A blog for everyone who has ever been unfriended over an election, uninvited over a WhatsApp forward, or un-loved over a vote. Written by a guy who has been watching this whole circus from Day One and has finally lost his patience.

Before You Read: A Disclaimer From My Side

Look, I’m going to be honest with you from the first line, because that’s the whole point of this blog.

I’ve been closely monitoring this protest from day one. Not from a newsroom, not from a party office, not from some think tank where people wear kurtas ironically. From my phone, my laptop, and my own two eyes — every livestream, every clip, every press conference, every dumbass panel debate about it. Day one. So when I say something here, it’s not because some anchor screamed it into my ear. It’s because I sat through this shit myself.

Second thing. I’m not left wing. I’m not right wing. And I’m not that fake “centrist” either — you know, the guy who says “both sides have a point” because he hasn’t read anything from either side. No. I’ve read both sides. And here’s my honest position, the position of crores of Indians who are too scared to say it out loud:

Sometimes I watch the left-wing guys make an argument and I go, “Bro… they’re right. This is actually correct.”

Sometimes I watch the right-wing guys make an argument and I go, “Bro… damn. THEY’RE right. This is actually correct.”

I have found both of them right. On different days. On different issues. Genuinely, honestly right.

And a lot of times — most times, if I’m being real — I watch both of them screaming at each other on my screen and I say: fuck both of you. I don’t give a shit about your team. Neither of you is my religion. I’m not wearing anyone’s jersey. I judge each issue like a normal human being with a functioning brain, and apparently in today’s India that makes me a rare species, somewhere between a snow leopard and an auto driver who goes by the meter.

One more thing before we start. At the end of this blog, I’ve listed my sources. Actual links. CNN, NPR, TIME, Wikipedia, ThePrint, even the Organiser — yes, the RSS-linked one, because I read EVERYTHING, that’s what “monitoring from day one” means. I’m putting the sources there specifically so that when this blog annoys you — and it will annoy you, I guarantee it, both wings, equally — you can’t do the laziest move in the Indian internet playbook and call me a “sold” journalist, a paid shill, some shiny sponsored shit. Nobody paid me. Nobody would WANT to pay me, that’s the tragedy. Go check the links. Fight the facts, not me.

Okay. Chai ready? Let’s go.

Prologue: A Judge, A Word, and Two Crore Angry Kids

Every great Indian story starts with someone saying something they really, really should not have said.

In May 2026, the Chief Justice of India — the top judge of this country, the guy whose whole job is choosing words carefully — compared unemployed youth and social media activists to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society.” Now in most countries, this would earn a strongly worded editorial and then die quietly, the way most strongly worded editorials do.

But this is India, baby. We don’t do quiet.

Within a day, a political communications guy named Abhijeet Dipke — a man who clearly understands that the Indian internet runs on exactly two fuels, outrage and comedy — founded something called the Cockroach Janta Party. CJP. Official tagline: “Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed.”

I saw it the day it launched, and I’ll admit it — I laughed. Because think about the genius of this for a second. He didn’t fight the insult. He ADOPTED it. Put the cockroach on a flag. It’s like your school bully calling you “motu” and you legally changing your name to Motu and then winning the school election. The insult becomes the identity, and the guy who threw the insult now looks like the dumbass.

And here’s the part the honourable judge maybe forgot about cockroaches: you cannot kill them. They survive everything. Nuclear winter. Chappals. Hit pieces. Prime-time debates. Baygon spray AND lathi charge.

By June, the joke had grown actual legs. Thousands of them. Marching to Jantar Mantar.

Part One: What Actually Happened (For Those Who Get Their News From Family WhatsApp Groups)

Let me give you the timeline, because I know half of you have only experienced this protest through forwarded videos with captions in ALL CAPS and seventeen exclamation marks, each caption claiming the exact opposite of the previous one. Your family group is not a news source. Your family group is a fiction festival.

The spark: The 2026 NEET exam — the medical entrance that decides whether lakhs of teenagers become doctors or become people who tell everyone at weddings “I almost became a doctor” — got its results voided after investigators found the paper had leaked. AGAIN. On top of that, CBSE’s on-screen marking irregularities — which is a very polite bureaucratic way of saying “we may have graded your child’s entire future incorrectly, oops, lol.”

Now imagine you’re nineteen. You’ve spent two years in a Kota hostel room the size of a cupboard, eating dal that tastes like regret, studying eleven hours a day, watching your parents quietly sell a piece of land or take a loan they never talk about at dinner. You walk into the hall on D-Day. And then you find out somebody’s nephew already had the paper last week.

That’s not politics. That’s daylight robbery of the young. That’s the kind of thing that has, tragically, driven students to suicide. And that grief — real, non-ideological, gut-level grief — is where this movement actually came from. Whatever garbage got attached to it later, the seed of it was real. I was watching. I know.

