Imlisanen Jamir
Thousands of students gathered at Jantar Mantar on the opening day of the Monsoon Session to march on Parliament under a banner that read Cockroach Janta Party, and by evening the same students were being counted by the Delhi Police in the language usually reserved for pests, as a problem of numbers requiring barricades, tear gas and a mobile internet shutdown to bring under control.
The organisation had chosen its own name before the state chose its method, so that the insect the party invoked as a symbol of resilience against paper leaks and recruitment scams found itself, within a single news cycle, standing in for something closer to the truth than its founders may have intended, since the very fact that a protest calling itself vermin could survive tear gas, baton charges and roughly seventy detentions and still return to Jantar Mantar by nightfall for a sit-in near Kerala House suggests that the metaphor was more accurate than provocative.
There is a popular belief, useful chiefly for its neatness, that the cockroach would outlive a nuclear winter, walking out from under the rubble of grander and more fragile creatures because its biology asks so little of the world that even a ruined one will do. The claim does not hold up especially well under scrutiny, but its persistence in the popular imagination says something about what people want the metaphor to mean, which is that certain forms of stubbornness cannot be legislated out of existence no matter how much disinfectant a household applies to the corners where the insects are known to gather.
The Delhi Police reached for their own disinfectant on the first day of the session, invoking Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita to declare that no permission had been sought for the march and that the area around Parliament would be treated as a zone where assembly itself was the hazard to be prevented, a formulation that asks a citizen to imagine the mere presence of other citizens as something closer to vermin than to democracy.
Section 163 is presented in official language as a fresh instrument of a reformed criminal code, but the provision it replaces, Section 144 of the old Code of Criminal Procedure, was drafted in 1861 by a colonial officer in Baroda at a time when the empire feared nothing so much as five Indians gathered on a street with a grievance in common, and the provision spent the following decades being turned against the very freedom movement whose descendants now govern the country that has kept the tool in its cabinet.
The section acquired a new number when India recodified its criminal procedure, but a new number on an old bottle changes the label, not the contents, and the contents on the first day of this Monsoon Session were tear gas, barricades and a suspension of mobile data across central Delhi, deployed for the stated purpose of preventing misinformation among citizens who found, once the networks went dark, that misinformation was the only kind of information still capable of travelling.
The government’s own figures supply the clearest evidence of how disproportionate the response looked beside its cause, since a police claim of a hundred and eighteen injured personnel, set against a protest organised around examination irregularities and paper leaks, describes a confrontation whose scale had very little to do with what the marchers were actually asking for, which was the resignation of an education minister and a more honest recruitment system rather than the removal of a government.
Sonam Wangchuk continued his hospitalised fast through the same day, offering to end it the moment Parliament merely agreed to discuss the education system that had produced the protest in the first place, a modest enough condition beside the machinery assembled to keep a few thousand students away from the building where that discussion was supposed to happen anyway. A state that finds a hunger strike easier to ignore than a march finds louder is a state that has confused audibility with legitimacy, and the confusion does not reflect well on either the audibility or the legitimacy.
What survives an extermination attempt tends to be whatever the extermination attempt was least prepared to understand, and a protest organised by young people around an examination system that has repeatedly failed them was never going to be talked out of existence by a curfew on data or a line of barricades.
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