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Abhijeet Dipke certainly changed the future of India, a country of nearly 1.5 billion people. When I read about his family and community background and learnt that he is just 30, I was reminded of Jesus Christ, a great revolutionary who changed the world at the age of 30, having come from a shepherd-carpenter family. What Jesus did was seen as a miracle, and he became a prophet and finally God after Catholicism declared him so.
What did Abhijeet do in India, a country that was being ruled by forces with the most inhuman values in the garb of religion and had virtually established an iron grip on human consciousness with the money, media, and muscle power of the two richest castes? They injected fear into every individual, friend or foe, in order to control all.
The young man led the country with a vision of fearlessness within just two months. If Jesus’ God was an abstract entity taken from the Torah, Abhijeet’s God is Ambedkar, a man who changed the mass consciousness of the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak from fear and lifelessness into a rebellious mass consciousness almost a hundred years earlier by writing the first essay on caste at Columbia University, New York.
Abhijeet has engineered a revolutionary movement among the youth, globally known as Gen Z – the generation born in the new millennium along with new communication systems – in India, who were fear-stricken, by creating the Cockroach Janta Party online from Boston, the hub of education in the world.
By launching the social media-driven CJP, Abhijeet shattered the psychological paralysis gripping India’s Gen Z, unleashing a globalised cultural shockwave that liberated a terrified nation from the iron grip of Hindutva authoritarianism.
Freedom from fear
Not only for me, but for many who were fighting this regime of the RSS/BJP, what Abhijeet did with the team that followed him (like the twelve disciples of Jesus) with absolute discipline and achieved within two months comes like a miracle in the dreams of frightened people. The democratic masses and working-class/caste Indians were spending sleepless nights witnessing the ongoing march of authoritarianism in the garb of democracy, religion, and culture.
The RSS/BJP regime was imposing on these youth the old Sanskritic values of Kattu-Bottu (dress of ancient Brahminical Indians and the makeup culture of primitive Brahminism). They were imposing Hindi on everybody and forcing them to give up English education and the modern worldview.
The new cultural idiom of the Cockroach movement that emerged across Indian social media shook the foundations of the RSS/BJP, VHP, and other right-wing organisations because most participants in the protests were from pro-RSS/BJP upper-caste families, particularly the new generation of English-educated girls and boys, whom the right-wing assumed were getting moulded in the Treta Yuga Brahminic culture.
When the Hindutva forces saw that these youth came dressed in jeans and t-shirts, with mannerisms, food habits, song and dance patterns that were all global, Mohan Bhagwat’s and Modi’s teachings from all platforms about Indian traditional parampara were shattered. No girl was found wearing bangles on her wrist and no boy was found with a pilaka (juttu) on the back of his head. Most of the boys had South Korean haircuts.
They also showed the RSS that there was no place for it in their lives and in their vision of the future. They do not want to go to the RSS Treta Yuga culture. The RSS’s narrow nationalism stood torn apart at Jantar Mantar, and they wore universal culture and values on their sleeves. This shocked the preachers of cocoon nationalism more than the demand for the resignation of the then Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.
The youth brought Cockroaches into the RSS pooja rooms. Abhijeet exploded the bomb of Culture Shock. This is going to stay, and the RSS came to know that a hundred Kumbha Melas cannot change India to suit their vision of Sanatana Dharma. These youth are going to be the rulers of India with exactly the opposite outlook from what the Hindutva forces wanted them to have, that too after being in power for 12 years. This is, in fact, what Alvin Toffler called ‘Future Shock’ for the Hindutva forces in India, the most populated country in the world.
They constitute the best brains that India has today. The RSS/BJP have to survive with empty brains called Andh bhakts (blind followers), unlike Gen Z. One elite girl speaking at a dharna that the BRS organised at Hyderabad’s Dharna Chowk (Indira Park) said something that sent shock waves to the blind bhakt parents, who are BJP voters.
Though her parents voted for BJP, the girl said, “I don’t give a f**k about BJP”. She was in trousers and a tucked in t-shirt. I too was shocked when I saw that video. It was the language of Black women against White racists in the 1960s.
Does this not send shock waves through Hindutva cultural squads? Can they imagine that the youth are confined only to their parental vegetarian Hindutva food outside the home? Are they not getting exposed to global food culture too?