The escalation: On 6 June 2026, CJP held its first protest at Jantar Mantar, demanding the Education Minister’s resignation and actual exam reform. Student organisations joined. Crowds grew. Then on 28 June, Sonam Wangchuk — the real-life inspiration behind Phunsukh Wangdu, the actual “All Izz Well” guy — sat down at the protest site and started an indefinite hunger strike. Bro. When the 3 Idiots guy goes on hunger strike about your education system, the joke has officially stopped being a joke.

The boiling point: On 20 July, thousands marched toward Parliament during the monsoon session. Delhi Police had declared the march unlawful. What followed: tear gas, lathi charges, and by the police’s own count nearly 180 people injured — over a hundred security personnel and dozens of protesters. I watched those clips the night they dropped. Bruised teenagers. Bloodied faces. Kids holding up their wounds to the camera like report cards. The next day, the protesters came back to Jantar Mantar, rebuilt the camp that police had demolished, and sat down again. A senior union minister then met CJP representatives for all of TEN minutes — which, for context, is less time than it takes to get a table at Haldiram’s on a Sunday.

Somewhere in between: a woman chanting religious-political slogans threw ink on Dipke’s face. Opposition leaders got detained at solidarity protests. Sixteen metro stations shut. Bollywood celebrities started arriving at 2 AM for solidarity selfies, because nothing says “I stand with students” like perfect lighting at a protest site.

So that’s where we are this week: an ongoing sit-in, a minister who refuses to resign, a hunger-striking legend, a government that took a month to say hello, and a country watching all of this and doing what we do best.

Which brings me to the actual subject of this blog. Because the moment those kids sat down at Jantar Mantar, this country did NOT ask, “Is the exam system broken?”

This country asked, “Wait — but which side are these kids on?”

And that question, my friends, is the disease.

Interlude: The Two Names Nobody Is Chanting (So Let Me Chant Them)

Now here’s something I noticed around week two of monitoring this thing, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Thousands of slogans at Jantar Mantar. Resignation demands. Effigies. Hashtags. And in this entire festival of accountability, do you know whose names I almost NEVER heard? The people who actually run the agency that conducts the damn exam.

So let me do the protest’s homework for them, free of cost, sources attached:

The exam at the centre of this storm — NEET — is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). The Director General of the NTA is Shri Abhishek Singh, IAS. As DG, he manages the day-to-day administrative operations of the agency and serves as its Member Secretary. Above him, the overall organisational chairperson of NTA’s Governing Body is Prof. (Retd.) Pradeep Kumar Joshi — a former Chairman of the UPSC, i.e., a man whose previous job was literally running India’s most secure examination. This is not secret information. It’s on NTA’s own website. Took me two minutes to find. Two minutes that apparently nobody at any podium, any TV studio, or any protest stage could spare.

Think about how insane this is. If a plane crashes, we ask questions of the airline AND the pilot AND the aviation regulator. But a national exam crashes — twice, in multiple ways — and the entire country’s conversation instantly teleports three levels up to the Prime Minister, skipping the actual cockpit entirely. The minister should absolutely answer for it; the buck does stop with the political leadership, no argument. But the agency whose ONE job is conducting secure exams? The administrative machinery that had operational custody of that paper? It’s ALSO their failure. Institutionally, professionally, specifically theirs. And they’ve been allowed to stand quietly behind the political dust cloud while everyone screams at the podium in front of it.

And WHY does this happen? Because we’ve made everything so political that accountability itself now has a party symbol. Watch the pattern with your own eyes, because I have: the moment something fishy happens in this country, one entire ecosystem will find the BJP in it within four seconds — leak in the exam? BJP. Pothole outside your house? BJP. Rain on your wedding day? Somehow, BJP. But when something genuinely goes right — an exam conducted cleanly, an initiative that works, an institution that delivers — the same people will develop sudden, total amnesia. Credit? What credit? Never heard of her.

And that, my friends, is hypocrisy with a capital H. You cannot run a system where one side gets blamed for everything and credited for nothing — and the mirror version is equally garbage, by the way, where the other side’s fans credit their guys for everything and blame them for nothing, including things like the monsoon and India winning matches. Both are the same broken scoreboard, held upside down.

Real accountability is boring. It’s unglamorous. It doesn’t trend. It means naming the DG and the chairperson and the exam-conduct machinery and asking dry, procedural, snore-inducing questions about custody chains and printing presses and cyber security audits. It means holding the minister responsible AND the agency responsible AND being willing to say “well done” when the same people fix it. A protest that only knows the Prime Minister’s name isn’t doing accountability. It’s doing theatre with an accountability costume. The students deserve the boring version. The boring version is the one that actually gets papers un-leaked.

Part Two: The Disease Nobody Diagnosed — Ideological Untouchability

I’ve been trying to find a name for this thing we do. This thing where we scan every person, every protest, every movie, every joke, every samosa stall for its political alignment before we allow ourselves to have feelings about it.

I’m calling it Ideological Untouchability.

Yes, I know that’s a heavy word to borrow. That’s exactly why I’m borrowing it. Because we are a country that spent decades fighting the idea that some people are impure to touch, only to invent a shiny new version of the same shit: some people are impure to listen to.

