vision turns to how do we as citizens reinvigorate state institutions and become part of this whole machinery of democracy in a very responsible way?

Will Brehm 30:16
Well, Susan Ann Samuel, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. And thank you for explaining this cockroach movement party protest and how it reinvigorated the spirit of democracy in India.

Susan Ann Samuel 30:28
Thank you, Will. Thank you so much.

Related Guest Publications/Projects

1. Climate Litigation and Vulnerabilities: Global South Perspectives (Routledge, 2025, open access)
2. Climate Futures Across Disciplines: A Next Generation Approach (Routledge, 2026, open access)
3. Susan Ann Samuel’s writing on Verfassungsblog

Recommended Resources

1. What Is the Youth-Led ‘Cockroach Movement’ Staging Mass Protests in India? (TIME)
2. India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach People’s Party’ started as satire but is serious about change (NPR)
3. NEET exam cancelled over paper leak allegations; CBI probe ordered (Akashvani News)
4. The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026 (PRS Legislative Research)
5. Supreme Court forms committee led by ex-SC judge Subhash Reddy to probe student protest violence (LiveLaw)
6. Strengthening student mental health support systems in India: reflections on the Supreme Court’s landmark guidelines (The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia)
7. Why Gen-Z Is Rising (Journal of Democracy)
8. Gen Z Protests Across Asia Offer a Delicate but Renewed Democratic Order (Carnegie Endowment)
9. Craig Jeffrey on Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Rorotoko)

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com