On 13 October, two Cockroach Janta Party leaders, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, jumped over police barricades at Jantar Mantar and held aloft protest signs and the Indian flag. The site, close to parliament, had been central Delhi’s designated protest venue for over 30 years until police stripped it of its status in the wake of a mass protest on 10 October. Arrested for the second time, Das and Ranka spent five days in jail.

India’s Gen Z cockroach movement has already forced the resignation of the education minister. Now it’s part of a mass mobilisation demanding the Hindu nationalist government reverse and be held accountable for the deletion of some 130 million names from the electoral roll.

Last year, the Election Commission of India embarked on what it calls a Special Intensive Revision of the country’s electoral roll, which it says is needed to remove duplicate and ineligible names, including those of people who’ve died. With the task completed in 30 of India’s 36 states and centrally administered territories, around an eighth of the electorate has been struck off. Millions have complained that they’re eligible voters who’ve been disenfranchised.

The Commission is accused of using opaque, flawed software that flags high numbers of false positives. Because the software looks for evidence that voters, their parents or grandparents were on the electoral roll in the early 2000s, some people have been flagged simply for coming from large families.

The purge threatens to turn the universal franchise into a selective privilege, violating the fundamental democratic principle that every adult citizen should have the same right to vote. The government’s approach forces people to prove they’re entitled to a vote that the state should guarantee by default.

Women are disproportionately affected because many move states when they marry, complicating the paper trail. The purge therefore threatens to deepen their political exclusion. Migrant workers and poorer people are also affected, and Muslims, long vilified by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are also disproportionately impacted. In Bihar state, around 33 per cent of final-stage deletions were of Muslims, even though they make up roughly 17 per cent of the state’s population. People who lose the right to vote risk no longer being recognised as citizens, and can then be accused of being in India illegally and deported.

The suspicion is that the changes will benefit the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The purge has been accompanied by divisive language, with the BJP speaking of the need to ‘purify’ and ‘cleanse’ the roll of ‘infiltrators’, a term used to refer to undocumented migrants from predominantly Muslim Bangladesh. Suspicions are heightened by the fact that in 2023, the government changed the rules to give itself more of a say in appointing election commissioners and handed them sweeping immunity. Former commissioners have criticised the current exercise.

Anger over the electoral roll grew when a media investigation revealed a series of objections by two election commissioners to decisions taken by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, including complaints that deletions had taken place without their knowledge. The implication is that Kumar pushed changes through without due process.

The deletions can swing elections. In May, the BJP won the state election in West Bengal, previously an opposition stronghold, after 9.1 million names, over 10 per cent of the electorate, were removed from the roll. Over 2.2 million people challenged their removal in West Bengal, but almost all were left without a vote on election day. Voters must appeal for reinstatement at tribunals, and only around 2 per cent of appeals were decided before the election, with just some 1,600 voters reinstated following successful appeals. In some Muslim-majority constituencies, close to half of voters were removed from the roll. Several factors may lie behind the BJP’s win in West Bengal, but the removal of Muslim voters can only have helped.

Cockroaches rise

India’s cockroach movement arose in response to an insult. In May, the country’s Chief Justice, Surya Kant, told a courtroom that unemployed young people who protested and spoke out on social media were like cockroaches. He later said he was speaking about people with fraudulent degrees, but many knew what they’d heard. Communications strategist Abhijeet Dipke posed a simple question on social media: what if all the cockroaches came together? The answer was an online movement of millions, organised around the satirical Cockroach Janta Party, whose name playfully echoes the ruling party’s.

The movement found its galvanising issue in the leak of the national medical college entrance exam paper. Each year, some 2.2 million students compete for 130,000 medical college places in a make-or-break exam, after years of preparation and support from their families. But corruption means questions are leaked in return for bribes. When it happened again this year, the cockroach movement turned an online community into real-world action. Protesters camped out for weeks in Delhi, until the authorities unleashed violence, beating them with batons and wooden sticks, firing teargas and arresting many.

The violence backfired. Public revulsion forced the government to hold talks with the movement, and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan quit. A government that dislikes being seen to make concessions to protesters had buckled.

The cockroach movement has pushed on. On 2 October it was part of nationwide protests, with the movement demanding Kumar’s resignation, a criminal investigation, reinstatement of deleted voters, a review of recent state elections and independent selection of election commissioners.