Ideological Untouchability is the belief that a person who votes differently from you is not just wrong — they are contaminated. Their opinions are contaminated. Their facts are contaminated. Their jokes are contaminated. If they say the sky is blue, you will first check whether the sky has any known political affiliations before agreeing.

You’ve seen the symptoms. Check yourself against this list — self-diagnosis is free:

Symptom 1: The Pre-Screening. Before you can enjoy anything — a stand-up special, a film, a news article, a protest — you first Google the creator’s politics. Your side? Brilliant, a masterpiece, everyone must watch. Other side? Propaganda, garbage, boycott. The content itself is irrelevant. We don’t consume content anymore; we consume affiliations.

Symptom 2: The Guilt-By-Association Olympics. If a person you hate supports a cause, the cause is now cancelled. Doesn’t matter if the cause is “children deserve fair exams” or “water should be wet.” Wrong anchor covered it? Dead to me. Wrong actor tweeted it? Dead to me. At this rate, if the wrong person endorses oxygen, half of India will hold its breath out of pure principle and die winning.

Symptom 3: The Family Firewall. This is the saddest one. Parents losing actual sleep — not because their kid is failing exams or doing drugs, but because their kid might be developing the wrong opinions. “Beta, who are these friends of yours? Are they… you know… those types?” Uncles running ideological background checks on prospective sons-in-law. Rishta ads that might as well say: “Wanted: fair, convent-educated, politically compatible.”

Symptom 4: The Conversion Fantasy. Deep down, everyone infected with this disease believes their life mission is to make everyone else think EXACTLY like them. Not understand others. Not co-exist. CONVERT. Every family dinner is a mission field. Every WhatsApp group is a battlefield. You don’t want your friend to have his own view; you want a photocopy of your brain walking around in his body. That’s not friendship, bro. That’s cloning with extra steps.

And here’s the diagnosis nobody wants to hear: this disease is perfectly, beautifully, symmetrically bipartisan. The left has it. The right has it. The centre has it too, and the centre doesn’t even officially exist in India anymore — it’s just a bus stop where people wait before boarding one of the two buses that will spend the whole journey abusing the other bus.

Part Three: How a Cockroach Caught the Disease — The CJP’s Ideology Problem

Now let’s talk about what happened to the CJP itself, because I watched this happen in real time, and it is the perfect case study of Ideological Untouchability eating a movement alive from both ends — like two people fighting over one dosa until the dosa is on the floor and nobody eats.

The Open Door Policy (And Who Walked Through It)

When CJP started, its greatest strength was its shamelessness about being for EVERYONE. Lazy people. Unemployed people. Angry students. Tired parents. The whole “Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed” branding was a masterstroke, because unemployment, unlike ideology, does not check your voter slip. A jobless engineer in Nagpur and a jobless engineer in Kerala are having the exact same 3 AM panic attack, I promise you.

So CJP opened the doors. Everyone in. Come one, come all. Bring your tricolour, bring your books, bring your flowers — that was the literal instruction from their own spokesperson.

And people came. Including — here’s where the national disease kicked in — the organised left. Student federations with decades of protest experience, red flags neatly folded in their bags, showed up to march with the cockroaches. Which, purely logistically, makes sense. First big protest of your life? You call the people who’ve been protesting professionally since before you were born. It’s like calling your one friend who’s attended twelve weddings to help plan yours.

But the MOMENT those particular flags appeared in the crowd, a huge section of right-leaning India — including lakhs of people who were GENUINELY furious about the paper leak — did an instant 180.

“Oh. OH. So THIS is what it is. It’s THEM. It’s a THEIR protest now.”

And just like that, parents whose own children write these exams decided the exam leak was no longer their problem, because the people complaining loudest about it were ideologically untouchable.

Read that again slowly. People abandoned their own children’s cause because they didn’t like who else was standing in the queue.

That’s not politics. That’s a mental health emergency wearing a flag.

But The Other Side Is Not Innocent Either — Sit Down, Your Plate Is Coming

Before my left-leaning readers start a smug little victory lap — sit your ass down. This is a full-course meal and everybody eats.

CJP made a very specific, very public promise: this is NOT a religious protest, NOT a political protest, NOT a casteist protest. This is about students. About exams. About the future. They even released an approved slogan list — an actual curated menu of four permitted chants — precisely because they knew one wrong slogan would become the only thing anyone discussed for a week. That was smart. That was self-aware. That was a movement that understood exactly which country it was operating in.

And then… the mission creep began.

Because when you invite everybody, everybody brings their own luggage. And some of that luggage was full of slogans and speeches that had NOTHING to do with NEET. Clips started circulating — “Azadi” chants that spike half the internet’s blood pressure on sight, flag-handling controversies, and a strain of rhetoric taking direct aim at “Brahminwad,” with sections of the crowd and its online cheer squad going after upper castes generally and Brahmins specifically.

Now hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. I know that’s asking a lot of the Indian internet, but try:

Thought one: Caste discrimination is real, it is ongoing, and the anger about it is legitimate. Anyone who tells you caste is “over” in India has never read a matrimonial column.

