Yves here. Readers have sometimes taken issue with tweets and article we have published on India’s “cockroach” movement and the policies of Modi’s BJP. Hopefully this piece will be more on target. It focuses on how the CJP, the Cockroach Janta Party, is successfully building support based on concerns about the diminished state of democracy in India.

By Amrita Basu, Professor of Political Science, and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, Amherst College. Originally published at The Conversation

Five months after its founding , India’s Cockroach Janta Party, known as the CJP, has revealed what youth-led democratic movements can achieve – and how hard they are to sustain.

The movement was formed in May 2026 to protest the government’s cancellation of medical school entrance exams and after India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant likened unemployed youth to cockroaches.…