On Saturday, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union education minister, felled not by the Opposition or a court of law, but by a movement that began as a joke. Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) - born in May as an online parody of the ruling party after NEET paper leaks, and after CJI Surya Kant had described unemployed youngsters entering fields like media, social media or activism as 'cockroaches' - swelled in two months into the largest display of public dissent India has seen in years: over a month-long occupation of Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, hunger strikes, marches, and tens of thousands of young Indians in the streets of cities across the country whose names the government would rather not list.
Narendra Modi does not do concessions easily. His instincts - float above the fray, promise grandly, deflect blame downward - have served him for a decade. This time, they failed sequentially. Blaming ground-level bureaucrats did not work. Promising fast-track courts did not work. Nor did the darker script: foreign hand, opposition puppetry, 'anti-national' tag.