Thought two: If your protest’s official position is “we are not about caste,” and then the mics at your protest are being used to abuse an entire community of people for their birth — you have broken your own promise, and you’ve handed your opponents a loaded gun, gift-wrapped, with a thank-you card.

Here’s the simple test, and it works in every direction: take the sentence being shouted, swap the community name with any other community name, and check whether you’d still call it “social justice” or whether you’d call it “hate speech.” If the sentence is only acceptable when it targets one particular group, it was never a principle. It was a grudge wearing a principle’s clothes.

Picture a nineteen-year-old Brahmin kid from a lower-middle-class family. Father’s a temple priest earning less per month than a Zomato rider. Same coaching cupboard, same leaked paper, same stolen future. He came to Jantar Mantar because he got robbed. And then he stood in that crowd and heard, over a loudspeaker, that people like him were the actual problem.

You know what he did? He went home. And he took his story with him. And that story is now being narrated at a hundred dinner tables as “see, I told you what these protests really are.”

Every unnecessary slogan converted an ally into an enemy. Congratulations, everyone. Fantastic teamwork. Truly.

The Papad-Poli Economy: The People Who Came For Themselves

Now this section — this one is mine. This is not from CNN or NPR. This is from me sitting through week after week of footage, and you can take it or leave it.

Because a protest this size doesn’t just attract believers. It attracts entrepreneurs. In Hindi we say it perfectly: “apne papad belne aaye hain” — they’ve come to roll their own papads. In Marathi, even better: “raajkiya poli bhajayla aalele aahet” — they’ve come to bake their political poli on someone else’s fire. Every language in India has this phrase, by the way, which tells you how ancient and how reliable this species is.

I watched them arrive in waves, and I’ll give you the full taxonomy:

The Career Launchers. Small-time influencers who discovered that a protest is basically free studio lighting. Ring light? No need — tear gas has a lovely cinematic haze. These people weren’t protesting the exam system; they were auditioning. Every reel captioned “the revolution will not be televised” was, in fact, being televised, by them, in 4K, with three hashtags and a discount code.

The Political Poli-Bakers. Party workers of every flavour — and I mean EVERY flavour, don’t kid yourself — who saw a leaderless youth movement the way a hungry man sees an unattended buffet. Some came to co-opt it, some came to discredit it, some came just to be photographed near it. Even CJP itself publicly accused outsiders of being sent in to disrupt and stage provocations. When the protest is accusing people of infiltrating the protest, you know the poli is being baked at industrial scale.

The NGO-Panel-Seminar Circuit. The professionals of outrage. Same faces, every protest, any cause, fully interchangeable. Farmers today, students tomorrow, whatever’s trending on Thursday. Their commitment is real in a way, I suppose, the way a wedding band’s love for the couple is real.

And then — the biggest group, and the one nobody talks about honestly — the people who simply have nothing else to do. I’ve watched enough hours of this thing to say it with my chest: a LOT of the crowd was just… there. Not for justice, not for politics, not even for content. Just bored. Unemployed guys for whom the protest became the day’s plan. Uncles for whom it was an evening walk with extra drama. Students who came because their friends came, who came because THEIR friends came, all the way down until you find one guy who actually read the demands. For thousands of people, Jantar Mantar became a free festival — food stalls nearby, music, chanting, celebrity spotting, main-character energy for everyone.

And you know what? I’m not even fully condemning that last group. In a country where the trigger for this whole movement was a judge calling the unemployed “cockroaches,” it is almost POETIC that the unemployed showed up with literally nothing better to do. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s the entire point wearing chappals. But let’s not romanticise it either — a crowd is not a movement, and footfall is not conviction. Half of Jantar Mantar was fighting for the future of Indian education, and the other half was there the way people are at a Sunday mela, and from a drone shot you cannot tell the difference. The media counted all of them as revolutionaries. The government counted all of them as troublemakers. I counted them as what they were: India. All of it. The sincere, the scheming, and the strolling, in one frame.

The Celebrity Problem: When Your Protest Becomes a Red Carpet

And then there were the celebrities.

Sonam Wangchuk on hunger strike? That’s moral weight. That man spent his life building schools in Ladakh at altitudes where most of us would need oxygen just to hold a grudge. When he fasts, it means something.

But then the orbit expanded. Swara Bhasker showed up in support. Huma Qureshi and Saqib Saleem did their 2 AM solidarity march. Kunal Kamra’s name — a man who cannot order a vada pav without triggering three FIRs and a state assembly debate — started floating around the movement’s supporters and amplifiers. And with every new famous face, the protest’s centre of gravity shifted a little further from “students cheated by a leaked paper” and a little closer to “the usual cast of characters, episode 4,752.”

Now, to be fair to these people as individuals: they have every right to support any cause. Swara Bhasker at Jantar Mantar is not a crime — the woman has attended so many Jantar Mantar protests she should honestly get a loyalty card, tenth dharna free. And Kamra’s entire job description is “annoy the powerful”; say what you want, the man commits to the bit even when the bit comes with legal fees.