Abhijeet shattered the fear of all these youths by using the metaphor of the Cockroach in the party name. Rahul Gandhi, as an opposition leader, was repeatedly urging people to give up fear and fight this regime while facing scores of cases and going around courts. Even though he came from an erstwhile rulers’ family, he could break the shackles. The ordinary citizens were in a situation where fear dominated and nothing else. All doors of justice were closed with the fear and favours of the RSS/BJP regime in all sectors of the government. Judicial compromise was creating even more fear, as the democratic, secular, liberal, and productive masses did not know where to go.
And there is no hope that in any future election the RSS/BJP would be defeated because the Election Commission is conducting elections only to bring them back again and again.
Abhijeet and the youth who followed him liberated all of us, for the time being, from that fear, creating a hope that the youth will fight to protect the Constitution and democracy, even by risking their lives. This is a big guarantee for those who were born at the turn of the 21st century, the Gen Z.
It sent a message to people like me, who are in our seventies, that we are where we are today because of the present Constitution and democracy. If that structure is torn apart, what about the future of the children already born and those who are going to be born tomorrow? In a situation where Mohan Bhagwat and Modi are determined to destroy this structure that gave us this life for a short period of 75 years, these Cockroaches came to the rescue of a dying democracy because of Abhijeet.
My fearful existence
Before July 25, I would wake up with the fear of how to face those working in and around this regime if I used one word in my articles or books that offended them. How would I face the police, court cases, and threats of “Jai Shri Ram”? The richest Arya Vaishyas of the two Telugu states planned several attacks on me, and my books were dragged to courts in different places in Telangana.
My book Post Hindu India was taken to the Supreme Court of India. My four books were sought to be removed from the syllabus of Delhi University by RSS/BJP intellectual networks. Yet I decided to keep writing. It would be hypocritical to say that I am altogether courageous and was never afraid of anybody. I, too, am a human being, that too without much backing from any power block.
Narendra Modi’s and Amit Shah’s names became a source of intellectual fear not only for me but for many in the country. No Arundhati Roy of international fame wrote in defence of my books. No Kapil Sibal or Prashant Bhushan was expected to stand in defence of my book in the Supreme Court. Since I do not belong to their caste, class, or club, I needed to live and fight in fear.
Only the Shudra/OBC/SC/ST students and faculty were my strength. In such an atmosphere, Abhijeet comes as an organic force to provide a breath of freedom, like Jesus came to defend the Samaritans, Gentiles, and condemned women. Yet we do not know what is in store for the future. But this breeze was necessary for survival, to die peacefully.
Youth did not see caste or religion
After Abhijeet inspired youth of all castes and religions to protest at Jantar Mantar, there is a feeling that we can live free from the fear of caste bias. They sent across the country a breeze of freedom from the RSS/BJP anti-intellectual environment, which has the full support of the richest crony capitalists of India. Their media was/is attacking anybody who was/is critical of the system. Anchors shout, yell, and even at invited guests. There is no respect for media balance.
The Cockroach Janta Party took the narrative out of their control. Though it is just a baby, it thundered back into their ears with fun and humour. The protest generated a volcano of creativity among boys and girls. Abhijeet just ignited the fire among them and they poured out stuff that the crony media did not know how to handle.
Leave alone changing the regime, the fear of speaking and writing about the regime was an everyday poison around us. Abhijeet and his team of young Indians brought fearless sleep to millions of people living in fear. When an upper-caste girl asked the Delhi Police, “How can you protect women from rapists when you yourselves are tearing down our clothes on the roads?”, she spoke the truth that no women from the upper castes could have asked earlier because they thought it was their government.
Abhijeet alone could make this possible. That is the reason why his rise, work, and achievement within two months appear to me like a miracle.
Though the ruling forces will not rest until they regenerate the atmosphere of fear, the youth who fought in response to the call of the Cockroach Janta Party at Jantar Mantar and other places in the country may not withdraw into cocoons of fear. They know how to fight this regime with every technology that the regime uses.
This is the hope for the future of the nation. When even the judiciary was caught in the shell of fear or co-option, the citizens found no way to feel free. The very use of the language that unemployed youth are Cockroaches by the person heading the judicial system happened in an environment of systemic hatred towards working-class/caste people and their children.
Jantar Mantar became a better-handled place than Tiananmen Square in 1989. Thank you, Cockroaches across the country, for showing that courage, confidence, creativity, and perseverance for 45 days.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist, and author. His forthcoming books are A Shudra Life and Harappa: God’s City of Civilization.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
