Beyond CJP, beyond Delhi: How movement took on a life of its own

Anushka Bhardwaj explains how the campaign became decentralised and spread across India, powered by students, satire, and shared outrage

On the night of Friday, July 24, the entire leadership of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was absent from the stage, but the crowd stood firm. Volunteers wrestled the growing chaos, as one question lingered over Jantar Mantar: Where were CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and his core team? 

The unease was understandable. Earlier that morning, Dipke had told the gathering that the party’s leadership was likely to be arrested that night. “If this happens, you people will have to take this forward,” he said. The arrests never came. 

An on-ground volunteer said the core team usually met at night and consisted of no more than seven or eight people. Initially, it included Dipke, public policy strategist Ashutosh Ranka, journalist Saurav Das, and author-filmmaker Vijeta Dahiya, who was later removed from the leadership group. As the movement expanded, and the CJP came under criticism for its lack of women in decision-making, the group widened to include lawyer Ratna Singh, political science student Amulya Dhawan, policy expert Vaishnavi Gaur, and MBA graduate Aafreen Nawaz. Farmer activist Deepak Baliyan joined, too. 

“It became the movement of everybody who stood by us. We welcomed advice from everyone who joined us, including unions and politicians,” Baliyan told Business Standard. “But final decisions were taken by our team.” 

On Friday afternoon, the second round of talks took place between CJP spokespersons Das and Ranka and Union ministers J P Nadda and Jitendra Singh. “We have told them we would not settle for anything less than a resignation, and they have sought time until tomorrow afternoon,” one of the negotiators said. 

Then Saturday afternoon arrived. Dharmendra Pradhan tendered his resignation. The news filtered into Jantar Mantar despite an internet shutdown. Once it was confirmed, Dipke raised his fist in triumph. Within hours, the government’s acceptance of the group’s remaining demands followed, after the third round of talks. 

But by then, victory no longer belonged to CJP alone. 

Over the course of the agitation, the movement had grown beyond not just its scale but also the leadership of the organisation that had launched it. After police baton-charged and tear-gassed demonstrators in central Delhi on July 20, protests spread rapidly across the country. Independent groups, student unions, politically affiliated organisations and a generation of young Indians became equal stakeholders in a campaign that increasingly answered to no single centre. 

Even some of the movement’s most consequential influencers were missing on Saturday: Activist Sonam Wangchuk, who remained on a hunger strike for 26 days, and his wife, Geetanjali Angmo, were deeply involved throughout the agitation, including in key decision-making. 

Much of that momentum, and the political attention it commanded, was driven by Wangchuk’s hunger strike, particularly after police detained the climate activist from the protest site in the early hours of July 18. Wangchuk ended his fast on Thursday evening. 

“Youth was standing up for youth,” said N Sai Balaji, former national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA). “People did not follow any traditional protest rulebook. They started building this movement on their own.” AISA, affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, was among several politically aligned student organisations that bolstered numbers at the protest site while advising the CJP leadership on tactics and strategy. 

“Humour and satire have always been integral to protest, but this one stood out,” Balaji said. 

Protesters arrived carrying witty, sardonic placards, photographed them, and uploaded the images to social media. The CJP’s official digital handles adopted much the same formula. 

“This is the first time that a movement is being led online and offline simultaneously… Everything was up there on the internet, dominating the algorithm,” said Rahul Rastogi, a Delhi University student who regularly visited the site. 

Balaji further said: “Instagram was a strong tool because you can’t always police it.” 

Images of women confronting the authorities also travelled far beyond the protest site. In Mumbai, 27-year-old Rhiya Ahir emerged as one of the defining faces of the agitation after standing with outstretched arms in front of a police vehicle carrying detained students, refusing to move for 40 minutes until they were released. 

Yet even as Gen Z shaped the movement’s style, it retained the architecture of a conventional mass protest. Opposition leaders and trade union representatives took the stage to demand accountability. “Ashutosh and I went to invite the farm union leaders, and they said they were already ready to support us,” Baliyan said. Coming from a farming background himself, he regarded their participation as indispensable. “They knew how protests are run and how demands are negotiated.” 