But here’s the strategic reality that the CJP organisers, sharp as they are, surely understood — and this is the part that matters:

In a country with Ideological Untouchability, every controversial supporter you accept is a tax you pay in credibility with the other half of the country.

The moment certain faces appeared in the frame, crores of Indians stopped hearing “NEET paper leak” and started hearing “ah yes, the same gang again.” The message didn’t change. The MESSENGERS changed — and in India we shoot the message to punish the messenger. It’s our national sport, right after cricket and honking.

If your movement’s entire moral power comes from “we are ordinary students, not political players,” then every professionally political face on your stage is a withdrawal from your moral bank account. Is that unfair? YES. Completely unfair. It’s also TRUE, and movements don’t get to choose the country they operate in.

Those students needed one thing: for the whole country to look at Jantar Mantar and see its own children. Instead, thanks to the imported cast, half the country looked at it and saw its least favourite TV panel. What a waste, yaar. What a waste.

The Elephant at Jantar Mantar: The R-Word Nobody Touched

Okay. Deep breath. Because now I’m going to touch the thing that nobody at that protest touched, and half of you are going to hate me for it, and the other half are going to hate me for how I do it. Perfect. That means I’m doing it right.

If this protest is genuinely, purely, 100% “for the students” — as claimed on every banner — then explain to me why one of the biggest sources of student pain in this country was treated like it doesn’t exist. Weeks of speeches about fairness in exams. Marathon monologues about merit being stolen by paper leaks. And not ONE serious conversation about the fairness of what happens AFTER the exam: the cutoff system.

Let me paint you the picture that plays out every single admission season, in lakhs of homes, and that I’ve personally watched destroy kids I know.

There’s a poor kid. Genuinely poor — the kind of poor where the family income would qualify for EWS on paper, but he’s sitting in the open category pool where the general cutoff is, say, 85%. He works like an animal and scores 70%. Phenomenal, given that he studied under one bulb with the whole house’s noise around him. And the system looks at his 70% and says: fuck off, not enough.

Same exam. Same year. There’s another kid from a genuinely wealthy family — big house, personal tutors, foreign vacations, the works — who scores 45%. But he holds an SC/ST certificate, and the cutoff for his category is 40%. He’s in. Seat confirmed. Sweets distributed.

Now that first kid — and there are LAKHS of him, every single year — didn’t lose to a leaked paper. He lost to a birth certificate. Not his marks. Not his effort. The category he happened to be born into, which has exactly nothing to do with his academics, decided his future. And these kids don’t trend, they don’t get candle marches, they just quietly downgrade their dreams — wrong college, wrong field, wrong city — and carry that “what if” for the rest of their lives. Some of them are reading this right now. You know who you are. I see you.

Now — and this is where I do the thing this blog always does, so both wings stay in the room — let me steelman the other side, because I’ve read them too and they’re not making it up: reservation was never designed as a poverty scheme. It was designed as a representation scheme, an answer to centuries of documented, brutal exclusion — communities kept out of education entirely, not just out of good colleges. Caste discrimination is not a history chapter; it’s in today’s newspaper. That argument is real, and if you pretend it isn’t, you’re doing the same denial you accuse the other side of.

BUT. And this is a but the size of Jantar Mantar itself.

If your movement claims to be about students and fairness, then the conversation about HOW we do affirmative action — why a millionaire’s son gets the concession while a labourer’s son in the open category gets the door — why income refuses to enter the equation seriously — why the creamy layer logic applies in some places and vanishes in others — that conversation belongs AT a students’ protest more than it belongs anywhere else on Earth. And it was nowhere. Total silence. A protest that will happily scream about “Brahminwad” into a microphone suddenly develops laryngitis when the topic is whether a rich kid should outrank a poor kid at 45 versus 70. That’s not principle. That’s a menu. You’ve chosen which unfairness is fashionable to discuss.

And here’s the part that genuinely makes me want to throw my phone. When you raise this — politely, with numbers, with real kids’ stories — you know the reply you get? “Oh, but why aren’t you talking about caste-based hatred? Caste-based murders?”

Bro. BRO. We are discussing entrance exam cutoffs for seventeen-year-olds and your counter-argument is homicide? What is this logic? You seriously think these 12th-standard schmucks — kids whose greatest crime to date is hiding their marks from their parents and their phone from everyone — are out here committing caste atrocities? These are children comparing percentiles, not perpetrators. Caste violence is real, it is horrifying, and it deserves its own full-volume outrage AND police action AND fast courts — I’ll march for that too, tell me where. But using murders as a conversational shield to avoid discussing whether a cutoff system is fair to poor kids? That’s not fighting injustice. That’s using one injustice as a bodyguard for another. Two things can be wrong at the same time. This country’s biggest intellectual disability is believing that acknowledging problem B is a betrayal of problem A.

