After a summer interlude, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) are back for what remains unfinished—an all-out struggle with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the repressive state apparatus standing behind them.

[Originally published on Marxist.com]

Modi has taken no chances and enacted the most draconian and authoritarian measures since Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975. Thousands have been arrested, beaten, harassed, and detained, including the entire central committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

This brutality was enacted to protect Gyanesh Kumar, a member of India’s Election Commission who has been exposed by the Indian Express as Modi’s stooge, who erased millions of Indians (disproportionately Muslims and other minorities) from the electoral roll in order to rig elections in his party’s favor.

Following the exposé, a national protest was called by the CJP for Saturday, October 10, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, the site of their previous victory this summer, when the hated education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, was forced to resign.

But this time, all the main CJP leaders—Abijeet Dipke, Ashtosh Ranka, and Saurav Das—were theatrically arrested from their airplane upon landing in Delhi. They’ve since been released and issued bail conditions requiring they commit to “No breach of peace for one year.”

The anger in society, the pressure to restart the Cockroach protests, and Modi’s preemptive crackdown have pushed the CJP leadership to adopt a defiant tone. They’ve called Modi a coward, vowed not to bow to repression, and called for Cockroaches to “hit the streets again!”

The Cockroaches must remember the most important lesson of the summer: there can be no compromise with these gangsters. If this second act is to succeed, an indefinite struggle must be called until, not only Kumar falls, but Narendra Modi himself, and the “Billionaire Raj” that stands behind him.

For inspiration, the Indian youth need only look to the battles raging in Europe, where students and the youth are linking up with the wider working class, connecting their demands around education and housing to the call for a general strike in France and Spain.

It should be remembered that, when Modi blinked before, it was precisely because other social layers—workers and particularly the farmers—were on the precipice of joining the CJP in their struggle.

The events in Delhi are part of an international process, driven forward by the historic crisis of capitalism, which is provoking the fury of a whole new generation of class fighters. The Cockroaches were a continuation of the Gen Z Revolution that swept Asia in 2025, and anticipated the revolt of radical youth on the European continent in recent weeks.

Now the Indian youth must rejoin the struggle and finish what they started.

Delhi on lockdown

Delhi, a city of over 20 million people, last Saturday experienced one of its biggest ever crackdowns since India’s independence. 40,000 security personnel were brought in, including from sensitive border areas. Two layers of barricades blockaded Jantar Mantar. 57 metro stations were shut down. Trains to Delhi were canceled. The internet was shut down. “Phone journalists” were arrested.

Actors like Imran Khan were arrested in Mumbai and the well-known YouTuber Dhruv Rathee was abducted in the middle of the night. Three Newslaundry reporters were arrested alongside at least 35 other media workers.

Detainees have included figures from nearly all the major opposition parties, including Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamta Banerjee, and even members of the Maharashtrian Hindutva Party Shiv Sena!

Special brutality was meted out against the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its student wing, with CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas receiving a beating from security forces.

Not only prominent figures, but random young people, going about their day, were picked up and bussed away. The BBC reported seeing women beaten. RSS goons are seen battering protesters in front of Delhi Police, who stood by and did nothing.

As of now, CJP leaders Saurav Das and Ashtosh Ranka have been jailed again for unfurling the Indian national flag at Jantar Mantar.

Modi cracking down

This sweeping clampdown on dissent is the closest India has come to dictatorship since the days of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975–77. But far from an illustration of strength, these measures are coming from a position of extreme weakness and paranoia on the part of Modi.

Serious cracks have started opening in Modi’s “invincible” facade. The BJP underperformed in the 2024 general election, shortly after which the Election Commission started their purge of voter rolls, starting in Bihar last year. Then Donald Trump gave Modi a very public dressing down after claiming credit for brokering peace in the brief war between India and Pakistan in 2025.

And now the Iran War has put the economy in a fragile position, cutting off the bulk of India’s oil and natural gas imports from the Gulf. Already this year, the government has carried out massive attacks on workers’ rights and protections. Tens of millions are unemployed. Inflation is eating away at living standards. The Rupee has hit new lows. AI is threatening India’s crucial position as the “back office of the world.” This is all a finished recipe for class struggle.

The Indian ruling class knows that things are not going to get better any time soon. The growing mood of resentment and frustration in society is already starting to burst to the surface, most visibly through the accidental phenomenon of the Cockroaches.

Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah are acting in the only way they know how: centralizing the repressive apparatus of the Indian state, mobilizing their RSS goons, shutting down the capital, mobilizing their allies in the media, spreading misinformation, and whipping up Hindu-Muslim hatred.

Doubtlessly, Modi will become more ruthless as his position becomes more insecure. We can expect intensified repression and attacks on democratic rights in the future, and he could resort to increasingly Bonapartist measures in his desperation to hold onto power. But this will blow up in his face, as we saw in the summer.

The enormous anger of the youth, expressed through the CJP, meant that rather than backing down in the face of severe police repression, they became even more determined. The violence from the state forces also enraged wider layers of society, resulting in an outpouring of sympathy for the Cockroach movement, which threatened to develop in the direction of the revolutionary movements in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in 2022 and 2024, or the Gen Z Revolutions of 2025. This shook the Indian ruling class, and Modi for once very publicly bowed to the CJP’s demands.

