NEW DELHI — Thousands of protesters marched to India’s Parliament on Monday, facing a police crackdown as the demonstrators demanded the resignation of the country’s education minister, in one of the biggest confrontations of an emerging, youth-led movement.

The demonstrators call themselves the Cockroach Janta Party (“Cockroach People’s Party”), and they want to overhaul the way India is run, starting with an education system they say is corrupt. They are making their voices heard as they come up against the country’s rising cost of living and a lack of quality jobs.

The protests mark a rare show of defiance against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Critics say the 12-year rule of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has marked a crackdown on civil society and jailing of political opponents. Despite rapid economic growth under Modi, analysts say, India’s youth unemployment remains stubbornly high.

The Modi government has portrayed the demonstrators as villains. “These are people who want to make the country hollow,” BJP chief Nitin Nabhi said in a speech last month.

But on Monday, the government appeared to make its first outreach to the protest group. Saurav Das, a spokesperson of the Cockroach Janta Party, said Indian Health Minister J.P. Nadda had met them for 10 minutes at the minister’s residence. Another Cockroach spokesperson, Ashutosh Ranka, said the health minister asked for time to discuss the movement’s demands, which include the release of a detained activist and the education minister’s resignation.

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has so far refused to step down.

Pradhan did not respond to a list of NPR’s questions. BJP spokespeople did not respond to requests for an interview.

Tear gas and wooden sticks

For more than a month, hundreds of Indian young people had camped at Jantar Mantar, one of the few open spaces in the Indian capital where the government allows mass protests. On Monday, they mobilized a major march to Parliament.

Authorities in New Delhi cut off mobile internet, put up barricades and shut off metro train stations near the protest site. Then, the riot police charged into protesters with batons and shields.

Protesters say police hit dozens of them with batons in their heads. While Delhi police denied using violence, NPR witnessed police fire tear gas to disperse the protests and hit the demonstrators with wooden sticks at several points in central Delhi.

Protester Mohammed Nasir, a high-school graduate, said tear gas shells fell near him and he witnessed officers hurting a protester. “I saw three to four personnel kicking a woman in her abdomen,” he said. “She couldn’t get up from the road after.”

Many demonstrators retaliated by pelting stones at the police, injuring about 50 officers, according to local news reports.

Protesters were on New Delhi’s streets until the evening, singing, sloganeering, waving the Indian tricolor flag.

“Whenever Modi is scared, he sends the police out,” a group chanted near metal barricades. “Let’s test the limits of your oppression,” another group of men and women chanted as a dozen police hovered nearby. “Let’s find out how much space you have in your jails.”

The “cockroach” movement started as a parody

The “cockroaches” took their name as a mocking response to a pointed comment from India’s top judge.

During a hearing in May, India’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant compared the country’s unemployed young adults to roaches while referring to criticism of judges on social media. “There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession,” the Indian Express newspaper reported him saying. He said some become social media creators, some become activists, and “they start attacking everyone.” He later said he was misunderstood. But it was too late.

Days after the remarks, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old with a master’s in public relations from Boston University, launched the Cockroach Janta Party as a satirical online collective. Millions of people followed them on social media, drawing support from activists, movie stars and some opposition politicians.

“In India, if you’re rich, the system dances at your fingertips. If you’re poor, nobody will be there for you,” Dipke says. “We’re frustrated because the government has stopped listening.”

The Indian government banned the party’s first X account, citing “threats to national security.” So Dipke created another one, saying, “Cockroaches don’t die.” On Instagram, the group racked up nearly 22 million followers, more than twice that of India’s ruling BJP. The satire had turned serious.

Dipke says he was born into a Dalit family. Considered the lowest of South Asia’s hierarchical caste system, Dalits were once known as outcasts and many are still treated that way. Dipke says he spent his summers in his grandparents’ village in central India. “We’d often share one roti among two people. If there was a drought, we’d travel miles on a bullock cart to fill water from a well.”

In his 20s, he worked with an anti-corruption party’s social media team.

Then, taking a cue from many of his peers, he applied to study in the U.S. in 2024. He didn’t want to return — even when he says he experienced racism there. “It wasn’t too different from the casteism I experienced in India,” he says. “But at least in the U.S., you are able to feed your family.”

But after his parody party went viral, Dipke returned and launched a sit-in in New Delhi.