So yes — I’m calling it what it is. Hypocrisy. A protest about stolen futures that refuses to discuss ALL the ways futures get stolen isn’t a students’ movement. It’s a curated playlist. And the kids who fell through the cutoff cracks noticed the silence. Trust me. They always notice.

Part Four: A Field Guide to India’s Two Great Tribes (Roasted Equally, As Promised)

I promised both wings will enjoy this blog, so let me now insult you both with the tenderness of a family member. This is the buffet section. Everyone eats. No one leaves hungry or un-offended.

To The Right-Wing Reader

My dear right-leaning friend. You love this country. Genuinely. You get actual goosebumps during the national anthem, you know Vande Mataram beyond the first line (rare!), and your heart is in the right place — which is more than can be said for your WhatsApp forwards, whose facts are frequently in no place at all.

But here’s your report card on this protest: you saw students — many of whose politics you’d agree with on nine out of ten issues — protesting about something that affects YOUR kids, YOUR nephews, YOUR coaching-class EMIs. And your first instinct was to scan the crowd for red flags like a metal detector at airport security. Found one, declared the whole thing a conspiracy, put the phone down, and went back to defending an exam system that just leaked a paper onto your own child’s head.

Brother. The paper LEAKED. Your outrage should not need an ideology certificate. When your house is on fire, you do not ask the fire brigade who they voted for.

Also — and I say this with love — for a group that talks constantly about how tough and civilisationally ancient we are, you get emotionally destroyed by a comedian’s song parody with remarkable speed. Five thousand years of civilisation, undone by one dumbass with a mic and a smirk. Build some resistance, yaar. Your ancestors survived invasions. You can survive a punchline.

To The Left-Wing Reader

Now you, my Marx-adjacent friend. Come here. You care about the marginalised. You show up. You have stamina — you’ve been protesting since before protests had hashtags, and there’s real value in that muscle memory.

But here’s your report card: you have a gift — a genuinely supernatural gift — for finding a movement with 90% public support and lovingly whittling it down to 22%. A student protest about exam leaks lands in your lap. The most universally sympathetic cause in the entire country. A cause that unites the Sanghi uncle and the comrade aunty, because BOTH of their kids write NEET. And within weeks, elements of your ecosystem had turned portions of it into the greatest-hits album. Azadi chants. Brahminwad speeches. The full playlist, uncut.

You cannot help yourselves. You’re like that friend who’s invited to a birthday party and starts a debate about the caste politics of the cake. Sometimes the cake is just cake, Comrade. Sometimes the protest is just about the exam. Let the cake be cake. Let the students have their protest.

And your version of Ideological Untouchability is exactly as strong as theirs — you just use fancier vocabulary for it. They say “anti-national,” you say “problematic.” They excommunicate, you “call out.” They check for red flags, you check for saffron ones. Same disease, different pharmacy.

The Final Scoreboard

Right wing: abandoned their own children’s cause over the company it kept. Left wing: grabbed the mic at someone else’s funeral to promote their mixtape. The freelancers: rolled their papads, baked their polis, shot their reels. The government: took a month to send someone for a ten-minute chat. The students: tear-gassed.

Everybody played their role perfectly. Nobody won. The paper is still leaked. The minister is still the minister. And the kids are still sitting at Jantar Mantar wondering how a protest about physics, chemistry and biology became a national debate about everything EXCEPT physics, chemistry and biology.

Part Five: “Country First” — What It Actually Means (Not What Your Favourite Anchor Screams)

Everyone in India says “nation first.” Printed on posters, shouted at rallies, tattooed on biceps. But watch what people actually DO, and the real order of operations is:

1. My ideology
2. My ideology’s leaders
3. My ideology’s celebrities
4. My ideology’s WhatsApp admins
5. A large gap
6. Another large gap
7. The country
8. The actual human beings living in the country

“Country first” has become a thing we scream AT other people, never a standard we apply TO ourselves. The right thinks country-first means the left should shut up. The left thinks country-first is a dog whistle. And in the middle of this screaming match, a generation of students is sleeping on a pavement because the ONE issue both wings could have agreed on — that a leaked exam is a robbery of the young — got fed into the ideology shredder like everything else in this country.

Here is my radical, dangerous, extremist proposal for what “country first” actually means:

When the issue is real, you show up regardless of who else showed up.

The paper leaked? You’re angry — whether the person next to you holds a red flag, a saffron flag, a blue flag, or a Swiggy bag. A student died by suicide after an exam scandal? You grieve — without first checking the kid’s Instagram for political content. Police lathi-charged teenagers? You wince — even if the teenagers’ playlist annoys the shit out of you.

And it cuts the other way too: when the protest YOU support starts abusing communities it promised not to abuse, you say so — from INSIDE the protest. Loyalty to a cause is not measured by how loudly you defend its mistakes. That’s not loyalty. That’s fandom with extra steps.

A country is not a football team. You are allowed — encouraged, even — to think the referee made a good call against your own side. I know. Shocking. Sit down. Drink some water.

Part Six: The Gully Cricket Theory of Friendship

Let me tell you about the best friends I ever made. You have this story too. Everyone does. That’s the whole point of telling it.