Suggestions from supporters were routinely considered by the leadership. While most Opposition parties limited themselves to visits of solidarity and public support for Wangchuk, leaders from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) appeared frequently, particularly during the final fortnight. On the day Congress leader Rahul Gandhi staged a protest near Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence, both Atishi and Sanjay Singh alleged that attempts were being made to weaken the CJP protest. The presence of AAP’s student wing, the Association of Students for Alternative Politics (ASAP), also became increasingly visible, with its members regularly sharing the stage alongside CJP leaders. 

Although Rahul Gandhi stopped short of acknowledging CJP directly, he echoed its demands through his own campaign, Chhatron ki Goonj, while demanding accountability for the police action against students. Support from the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the Congress’ student wing, arrived comparatively late and remained limited as it divided its attention between two separate movements. 

Soon, the protest ceased to be a Delhi story. Demonstrations sprang up independently in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Patna, Goa, Indore, Chandigarh and Kolkata, drawing inspiration, but not instructions, from Jantar Mantar. 

“It had surpassed CJP, Wangchuk or only the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET),” said Siddharth Mokle, spokesperson for the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi (VBA), the party founded by Prakash Ambedkar. “We even protested outside the Maharashtra education minister's residence.” 

The VBA also called for a Maharashtra bandh on July 23 in solidarity with students injured during the clashes in Delhi. It was joined by several organisations inspired by B R Ambedkar’s politics, including Lok Sabha MP and Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) chief Chandra Shekhar Azad and the Dalit activist groups aligned with him. 

“Dynamics were different in every state, In Maharashtra, the Left, the Congress and even district-level organisations came together for the bandh,” said Mokle. 

In Bihar, by contrast, the movement was largely coordinated by AISA, while the Rashtriya Janata Dal kept its distance.

From the outset, student organisations formed the movement’s backbone. Student leaders and volunteers said CJP was barely two-and-a-half months old when the protests began, with limited organisational capacity and little trust among activists. 

“For volunteering, we had multiple WhatsApp groups and every day a task list came,” said Mohit, a Delhi-based CJP volunteer. “There was no particular criterion for becoming a volunteer. Most of us joined in the beginning and, once student unions came in, we no longer needed more volunteers.” 

Aniket Madke, a member of the Delhi student council of the All India Students Federation (AISF), affiliated with the Communist Party of India, noted: “The Left came in, sent volunteers and helped organise the protests, especially in the initial days.”

As the movement faltered in its early days, Wangchuk and several student leaders began indefinite hunger strikes. AISA President Neha Bora, along with Ameen Amitoj and Manish Kumar, continued their fast for 23 days. 

“On the day of the Sansad Chalo march, we sent 5,000 students to Delhi,” said Vaibhav Chopkar, AISF’s Maharashtra president, who was himself injured during the clashes. 

The violence that followed shifted even greater responsibility onto student organisations. Many students felt the march had lacked leadership and direction. 

“We started creating district-wise groups for multiple local protests,” Chopkar said. Asked whether the CJP leadership had reached out after the violence and detentions in Maharashtra, he replied that events had moved beyond the organisation’s control. 

Those who watched attendance swell from around 1,000 or 2,000 people to more than 20,000 say the mobilisation was fuelled by anger that had long been accumulating. 

“For most people who came here, NEET wasn’t the biggest concern,” said Bhim Kumar of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS), a student organisation based at Delhi University’s School of Open Learning, whose stall had stood at the protest site from the first day. “It was another paper leak or another instance of mismanagement that had brought them here.” 

Kumar noted that KYS had protested at Jantar Mantar two years earlier over the alleged NEET 2024 paper leak. “It was an issue that resonated with almost everyone. And there was also a feeling that ministers don’t resign any more. All of it came together in favour of this movement.”