Exam question leaks

The group’s immediatedemand is the resignation Education Minister Pradhan after a series of exam leaks. Every year, the Education Ministry conducts a set of screening exams for students seeking higher education, and for academics who want to teach in public schools and universities. With millions of candidates fighting for a highly limited pool of university seats and government jobs, a single exam can determine their entire economic future.

In the latest incident, a file allegedly containing test questions circulated on messaging apps ahead of a nationwide exam held in May. It affected more than 2 million aspiring doctors applying for a fraction of seats in India’s medical colleges. Those students were informed about it two weeks after they took the exam. Local media reported at the time that at least a dozen students had died by suicide after hearing they’d have to re-sit an exam that many prepare for over years — and at great expense to their parents.

Dipke says it’s why a chunk of those turning up for the protests are parents. “I have seen them come with their 10-year-olds. They tell me they want to make the system fairer by the time their kids appear for their medical college exams,” he says.

Another of the movement’s demands, according to spokesperson Ranka, is compensation for the families of the people who took their lives.

Scant quality jobs

Dipke says it is getting harder to afford a decent education and find well-paying jobs in India and the ways to get them seem rigged.

India’s economyhas grown by more than 7% most years over the past decade. Even as it became the most populous country, it has reduced extreme poverty and improved education levels.

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Yet, many of India’s 300 million youth aren’t seeing their lives improve, says Rosa Abraham, an economist at Azim Premji University. She says that’s because “we’re not creating enough jobs given the number of graduates we are producing.”

Abraham says around 40% of India’s university graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed: “It’s among the highest rates in decades.”

Even when they get a job, the entry-level salaries are lower than they used to be more than a decade ago, adjusting for inflation. The lack of options, she says, forces many to take up physical labor in agriculture or construction, where the pay is lower and there’s no guarantee of income.

Bhanu Joshi, a political scientist and co-founder of Data Action Lab for Emerging Societies, says successive governments have struggled to create employment for Indian youth. But even as the problem became more acute under Prime Minister Modi, Joshi says the government has primarily addressed it using welfare or unemployment benefits. “It’s like saying, unemployment is a huge issue but I cannot solve it. Let me give you 1,500 rupees [under $16] and take care of your grievance.”

Economists say the concerns of young adults in India need structural solutions.

“We are sitting with a generation of the most educated group of youngsters we’ve ever had in the country,” says Abraham, who heads Azim Premji’s Centre for Sustainable Employment. “If they are not given the means to kind of utilize this education, fulfill at least some of their aspirations, that’s going to lead to frustration, which can come out in different forms of unrest.”

Unrest — like the ongoing protests in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar grounds.

Defying diktats

Satire has been the bedrock of the Cockroach Janta Party’s campaign. One evening, demonstrators invited people to sign diapers and mail them to the federal education minister to help plug exam paper “leaks.”

On another occasion, they danced and banged plates while demanding the minister’s resignation.

Two weeks ago, the prominent environmentalist and education activist Sonam Wangchuk joined them and launched a hunger strike. According to a Cockroach Janta Party press release, he lost more than 18 pounds in 18 days. Over the weekend, dozens of plain-clothes policemen entered the protest site and dragged Wangchuk into an ambulance.

Spokesperson Ranka said the party was demanding Wangchuk’s release.

On Monday, local media reported that the police entered the protest site again, dismantled the stage and tents, and evacuated the protesters.

Even as the protesters accuse the education ministry of failing to prevent leaks, Education Minister Pradhan has refused to resign. In an interview with the news channel NDTV, he called the protesters “a B-team of terrorists” who were trying to “divide the country.”

Dipke rejected the claim. Last week, Dipke also shared a montage of Pradhan’s photos set to the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s song “Anti-Hero.” “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem.”

Students and professionals come to the protest site from across the city and neighboring states. Many speak of being let down by “the system.”

Twenty-year-old Mohammad Arshad says the medical exam paper leak in May destroyed his faith in the fairness of the system after spending two years preparing. “I appeared for the re-exam last month but I can no longer trust the process is fair.” It has driven some of his friends to study medicine abroad, even in Russia. “They lost hope in India’s education system,” he says.

Kajal Singh, 22, says she traveled nearly three hours with her friend to join the protest. She wears a white mask, “because I haven’t told my parents,” and says she wants government accountability. “We are not anti-nationals,” she says, referring to the term the ruling party uses for critics. “We are students. Listen to us.”