I was maybe eight. There was a kid in my colony — let’s call him the fast bowler, because that is genuinely ALL I knew about him. That was his entire biodata as far as I was concerned: fast bowler, owns a real leather ball, mother makes unbelievable food, once cried when India lost but we never spoke of it again. Code of honour.

You know what I did NOT know about him? Anything else. I didn’t know what his father did. I didn’t know what his family worshipped, or IF they worshipped, or which button anyone in his house pressed in the voting booth. I didn’t know his caste. I could not have told you his surname under police interrogation. His surname was irrelevant data. It was not on the scoreboard.

Our friendship formed on exactly three criteria: (1) Can you play? (2) Are you fun? (3) Will you lie to my mother about where we were? Perfect three out of three. Friendship granted. Lifetime membership. No renewal fees.

And here’s what I want you to actually sit with: that friendship was possible only because we were too ignorant to ruin it. We didn’t give a shit about left wing and right wing. We didn’t KNOW about left wing and right wing. We thought “wing” was a fielding position. We had no idea the adults around us had already sorted the whole world into Us and Them, complete with membership rules and excommunication procedures. We were too busy fighting about the things that actually mattered — like whether the ball was out or whether it hit the wall first, a dispute that once lasted three days and nearly required UN intervention.

We didn’t “respect each other’s ideologies.” We didn’t HAVE ideologies. And so we accidentally achieved the thing every adult in this country claims to want and none of us can manage: we took people exactly as they were.

Then we grew up. And growing up in India means being handed, one by one, a full set of filters. Caste filter. Religion filter. Language filter. And now the newest model, the premium 4K ultra-HD filter: the Ideology Filter. Once installed, it runs automatically on every human you meet. Friend request from a school friend? Scan his timeline first. Old roommate posted something? Recalculate the friendship. Cousin voted for Them? Downgrade from “family” to “extended family” to “we only meet at weddings” to “we only meet at funerals” to “not even at funerals, someone will send me a screenshot.”

Somewhere out there is YOUR fast bowler. You probably don’t talk anymore. And if you’re honest with yourself, there’s a decent chance the reason isn’t distance or time. It’s that one of you posted something in 2019 and the other one saw it.

An eight-year-old you would be ashamed of both of you. An eight-year-old you would say: “But can he still bowl? Then what the hell is the problem?”

Part Seven: Why Ideology Became India’s Favourite Religion (A Slightly Serious Interlude)

Okay. Putting the comedy hammer down for a few minutes, because this part deserves it. WHY did this happen to us? Why is Ideological Untouchability spreading faster than a wedding rumour?

Reason one: Ideology filled a vacancy. Humans need tribes. Ancient wiring — we survived by knowing who was “us.” For generations that need was met by village, jati, language, mohalla — imperfect, often cruel systems, but locally rooted ones. Then we urbanised, migrated, atomised. Millions of us now live in cities where we don’t know our neighbour’s name. Into that loneliness walked ideology, offering the full tribal package: an identity, an enemy, a uniform (your social media bio), daily rituals (the morning outrage scroll), and a congregation (the group chat). Ideology in India today isn’t a set of policy preferences. It’s a replacement family. That’s why attacking someone’s political position feels, to them, like attacking their relatives — because functionally, it IS their relatives now. Some people talk to their ideology group chat more than they talk to their actual mother.

Reason two: Your anger is a business model. Your outrage is a product. Manufactured, packaged, and sold with the efficiency of an Amul supply chain. TV channels found decades of profit in the format “two people scream, nation watches.” Social media platforms found that anger keeps you scrolling roughly three times longer than agreement does. Political parties found that a voter who HATES the other side is far more loyal than one who merely LIKES their side — hate has better customer retention than love, ask any marketing guy. And nobody in this entire pipeline makes one single rupee when you say, “You know what, that person I disagree with made a fair point.” That sentence is commercially worthless. So the machine is calibrated to make sure you never, ever say it. You think you’re angry because of the news. Bro, the news exists because you’re angry. You’re not the customer. You’re the product AND the raw material. Congratulations.

Reason three: We confused disagreement with disrespect. Somewhere along the line we lost the software update that lets two people hold opposite views and still share one plate of pani puri. In the same friend circle, “your favourite cricketer is overrated” is fun Friday-night banter, but “your favourite politician is overrated” is a friendship-ending event. Same structure. Same stakes — ZERO, by the way; neither the cricketer nor the politician knows you exist, and neither of them is coming to your funeral. But one is banter and the other is blasphemy, because we’ve let political identity fuse with personal identity until there’s no gap left between “you criticised my opinion” and “you criticised my soul.”

Reason four: Fear of contagion. This is the one playing out inside homes right now, and honestly, it’s the reason this whole blog exists. Parents today monitor their children’s ideological development with the intensity previously reserved for board exam results. “Beta is following WHOM on Instagram?” Aunties comparing notes: “My son has become a leftist, where did we go wrong?” Uncles staging interventions: “That liberal college ruined her.” And the exact mirror image on the other side: “My father has become a WhatsApp uncle, he shares fake Einstein quotes about Nehru.” Each side treats the other’s ideology like a communicable disease — one wrong podcast and your child is lost forever.

