Not Just Cockroaches: The Growing Youth Movements in India

Last May, the Indian government canceled the results of the national medical school entrance; exam when leaked questions were discovered online. A record 2.28 million students took the test for the nearly 150,000 spots available in medical institutions around the country. Faced with the daunting task of retaking an exam that requires years of preparation and expensive coaching classes to successfully pass, twenty-one students committed suicide—a tragic sign of the desperation for upward mobility among Indian youth.

As early police investigations revealed a large-scale scandal involving various National Testing Agency officials, and Indian politicians tactlessly discounted student anguish and frustration, an organized movement demanding accountability of the government quickly began to develop. This summer, student protesters took to the streets, conducting a series of ongoing demonstrations in New Delhi. The protests have been labeled by several writers and journalists as the first successful “Gen Z movement” against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s right-wing government.

The student movement is called the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)—a play on a disparaging comment made about unemployed youth by a prominent chief justice. Within weeks of the scandal, the CJP successfully organized protests with tens of thousands of attendees, featured high profile hunger campaigns that resonated deeply with the populace, encountered violent police interventions that were met with broad critique, and eventually forced the resignation of the Minister of Education—a major victory.

In the media reportage of these developments, the protests have been characterized as an instantiation of India’s young generation finally breaking away from the hold that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under the leadership of Narendra Modi, has had on India’s youth for well over a decade. Modi’s campaign in 2014 ran on a narrative of development and forward progress that captured the attention of India’s then-young generation of millennials. That year decisively marked the moment when the BJP successfully diversified its voter base. Once a political party that represented the interests of urban, upper caste Hindus, it came to dominate politics with the support of India’s vastly diverse rural, lower caste youth.

According to scholars and activists alike, these CJP protests represent the reawakening of critical thinking among a newer generation of students. Recent writings on the protests highlight the frustration of India’s youth who are experiencing mass unemployment despite having made, as a Time Magazine article stated, “a Faustian bargain”—voting for an authoritarian government in exchange for the promise of progress. For Indian writers observing the protests in person, they underscore a new kind of irreverence these students are exhibiting who grew up in a context where Modi is normatively addressed with the honorific title, Modi ji (the suffix ji shows deep respect, similar to sir). “Mr. Modi, now 75 years old, may eventually accept that he is too out of touch to lead the world’s largest youth population and fade away,” wrote author Kamil Komireddi for the New York Times recently. And for another set of writers, the most exciting part of these protests is that, finally, they have brought together an alternative coalition of highly diverse, nonelite students, who are putting aside their caste differences to stand united.

These protests certainly signal a growing dissatisfaction brewing among young Indians for this current political regime. However, a parallel phenomenon has been simultaneously unfolding in the backdrop of India. When brought into focus, it quickly complicates simple narratives of a widespread conflict between BJP’s nationalist movement and India’s young populace.

For nearly a decade, I have been studying and conducting ethnographic research with the university branch of India’s principal right-wing organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It was leaders of this group who created the BJP, and who are responsible for ideologically training its political elites, including Modi, who worked up the ladder of the highly secretive organization to become India’s charismatic leader.

The rise of Modi has substantially bolstered the membership base of the RSS. Its student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), has grown to become the largest student organization in the world. In 2025, for instance, the ABVP had a membership base of 7.6 million university students spread across India’s twenty-eight states. Its growth has been coupled with its increasing notoriety for protesting against left-wing student movements. The consequences these leftist students have faced include arrests which go on their permanent record, suspension, and withholdings of their scholarships. In one particularly tragic case at a university in the city of Hyderabad, the suspension of a leftist group from campus ultimately resulted in a member, a PhD student named Rohith Vemula, committing suicide. Vemula was part of an organization that represented students who identify as Dalit, a political identity adopted by previously untouchable caste groups who mobilize around shared experiences of oppression and rights-based activism. Such cases have led scholars and activists alike to assume that the ABVP is an organization of upper caste, privileged students meting out their resentments at the increasing representation of India’s lower caste demographics in higher education.

This assumption, however, does not hold true. Between 2018 to 2025, I observed the rapid diversification of the ABVP across caste and regional lines. Indeed, although once a small group of urban, upper caste students, it now predominantly attracts rural, lower caste men. Far from being a male organization, I learned through interviewing three generations of Hindu nationalist activists that the ABVP’s most consistent members since the 1970s have been urban, upper caste women whose families are associated with the RSS. Seen holistically, the ABVP has become India’s most diverse student movement.

