It was like a World Cup football match in which an unknown, unranked team with rookie players took on a much more powerful rival and won. Where ‘fast and furious’ beat the ‘slow and smug’.
For the first eighty minutes of the match, it was a painfully low-action, agonizing spectacle. The defending champions – the Narendra Modi regime – backed by a twelve-year legacy of political invincibility, massive financial empires, media support and a formidable bureaucratic machinery, dominated the pitch.
Facing them was the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a decentralized squad with no traditional structure, no billionaire backers, and no ideological pedigree. Initiated as a sarcastic online reaction to a callous establishment remark dismissing the unemployed youth of India as “cockroaches,” the CJP spent weeks running what appeared to be minor defensive manoeuvres. For the casual observer, the two-month-long agitation over the NEET examination paper leaks looked stagnant, predictable, and safely contained.
Then came the dying moments of the ninety-minute game.
In a staggering tactical blunder, the government conceded a penalty kick by detaining Sonam Wangchuk, on his 20th day of hunger strike in support of the youth. That heavy-handed intervention sparked a sudden surge of raw energy from the CJP’s vast online and offline fanbase. The Delhi Police (linesmen in the game) added fuel to fire by carrying out an unwarranted, brutal, partisan attack on protestors. The referee (the judiciary) too did not show them a red card despite the obvious foul committed.
Soon, in a flurry of rapid, decentralized counter-attacks, the underdogs scored the winning goal and turned the stadium upside down. Before the final whistle blew, the BJP’s star striker, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, returned to the pavilion, injured and thoroughly humiliated. Despite nursing grievous wounds CJP players and fans carried home the trophy leaving audiences with exhilarating memories of how a much smaller team had completely rewritten the rules of the game.
Predictably, sceptics have raised questions about the legitimacy of the match itself. Some claimed the referee was biased, the betting mafia was at work or that the CJP might have made inside arrangements with elements of the rival team. But like in any World Cup football game or for that matter, in the grand scheme of Indian politics, nobody can really tell whether the match was “rigged” or not. What matters though for the game itself is the final tally of goals. A seemingly untouchable ‘super team’ was forced to capitulate and sent packing in humiliation.
Looking back at the entire match, the main factor behind the CJP’s victory was its ability to play the game with a hyper-flexible, decentralized architecture. Traditional political movements in India are slow, lumbering giants dependent on complex caste arithmetic, deep funding pools, and massive organizational hierarchies. The CJP bypassed this entirely by operating like a guerrilla force.
Utilizing self-mocking humour, animated stick-figure satire, viral Instagram reels, and memes (many of them highly abusive but very creative and funny!), the CJP created an erratic, moving target that the state machinery simply did not know how to handle. Millions of marginalized youth, without a permanent command structure, acted like insects buzzing around a giant, subverting its sluggish systems till it collapsed in sheer panic and confusion.
The CJP also scored the winning goal because it stayed small, hyper-focused on a single demand, and willing to accept support from a broad spectrum of political or social actors without getting bogged down in traditional ideological purity tests. Gandhians, Communists, Socialists, freelance activists and enterprising YouTubers were all part of the team, united by their dislike of the Modi regime. It was an approach built for asymmetric political warfare, where speed, subversion, and adaptability trump raw state power.
The CJP’s approach to the game of Indian politics has potential to serve as an engine for mass mobilization and rapid politicization.
In contemporary India, it is clear that young people (the so-called Gen Z) are increasingly impatient with the old political calendar. Five years is simply too long to wait for accountability or regime change. Raised in a hyper-connected world of immediate feedback and instant gratification, the new generation demands quick results for quick actions. They respect the overarching rules of the game, willing to play within boundaries of the Constitution, raise the national flag, and sing the anthem too, but they demand the match be played with ninety-minute urgency.
It is precisely within this high-intensity, fluid environment that the guerrilla tactic achieves its greatest victory: it functions as a profound political crucible. A few weeks spent participating in the football match-like atmosphere at Jantar Mantar can completely eclipse years of academic lectures on politics, society, or grand ideologies. In the visceral heat of the crowd, navigating barricades and engaging in collective resistance, abstract concepts like hegemony, state power, and solidarity suddenly become lived realities. The adversarial energy breaks down individual apathy and transforms ordinary citizens into lifelong committed actors.
It it important though to not get unrealistic about the CJP victory. Guerrilla tactics are designed to provoke immediate reactions or force narrow, specific concessions, such as demanding a resignation or stalling an exam. They are fundamentally unequipped to dismantle the vast, institutionalized systems that drive wealth concentration and economic inequality.
Deeply internalized social hierarchies like casteism and patriarchy are woven into the very cultural and spatial fabric of society. A sudden burst of high-decibel activism can highlight a horrific headline, but it cannot untangle the daily, systemic denial of dignity, resources, and safety that marginalized communities endure.
Furthermore, when middle-class urban students occupy a public square, the state often responds with relative restraint due to the participants’ social capital, media access, and legal resources. But this format breaks down entirely when the actors change.
For historically targeted communities like Adivasis, Muslims, and Dalits, entering the public square in an unplanned, highly disruptive manner carries a catastrophic risk. The state and dominant social groups frequently weaponize severe anti-terror laws, preventive detentions, physical violence, and majoritarian labelling. They are rarely granted a pass for “youthful exuberance.”
For India’s working poor too, time spent protesting is directly subtracted from daily survival. A wage labourer cannot afford a spontaneous week off to occupy a street corner. Moreover, when farmers or workers do successfully mobilize, their resistance must be massive, highly organized, and physically sustained over months, to exert to force the hands of powerful industrial or agricultural lobbies.
Despite these profound limitations, it would be a mistake to dismiss guerrilla tactics as mere political theatre. While a flash protest cannot fix caste discrimination or wealth inequality on its own, it acts as a vital disruptor of the status quo. It demonstrates that, the invisible, the rejected, and the ignored can set the engine of long-term social change on fire before the final whistle blows if they strike fast enough.
It forces hidden issues into the national primetime spotlight, serves as a rapid recruiting ground for a new generation of activists, and allows disparate groups to build the foundational networks required for the tedious, long-term work of unionizing, community organizing, and legal advocacy.
Most importantly it dispels fear around the consequences of dissent. And that is perhaps the most lasting gain of the Jantar Mantar thriller, memories of which will fuel many more challenges by an entire spectrum of cockroaches to those in power.
First published in countercurrents.org on 28/02/2026.