Modi was humiliated, and for this he can never forgive the CJP, nor tolerate it as a looming threat. A desire for retribution explains the cruelty and psychological torture meted out against Dipke. He learned at 3:30 a.m. in his prison cell that his grandmother had passed away, and was told to call his father to say that “he was going to jail for a long time.”

Modi is taking every possible measure to stifle the momentum of the Cockroaches. But he knows this situation could rapidly spiral out of hand.

This also explains his recent desperate stunts like a month-long celebration for his birthday last month, and renaming Noida airport after himself over the weekend. He is determined to reassert his power and importance, but his actions are having the opposite effect.

Modi’s biographer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, himself noted that his aura has been lost since the summer and, in “the last two-months-plus, Mr. Modi has not been able to reinvent himself.”

In reality, the explanation for why Modi has remained in power for 12 years, and has appeared so unassailable for so long, lies with India’s feeble and corrupt opposition, led by the bourgeois India National Congress.

Their record of corruption, bureaucracy, and attacking working people paved the road for Modi’s rise to power to begin with. Let’s also not forget that, for all their talk of “defending democracy,” the dictatorial Emergency period of the 1970s occurred under Congress rule, and the dictator was Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother!

The leaders of the trade unions and communist parties have also played a lamentable role. Rather than galvanizing the anger in society into a serious struggle to bring Modi down, they call one-day general strikes to blow off steam and sow illusions in Congress as an alternative to Modi’s “fascism.”

This has all contributed to making Modi appear stronger than he actually is. Little wonder that furious young people are again making use of the CJP as the only proven vehicle of striking blows against him. After all, from their perspective, the Cockroaches achieved more in a few weeks than Congress and the mass organizations of the working class have managed in 12 years.

Fight to the finish

The main obstacle, as ever, is that of leadership. The limitations of the CJP’s leaders were demonstrated in the summer. It was not repression that allowed Modi to restabilize the situation, but the naivety of Dipke and co.

After their partial victory, they made the mistake of calling off protests in “good faith” with Modi: putting their trust in this bourgeois gangster and believing that the words in the constitution of India would save them.

Dipke has openly admitted that he’s an accidental figure, that he’d never even organized a protest before May. The leadership of the CJP are not seasoned revolutionaries, but relatively well-off graduates steeped in liberal ideas. It remains to be seen whether they have the mettle to prosecute this fight.

But as both Marx and Trotsky understood, the whip of the counterrevolution is often required to drive the revolution forward. The CJP has been under pressure from below to restart their protests ever since they were called off. Everywhere they went, young people asked them, when is season two starting?

At the same time, the CJP leaders are under pressure from the bourgeois “democrats” in Congress, who are attempting to co-opt them into their I.N.D.I.A. alliance: a hodgepodge of anti-Modi forces involving everyone from the communist parties to rival Hindutva thugs like Shiv Seva.

The CJP leaders likely believed the question of the Election Commission was “safer” than economic or social questions around housing and poverty, because the liberal Congress and other I.N.D.I.A. alliance parties were already championing it. But the logic of the situation meant things have once again exploded.

Modi was in no mood for a “polite” debate about democracy and the electoral roll. And neither are India’s youth.

While they are disgusted by Modi’s anti-democratic disenfranchisement of Muslims and other oppressed groups, they also see an opportunity to take out another one of Modi’s allies. They want to fight the BJP, and see the CJP as the best weapon for the job.

The strength of the CJP is precisely as a lightning rod for the rage and hatred of India’s youth towards all the political parties: the entire rotten establishment.

If its leaders are sucked into a popular front with the bourgeois liberals to defend “democracy,” the movement will be defanged and destroyed. This is a real threat, with Rahul Gandhi inviting the CJP and all the other discredited parties to his house, to bring them all under his leadership.

Accepting these overtures would amount to the same bankrupt strategy that the Indian so-called left has pursued for years.

Instead, a serious fight to defend basic democratic rights and advance the interests of working people against an increasingly reactionary, vicious BJP must draw all exploited and oppressed social forces into a battle against their common enemy: Modi and the billionaires he represents. The conditions for such a struggle are not only ripe, but rotten ripe.

India is a tinderbox waiting to explode. There were already symptoms. A few weeks ago there were big protests by women against the rape and abuse of girls in Delhi. There were strong mobilizations against the destruction of a historic mosque in Ujjain. There was widespread derision to economic figures saying the Indian economy was booming.

And what is most notable is how many people still came out on Saturday to struggle, despite knowing the risks of arrest and beatings. People are losing their fear of the repressive state apparatus, and that is an important sign of where things are heading. Tens of thousands are ready to fight.

Finally, it must be remembered that after the education minister resigned, he was replaced by someone worse—Prahlad Joshi, an RSS stalwart. If Gyanesh Kumar resigns, who will he be replaced by?

Last time, the protests ended prematurely, and Modi went on an offensive of disinformation, arrests, and made examples of protesters, particularly women. The CJP left Jantar Mantar, now it is a prohibited area. This time Modi has started with repression, which will only intensify if the movement retreats.

There can be no middle ground. Ultimately, for the CJP to claim victory, they must join forces with the powerful Indian working class and farmers who remain, for the time being, bystanders to these events. This would transform the entire situation and put Modi on the ropes.

• No to “Modi’s Emergency”
• Gyanesh Kumar must resign!
• Indefinite struggle until Modi falls!
• No compromise with the BJP!
• Indefinite struggle to bring down the “Billionaire Raj”!