On the one hand, this transformation is not totally surprising. The ascendance of Modi has become a household story. The son of a chaiwallah, a tea-seller, who belonged to a lower caste community, Narendra Modi rose from obscurity to become the most powerful man in India. This aspirational story successfully rebranded the RSS and BJP as organizations that give all students a chance to have their talents recognized. This meritocratic ideal stands in stark contrast to India’s liberal secular political party, the Congress.

There was a time when the Congress Party represented the ambitious ideals of Indian secular nationalism that caught the attention of the postcolonial world order. Imagined by a motley group of nationalists including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar, India’s 1950 Constitution was written to embody the principles of Indian secularism, in which the state would not give preference to any one religious or social order. But idealistic principles eventually gave way to corrupt political practices. By 2014, the Congress was well known for being run by the same group of elite families who kept power highly concentrated, and who were enmeshed in a series of embarrassing financial corruption scandals that drove away their popular support. In this context, aspirational young men were easily drawn to Modi and his story. Interested in trying their hand at politics, they rushed to join the ABVP. The organization promises students access to RSS’s elite social networks, and if they do especially good work, a possibility for a BJP political ticket. Seen in this light, ABVP’s students are motivated by the same desire for social mobility as the CJP students currently protesting.

Yet, on the other hand, the success of this diversification is quite striking. Indeed, for nearly a century the RSS failed to make inroads among India’s lower caste communities. The reason is its ideology, known as Hindu nationalism. The nationalist project the RSS champions is concerned with finding a means to unite India’s highly diverse populace under one national identity. The sheer number of ethnic, caste, regional, linguistic, and religious identity groups present in the vast subcontinent is extraordinary. According to the RSS, the most effective means of bringing together such broad diversity is to make India’s populace recognize a common Hindu identity that exists among them, a loose cultural “Hindu-ness.” The RSS ascribes to a historical narrative that takes this Hindu-ness as evidence of the common origin of the Hindu people, the race it considers responsible for advancing Indian civilization. According to the RSS, this history—which is called Hindutva—ought to define the national narrative of India. And within this Hindu nation, the majority of India’s divisive caste groups ought to shed their differences in favor of a shared Hindu communitarianism. As for India’s minority populations, the RSS understands religious groups such as Christians and especially Muslims as present on the subcontinent due to foreign invasions, and to belong in India they must assimilate to Hindu value systems. Its nativist logic and treatment of minorities has earned the RSS and BJP the title of being India’s principal right-wing coalition.

Although the movement is concerned with uniting Hindus to produce its coalition, thus signaling a kind of greater inclusion, scholars have long argued that this unity retains the social hierarchy at the center of Hindu belief systems. This hierarchy is present in everything from RSS’s organizational structure, the authoritarianism now exercised by the Modi government, and importantly, in its understanding of the caste system. Although RSS’s leaders have historically been critical of caste, the movement is limited by its own ideological parameters. As upholders of Hindu identity, the RSS cannot advocate for the abolishment of caste, a fundamental part of Hindu cultural, family, and religious social networks. As a result, the RSS has chosen to not seriously reckon with the past histories of caste hierarchy. Instead, it is understood to support Hindu cultural practices that reproduce the salience of caste. Thus, its project of integration has been met with criticism from lower caste groups as being unimaginative, paternalistic, and based on strategies of assimilation.

This criticism has been particularly prominent in the city of Pune, where I conducted my primary research. One of the largest cities in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Pune has been at the center of discourse on caste hierarchy since the eighteenth century, when it served as the administrative capital of the powerful Maratha Empire. The Empire’s administrators were a social group known as the Chitpawan Brahmins, an occupationally scholastic class. Highly effective proprietors, the Chitpawans eventually seized control of the Empire and relegated the Maratha King to a ceremonial position. To justify their authority over the rightfully anointed king of the people, they utilized their clergy to spread Brahmin religious orthodoxy—from whence emerged gendered practices of widow-burning and caste practices of untouchability that continue to be spoken about in Pune. Such was the severity of the Chitpawans tyranny, that several famous anticaste movements and leaders emerged in Maharashtra, kickstarting a long process of attempting to socially reform the hierarchical Brahmins. Several generations later, it was a group of reformed Chitpawans who established the RSS. Pune has since remained a key site for both Hindu nationalism and various anticaste projects.