This time, the cockroach movement’s protests have come as part of a broader campaign. Civil society organisations have been raising the issue for some time, and established student movements, emerging leftist student leaders and opposition parties are active and vocal. The Congress party, India’s dominant political force before the BJP eclipsed it, has organised protests, including one attended by tens of thousands in Delhi on 1 November.

Civil society groups have also taken practical steps to help the disenfranchised, setting up helpdesks near places where excluded groups are concentrated so that people can file petitions and gather the documents needed to get their vote reinstated. These efforts could make a crucial difference, as without the capacity to appeal, many risk losing their vote by default.

State lashes out

The government has mobilised large-scale force, making clear it has no intention of walking back the changes.

Ahead of the protest on 2 October, police and paramilitary officers barricaded Jantar Mantar and set up checkpoints around the city. Police invoked section 133 of the Indian Citizen Safety Code, which bans gatherings of over four people, the use of slogans and speeches and other common protest activities, and authorities suspended internet services close to the protest site. When people protested regardless, police detained around 1,000, including student and political leaders, physically dragging some away. Police also banned a protest in Mumbai that same day.

The crackdown escalated on 10 October, when police detained several thousand, among them Dipke, who was picked up as he arrived at Delhi airport from Mumbai, along with other leading Cockroach Janta Party figures. Authorities deployed around 30,000 officers, sealed Delhi’s borders, shut down public transport routes and stationed anti-riot vehicles with teargas launchers along major roads. Police ordered Delhi hotels to refuse customers, told Uber drivers not to drop people off near protest sites and said they were tracking food delivery services in case they were used to supply protesters.

Police have also twice detained Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi at protests and put one of India’s most popular YouTubers, Dhruv Rathee, under house arrest. They’ve made detained people sign ‘peace bonds’ pledging not to take part in protests as a condition of their release. They’ve also detained journalists covering the protests. Police have met subsequent protests with the same response of barricades, transport restrictions, internet shutdowns and mass arrests. Pro-BJP Hindu nationalist groups have attacked and threatened protesters. Still, the protests continue.

The state’s hostile response to the protests is part of a broader pattern. In recent years the government has pushed through draconian laws that enable it to hold activists in lengthy pretrial detention, censor dissenting online voices, restrict civil society funding and force organisations to close, while police routinely use violence against protests. Having made it harder for people to speak out, organise and protest, now the government is taking away their right to vote.

Wider struggles

India has seen past protests against the BJP government, including protests in 2019 and 2020 against changes to citizenship laws that discriminated against Muslims, and protests by farmers in 2020 and 2021, triggered by changes to farming laws. After a year of protests that won public support in the face of state violence, the farmers forced the government to scrap the unpopular laws. Modi went on to lose support in the 2024 general election, forcing him to rely on coalition partners.

Because so many people are affected, protests against the electoral purge have the potential to win wide support. Even for those who aren’t directly impacted, the denial of people’s right to vote sits starkly at odds with India’s often-stated claim to be the world’s biggest democracy. The protests also speak to a wider sense, particularly among many young people, that Modi has gone too far and that his increasingly authoritarian approach offers no answers and leaves people unheard.

The breadth of the mobilisation brings challenges. The cockroach movement won concessions over the exam leak because it brings people together across lines the government normally uses to divide them, including of class, religion and political affiliation, while its smart social media use offers a way around conventional media largely captured by the BJP. But it has made clear it doesn’t want to risk being co-opted by political parties, and many of its young followers distrust Congress. Prominent cockroach movement figures expressed support for the Congress party’s 1 November protest, but they didn’t attend. The many groups mobilising will need to keep focusing on common ground and resist the pull of division.

If the protest movement wins changes again, the repercussions will be felt beyond India. The story of India’s cockroach movement has travelled the world, inspiring others, as part of a wider wave of Gen Z-led protests that has unfolded in many countries in the last couple of years. Young people are rising up against corruption, economies that fail them and out-of-touch politicians, demanding a more promising future, and their movements have had an impact. A student movement has just won power in Serbia, while high school protests in France, echoed in other European countries, have forced the French government to concede several demands.

A Modi climbdown would offer further proof that mass organising and protesting, spearheaded by Gen Z, can make a difference. The Indian government should recognise that its militarisation of central Delhi is a sign not of strength but of weakness. It should swallow its pride and offer dialogue instead of violence. The protesters have shown how much they value democracy, and made clear they intend to keep going until the damage the government has done to it is undone.

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India is currently on the CIVICUS Monitor watchlist, which identifies countries where a severe deterioration in the quality of civic space is taking place.