THE COCKROACH JANATA PARTY (CJP) began in May 2026 with a single demand: the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Abhijeet Dipke, the 30-year-old who started the CJP after a satirical post on X (formerly Twitter) went viral, made the NEET paper leak the movement’s first major issue, calling it a “system failure” that shattered the trust of over 220,000 medical aspirants. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) determines which students get places in India’s hypercompetitive undergraduate medical and dental colleges, and the leak of this year’s paper was linked to 21 suicides. This was not the first time a NEET paper had leaked, nor was it the first time student suicides had been linked to the exam, but Dipke’s movement met the moment. As the journalist Jyoti Punwani wrote in Frontline, the movement’s appeal “was not ideology but the basic premise of democracy: that leaders be accountable to those whom they claim to represent.”
Dipke first announced the CJP protests on social media in early June, calling for young people to gather at Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site in Delhi. The protests started with a few hundred attendees but quickly grew, particularly after the activist Sonam Wangchuk announced an indefinite hunger strike in support of the protesters. By 20 July, as thousands of people marched towards the Indian parliament in Delhi, CJP protests had swelled in towns and cities across the country. A crackdown by security forces succeeded only in fueling greater outrage that brought more people out, and public pressure resulted in Pradhan’s resignation on 25 July. He was replaced by Pralhad Joshi, another acolyte of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi.
What started as a movement for Pradhan’s resignation had, by the time the CJP’s leaders called off the protests on 26 July, expanded its demands to include the replacement of the National Testing Agency with a National Testing Commission; a transparency and accountability law with an independent ombudsman; a legally enforceable Students’ Rights Charter; and compensation for the families of students who died by suicide after the leak. It also sought immunity for those who had shown up to the CJP protests and were facing police or legal action. The movement’s demands were broadly organised around a single animating principle: as the CJP spokesperson Vaishnavi Gaur described it, putting “students, not the bureaucracy, at the center of the examination system.” A month after the protests ended, all of the substantive demands for educational reform remain unmet, and the CJP has announced that “all measures necessary to secure the government’s fulfillment of its commitments will be on the table, including another round of peaceful nationwide agitation.”