This caste history, which remains alive and well in Maharashtrian family stories, made the transformations taking shape in ABVP’s membership especially surprising. Pune has historically been a university city, with dozens of prominent colleges that have for over a century offered high-quality education to local, upper caste Hindu students. In the last decade, as caste-based affirmative action has expanded, nearly 50 percent of Pune’s university body now consists of rural, lower caste men and women. This diversity is reflected in ABVP’s Pune unit. Despite the presence of various anticaste, leftist movements on campuses, rural, lower caste men have enthusiastically joined Pune’s ABVP instead, making it the most diverse student organization in the state.
 

My interlocuters—university faculty, local activists, and students critical of the RSS—understood this transformation as surprising, but possibly temporary. As it was explained to me, these students would realize soon enough that the movement they had joined was an instantiation of Brahmin hegemony. Upar se orders aate hai, “the orders come from above,” was a common refrain, a reference to the strict linear hierarchy of the ABVP that would always have a Brahmin dominance. It was only a matter of time, my interlocutors would say somewhat hopefully, that these students would experience the very social hierarchy they were trying to escape and grow disillusioned by the Hindu nationalist project.

This has yet to take place. ABVP’s growing diversity is only making it more appealing. In fact, one of the key reasons why both men and women reject leftist organizations for the ABVP is due to its heterogeneity. For men from rural, lower caste backgrounds, leftist groups in Pune are made up of students from their same communities and even hometowns. Aspiring for social mobility, these students seek out the caste and regional diversity in the ABVP in order to build new forms of community. As for urban, upper caste women, feminist groups are predominantly made up of other women from similar caste backgrounds as them. Young girls seeking independence and cogendered experiences find the ABVP to be a much more attractive social space.

The diverse mixing that the ABVP offers has created the conditions for a new generation of students to develop intercaste relationships. As they embark on these new experiences, they naturally begin to question the normative culture of hierarchy so central to Hindu value systems. Thus, the RSS is forced to confront an unresolved contradiction in its ideological principles. Although it seeks to unify caste groups under one Hindu nationalist identity, it has historically upheld caste endogamy, a ubiquitous cultural practice of marrying within one’s own group, that reproduces caste boundaries. According to the RSS, endogamy is central to the stability of the family. It is the natural outcome of the cultural practice of families arranging their children’s marriages. However, ABVP’s training is teaching men and women to disregard caste differences, creating the very conditions for these two groups to develop intercaste relationships.

The challenge ABVP students are raising mirrors the concerns of their peers, who are encountering greater forms of diversity than their parents’ generation ever did. Indeed, pushback against arranged marriage seems to be growing. Across surveys, popular culture, and social media, a young generation of Indian men and women are wondering when they will break free from the hierarchy of family and caste obligations.

The RSS is closely listening. ABVP’s male and female senior leaders who are also coming from increasingly diverse backgrounds, often spoke to me about the rebellion they are observing among students. Rather than strictly repressing it, these leaders expressed an understanding that this is a generational difference that must be dealt with. As the Hindu nationalist movement understands it, if lower and upper caste students are both expressing discontent at a set of normative practices, then there is a universal Hindu problem to be addressed. In the past five years, the RSS has slowly begun to speak in support of intercaste marriage, building the discourses necessary to work with its massive intergenerational family support base.

As referenced earlier, the claim that the Hindu nationalist movement is out of touch with India’s youth generation falls flat in light of the grassroots work the RSS is continuously conducting. My research has shown that the RSS trains all its organizations to have their finger on the pulse of India’s myriad societies. Its leaders are constantly watching, observing, listening—essentially acting like anthropologists keeping track of changing cultural habits across demographics. Its ability to reform its principles in order to keep its imagined Hindu community satisfied is what makes this movement successful. In the past decade that I’ve studied the ABVP, I’ve noticed new kinds of students now being drawn to it. The organization has only found new ways to be more relevant, cooler, and more stylish in how it ideologically trains its members.

For any opposition seeking to topple this regime, it will take more than a few protests to be successful. For liberal or left-wing movements like this emergent Cockroach Janata Party to remain relevant, their leaders must find a way to address this generation’s increasing frustration with the social hierarchies preventing them from exercising greater autonomy in their decisions. Importantly, these movements must address this as a problem facing young men and women of all caste backgrounds.

Contributor Bio

Leela Khanna was a 2025–2026 Raphael Morrison Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow with the Weatherhead Scholars Program. She received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at New York University. Her research interests include right-wing movements; nationalism; Hindu majoritarianism; student politics; caste; gender; ideas/practices of inclusion and exclusion; social mobility and higher education; and political anthropology of South Asia.