Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as India’s Education Minister on Saturday, 25 July, handing the month-long youth movement led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) a major victory.
The resignation, many observers argued, underscored the growing political influence of the Gen Z-led movement that began as an online campaign sparked by a comment from the Chief Justice of India before evolving into a nationwide protest demanding government accountability over the NEET paper leaks.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally reached out to the young generation through FaceTime-style self-recorded videos, an acknowledgement of the political weight the protests had acquired.
The development has sparked a debate on the significance of protest politics in India. This is not the first time that a public protest in India has compelled the government to respond with policy or political changes.
In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the withdrawal of the three contentious farm laws after farmers, mostly from Punjab and Haryana, had been protesting against these laws at the borders of Delhi for about a year.
In 2012, the then UPA government was forced to reform laws for crimes against women after an unprecedented scale of nationwide public outrage triggered by the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a moving bus in New Delhi on 16 December 2012.
The Anna Hazare protests of 2011, eventually led to the enactment of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act in 2013.
Some protests ended on their own. The anti-CAA protest of 2019, for example, saw thousands of women occupying a major highway connecting Delhi to Noida to oppose the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the National Population Register (NPR).
The movement lasted for 101 days, capturing global attention before being cleared on 23 March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
Why is CJP protest different?
Mass protests are a fundamental democratic right India. Experts said that, unlike past protests and movements, the agitation over NEET paper leaks was not fundamentally about ideology and was not rooted in the interests of a single community or social group.
“The exam and education system cuts across caste, class and gender to quite a large degree. The core constituency coming to these protests doesn’t represent a singular interest group,” Yamini Aiyar, Senior Visiting Fellow at Brown University, told BBC.
Unlike the Anna Hazare movement (2011), the anti-CAA protests (2019-20), or the farmers’ protest (2020-21), the Jantar Mantar agitation was led overwhelmingly by people in their late teens and twenties. They were not merely participants but also the organisers, strategists and communicators.
“The farmers’ agitation had made the government withdraw legislation. But this is the first time that the government has acknowledged the need for taking responsibility and being held accountable,” Pratab Bhanu Mehta, political scientist and former Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, wrote in Indian Express.
‘Long-term risks to constitutional democracy’
Strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney, however, cautioned against the growing reliance on street protests as the primary means of driving political change.
Chellaney, in a long post on X, warned that the trend poses long-term risks to constitutional democracy despite mass mobilisation being a legitimate democratic right. Drawing parallels with Nepal, Chellaney noted that Gen Z protesters have returned to the streets against the very Gen Z-led government they had helped bring to power, accusing it of betraying their expectations.
“Their renewed agitation threatens to prolong instability in a country still recovering from the unprecedented mob violence of last September,” he said.
Nepal’s youth-led movement includes the historic September 2025 anti-government uprising and current 2026 protests against the Balen Shah administration. The key milestones involve the September 2025 revolution, the rise of young lawmakers, and recent 2026 tensions.
Gen Z-led protests in Nepal, Bangladesh
Remember, last month as the CJP campaign grew on the internet with mostly youth backing it across social media platforms, many compared it with Gen Z-led protests, which have toppled governments in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh in recent years promting a response from its founder Abhijeet Dipke.
“Let me make this absolutely clear, do not insult or underestimate the GenZ of India by making such comparisons. The youth of this country are far more mature, aware, and politically conscious than many give them credit for. They understand their constitutional rights and will express their dissent through peaceful and democratic means,” he said.
Chellaney argued that it reflected a broader pattern emerging across the Global South, where digitally organised and decentralised youth movements are increasingly bypassing traditional political institutions to seek immediate concessions from governments.
“Street mobilization can be effective in securing short-term political victories, but such success rarely alters the structural conditions that fuel youth unemployment, inflation and governance failure,” he said.
Gen Z-led movements have reshaped politics across the world with the rise of the internet, writes Edgar Kaiser, a human rights lawyer at People’s Watch, Tamil Nadu and an LLM candidate in European and International Human Rights Law at Leiden University, Netherlands.
“The young roaches of India have come together for the first time and this Gen Z movement means much more to a country with 600 million youth population than any other,” he said.
‘One day, one brick falls’
Political activist Yogendra Yadav also weighed in on his experience of participating in public movements.
“Keep striking relentlessly at the wall of autocratic power. One day, one brick falls, then another, a third… and before you know it, the entire wall begins to crumble. This is what happened in the farmers’ movement, this is what we saw here (CJP). The first duty of struggle is—to stand firm,” Yadav told Jist news last week.
But Chellaney warned that the result of street protests is a self-reinforcing cycle of expectation and disappointment. “Youth movements win dramatic concessions, yet the underlying economic and structural conditions remain largely unchanged, he said.
Protesters soon conclude that the government has betrayed them, prompting a fresh wave of demonstrations, Chellaney argues.
“The consequence is chronic political volatility, with streets replacing institutions as the principal arena of democratic contestation,” he said.
Where will the Cockroach movement go?
Political scientist Suhas Palshikar said the JP movement (1974-75) and the Anti- corruption movement led by Anna Hazare (2011-13) stand out as good precedents to compare the CJP movement.
Street mobilization can be effective in securing short-term political victories, but such success rarely alters the structural conditions that fuel youth unemployment, inflation, and governance failure.
“Where will the Cockroach movement go? Perhaps nowhere– it will allow venting of frustration and taper off. Like the farmers’ protests, it may win some, but lose steam over time,” he wrote on X.
Led by freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) in Bihar and Gujarat, and marked by widespread student mobilisation, the JP Movement championed Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution) against corruption, unemployment and governance failures. It eventually grew into a nationwide opposition movement against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, culminating in the political upheaval that preceded the Emergency in 1975.
Though the youth were the centre of much attention and hope on earlier two occasions, it would be a mistake to imagine a youth movement or a GenZ movement -these are only convenient myths for commentators, Palshikar wrote.
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