Cockroach Janata Party: A bourgeois movement against the working class

The mobilisations that swept India in July around the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) have been widely celebrated by the media and by various factions of the bourgeois political apparatus as a “youth uprising,” a “new democratic awakening,” or even a “generational revolt” or a “Gen Z revolt.” The reason for this hype was a comment from the Chief Justice of India (CJI), Surya Kant, during a Supreme Court hearing in May 2026, who remarked that certain young unemployed workers and militants behaved like "cockroaches" attacking the system.

The rapid spread of the movement, following the scandal at the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admittance to undergraduate medical programmes, from which questions had been leaked in advance, expressed a profound social anger among young people confronted with collapsing social prospects. This anger reflects the deep dislocation produced by capitalism in India and around the world today, where the promise of an improvement in living conditions has been eroded and the future appears more and more a dead-end to younger generations.

Yet the terrain onto which this anger has been channelled is not neutral. The CJP mobilisations, despite their mass participation and emotional intensity, remain firmly anchored in the ideological and political framework of bourgeois democracy. They do not express proletarian interests, nor do they open a path toward working class struggle.

India in 2026 is marked by a profound social crisis. The economic slowdown, inflationary pressures, and global instability have intensified attacks on wages, employment, and living conditions. Young people face seriously rising unemployment, generalised precarious and informal labour, collapsing living conditions, discredited institutions, and a growing impossibility of securing a stable future even after years of study. These conditions form the backdrop to the NEET scandal and the explosion of youth anger.

Significant workers struggles

However, in contrast to these movements on a bourgeois terrain, a significant event had already taken place: this time linked to the resurgence of workers struggles. In the spring of 2026, India actually witnessed important workers’ mobilisations across several industrial regions. These struggles, though uneven and fragile, represent genuine proletarian reactions to intensified exploitation.

In early April, contract workers at Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI) in Manesar, south west of New Delhi, in the state of Haryana, initiated walkouts demanding living wages. The agitation rapidly spread to auto component factories, garment units, and industrial clusters across the region. Haryana’s long‑delayed wage revision - its first in eleven years - exposed the depth of exploitation: even after a 35 percent increase, minimum wages remained below workers’ demands for ₹20,000 (€181) per month. The movement had its roots in the material living conditions of life and the collective struggle of workers faced with capital and the state.

By mid‑April, unrest crossed state borders to Uttar Pradesh and erupted dramatically in Noida. Organised via social media, workers from roughly eighty factory sites walked out, demanding wages that could sustain basic living costs. The local government invoked ‘Article 163’, a ban on assemblies. The protests escalated into violent confrontations, with vehicles torched, the police deploying tear gas, and with hundreds of workers arrested.

These were not ‘theatrical’ confrontations but expressions of real proletarian anger and desperation, driven by wage stagnation, inflation, and cross‑border wage disparities between the state of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Similar struggles unfolded in Faridabad, Panipat, and Surat, where textile, auto component, and chemical workers mobilised to demand wages that provide a living income and to denounce unbearable working conditions. These struggles were quickly diverted by unions and left parties away from the path toward strengthening their political unity, but they nonetheless revealed a rising combativity within the working class.

These mobilisations emerged from workplaces, expressed collective demands, came up against the state, and revealed the material basis of class struggle. They represent the real terrain for proletarian resistance in India for today’s struggle. It is in this context — that of a need to expand and develop the dynamics of class struggle — that the CJP mobilisations must be analysed.

CJP: an attack on working class consciousness

The political nature of a social movement is determined not by the social composition of its participants but by the nature of the demands it raises and the terrain on which it mobilises. Unlike the spring movement mentioned above, the CJP mobilisations were operating entirely on a bourgeois terrain. The slogans of the mobilisations - accountability, transparency, examination reform, democratic rights, ministerial resignation, better governance - were typical demands of bourgeois democracy. They aimed at improving the functioning of the state. And in this sense they did not express any proletarian interests.

Participants were mobilised as citizens, students, candidates for exams and supporters of a political project stemming from a simple critical opposition. They did not mobilise as workers. There were no general assemblies, no strikes, no mass meetings, and no organs of collective struggle. The movement relied on symbolic marches, with the political image of merely critical citizens. These methods belong to the repertoire of bourgeois protest culture.

The ideological framework of the movement reinforced this character. The mobilisations were animated by liberal democratic narratives of “the people versus corruption,” moralistic denunciations of administrative failure, generational ideology, and nationalist rhetoric about protecting India’s youth. These ideologies divide the working class, dissolve class antagonisms, and reinforce illusions in democratic reform.

The movement has thus served the interests of the bourgeoisie, it has obscured the significant role of class struggle unfolding across India by diverting the attention of the social anger which is specific to the proletarian terrain. While workers in Manesar and Noida fought for higher wages, they were accused of criminal behaviour and confronted with police repression; the media presented the CJP mobilisations as the “real” social movement of 2026. 

The future of young people does not lie in democratic reform, generational movements, symbolic protests, or demands for better governance. It lies in the autonomous, collective, and international struggle of the working class.

Only such a struggle can transform social anger into a challenge to capitalist exploitation and the capitalist system. Genuine workers’ struggles—deliberately pushed into the background by the bourgeoisie—pave the way along the still very long and difficult path toward this goal. They reveal the real terrain on which the proletariat, in its fight against capital, can organise itself and develop its consciousness.

The task of revolutionaries is to expose the bourgeois nature of movements like the CJP, to combat democratic illusions, highlight the real struggles of the working class, and help reconnect the anger of youth with the struggle and interests of the class. The anger expressed in the CJP mobilisations is real, and the crisis that produced it is profound. The real future lies solely in the collective struggle of workers as a historical class.

ICC, August 2026