“When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect,” Kafka writes in The Metamorphosis. Vladimir Nabokov, a novelist and entomologist, argued that Gregor was a beetle. But in the current metamorphic turn in Indian politics, a cockroach will do just as well, especially since Kafka often refers to his protagonist simply as a giant insect.
For 12 years now, the government has, with some help from State apparatuses, reserved for itself the right to define who is a true Indian. It scrutinised your acts and social-media posts, and judged whether you passed the test. An examination of sorts. But in the wake of Jantar Mantar, the examiner is being examined—and found to be failing. This role reversal is the single biggest political contribution the Cockroach Janta Party has made.
There’s a paradox at work here. The CJP insists that it is not a political party but a youth movement, a pressure group. Its refusal to become political may itself explain why it acquired such political force.
A movement that arrives with a party label, an ideology and a familiar political genealogy can be placed inside the existing machinery of political interpretation. Its motives can be explained away before its demands are heard. Shaheen Bagh could be described as communally tinged; the farmers’ movement as opposition-managed. A student organisation can be dismissed as an agent of some ideological sect and branded anti-national.
The cockroaches arrived without this burden. Their grievances were apolitical: examination paper leaks, unemployment and accountability. They began as a joke that soon no one laughed at.
A movement outside conventional party politics—like the Sorbonne students’ revolt—can sometimes travel farther than an organised political campaign. Shaheen Bagh and the farmers’ movement could not achieve what the Jantar Mantar rebellion did because they appeared overtly political.
The CJP moment in Delhi was similar to the Sorbonne movement, which began with students challenging university authority and police repression. But it had no political structure. Later, it joined hands with labour unions, whose demands were met by the de Gaulle government. The apolitical movement ultimately dissipated, as might the CJP.
The CJP has changed the semantic jurisdiction of the term ‘anti-national’—a word around which real power was transacted and free speech suppressed. The CJP managed this because it presented itself as a youth movement rather than a political formation. It put the body back on the line, and the government had to respond because the challenge came from outside the familiar structure of political horse-trading, and because scores of NEET candidates had already committed suicide.
In the preceding years, young people who participated in protest movements were beaten, removed or sent to jail. But they could also be easily interpreted as politically affiliated. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke wisely understood that ideology could frighten away career-minded students and their poor parents.
But, perhaps unwittingly, it facilitated the entry of Neha Bora, a classical political personality and leader of All India Students' Association, which is associated with the CPI(ML) Liberation, set up after a revolutionary Marxist tradition. In these wannabe times, the word ‘revolution’ itself sounds almost anachronistic. That’s possibly why AISA is not a major all-India political party; it has, however, pockets of influence among students, partly because of self-sacrificing leaders such as Neha Bora and Chandrashekhar ‘Chandu’ Prasad.
An aside. A couple of years ago, I nearly signed a contract to write a film script about Chandu, who was murdered in Siwan on March 31, 1997. The film was eventually put on hold, primarily because Bollywood is a business and cannot afford to antagonise the establishment. Shows you where we are at.
Neha Bora belongs to that tradition of organised politics. After Jantar Mantar, she was astute enough to use the agitation to promote AISA in Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. In the process, she turned the tables on both the CJP and the BJP.
The CJP is not a registered political party. It does not contest elections and possesses no conventional political machinery. Yet it has achieved something unmistakably political: it has challenged the monopoly over who gets to define patriotism. It has brought accountability back and infused new political energy into the opposition. Yet this apolitical character may eventually undo the CJP.
The Prime Minister’s party inhabits a bubble in which great things are always happening, where Ram coexists comfortably with rockets and robots. The common people live in another India: in wasted villages and broken cities. Squalor is a condition of the country. The CJP underlined the unreality.
CJP spokesperson Saurav Das has said that the organisation will function as a pressure lobby for youth-related issues such as education and employment. Without a political structure, however, it may end up imitating the Jantar Mantar model of protest, to which the establishment will soon become wise. And without electoral representation—and with laws such as the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act hanging like a sword over civil-rights groups—a pressure lobby may struggle to survive.
In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s father hurls an apple at his son. The wound eventually kills him. Gregor dies thinking kindly of the family to whom he has brought embarrassment. The novel ends with Gregor’s parents and sister—having rid themselves of their shame—going out for a walk. It is life as usual. The insect is gone.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)