Twelve years into the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in New Delhi, and the unthinkable happened.
A minister in the Union Cabinet, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, was forced to resign under massive pressure from student protesters demanding “accountability” for the leak of question papers for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Tests (NEET) on May 3.
Pradhan’s resignation came 36 days after the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) launched its indefinite mass protests at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar calling for exactly that outcome. It is a major victory for the CJP, an online satirical campaign started by Abhijeet Dipke in May 2026, in response to a derisive comment by the chief justice of India equating unemployed youth to cockroaches. Dipke’s online campaign went viral, garnering an online support base of over 2 million.
But few would have expected then that the CJP, which morphed from an online protest into a mass Gen Z protest on June 6, would force the Modi government to bend.
Since 2014, when the Modi-led BJP came to power backed by an overwhelming majority, his government has ruled with an iron hand, crushing all forms of dissent and ruthlessly targeting its opponents, be it opposition politicians or others. Three successive election victories had further cemented the perception that the Modi government was invincible.