You know what that fear actually reveals? We no longer trust our own loved ones to think. We don’t say, “My daughter is intelligent; she’ll weigh ideas and land somewhere reasonable.” We say, “My daughter must be quarantined from wrong ideas, because ideas are stronger than she is.” Which is insulting, if you think about it. Your daughter survived the Indian education system, Indian traffic, and Indian weddings. She can survive a differing opinion.

And the ultimate irony? The harder families push, the faster kids run the other way. NOTHING radicalises a twenty-year-old like being told what to think by someone yelling. If you actually want your children to share your worldview, the best strategy was always the boring one: be a person worth becoming. Kids don’t inherit lectures. They inherit examples.

Part Eight: A Practical Detox Plan (Because Complaining Without Solutions Is Also a National Sport)

Fine. Diagnosis complete. Treatment plan below. No hashtags, no candle marches, no LinkedIn post about your “journey.” Just small, private acts of rebellion against your own programming:

One. Steal an argument from the enemy. Once a month, find the smartest person on the OTHER side — not the clown; every side has clowns, and picking the clown is cheating — the genuinely smart one. Read or listen to their best case. You don’t have to agree. You just have to be able to repeat their argument accurately enough that they’d say, “Yes, that’s what I believe.” If you can’t do that, you don’t actually disagree with them. You disagree with the cartoon of them your side drew for you. I do this regularly, and I’ll tell you the result: sometimes the left guy is right, sometimes the right guy is right, and knowing WHEN is the entire skill of being a citizen.

Two. Judge the sentence, not the speaker. When you see a statement, try this deranged experiment: check whether it’s TRUE before checking who said it. I know. Revolutionary stuff. If a person you despise says the exam system is broken — the exam system is still broken. Truth doesn’t change its properties based on which mouth it comes out of. This is not a compromise of your values. This is just how facts work.

Three. Protect one relationship from politics. Permanently. Pick one person you love who votes wrong. Declare — unilaterally if needed — a permanent demilitarised zone. You will discuss cricket, food, gossip, health, memories, and the weather. You will NEVER discuss the news. This is not cowardice. This is recognising that your bond with this person predates and outranks every government that will ever be elected. Prime Ministers come and go. Your childhood fast bowler is irreplaceable.

Four. When your side is wrong, say it in your OWN group chat. Anyone can criticise the enemy — costs nothing, earns likes. Real spine is telling your OWN people: “Yaar, this one was wrong, and defending it makes us look like dumbasses.” One honest sentence inside your own tribe is worth a thousand screamed at the other one. If the CJP crowd had loudly policed its own casteist slogans, and if right-wing parents had loudly said “we support these kids even if we hate some of their friends,” this entire protest would look completely different today. Both had the chance. Both chose the comfortable silence. And here we are.

Five. Remember the leaked paper. Whenever you’re about to sort a national issue into Team Us vs Team Them, ask the eight-year-old-you question: who does this actually affect? The NEET leak hit Hindu kids, Muslim kids, Brahmin kids, Dalit kids, left kids, right kids — and, the biggest group of all, kids who have never had a political thought in their lives because they were too busy memorising the Krebs cycle. The paper did not check anyone’s ideology before betraying them. Neither should your outrage.

Conclusion: The Ball Doesn’t Ask Who’s Bowling

So here we are. The students are still at Jantar Mantar. The cockroach flag is still flying — dented by ink, tear gas, lathis, papad-rollers, poli-bakers, and worst of all, by its own supporters’ inability to stay on message. The government is still doing the governmental equivalent of “seen at 11:43 PM.” And the rest of us are still watching our own children’s protest and asking whose side they’re on.

Why are ideologies a concern in India? NOT because ideologies exist. Every thinking society has them, and it should. Left and right, at their best, are just two hands trying to hold the same country — one hand worried we’ll forget the weak, the other worried we’ll forget ourselves. A nation genuinely needs both hands. Try clapping with one, see how the wedding goes.

Ideologies become a disease only when they stop being tools for thinking and become substitutes for thinking. The moment your ideology starts doing your judging FOR you — pre-approving your friends, pre-screening your outrage, pre-writing your opinions — you haven’t adopted a worldview. A worldview has adopted YOU. And it is not a loving parent. It will happily eat your relatives, your friendships, your neighbours, and eventually your own children’s exam papers, and call every meal a victory.

That’s why I keep my position, and I’ll say it one last time for the people in the back: sometimes the left is right. Sometimes the right is right. I’ve checked both, issue by issue, from day one of this protest and long before it. And a lot of the time — fuck both of them, honestly — because both of them would rather win the argument than fix the exam. My loyalty is to the kid in the Kota cupboard, not to anyone’s flag. If that makes me homeless in Indian politics, then good. The homeless see the whole street.

The kids at Jantar Mantar had it right at the start, the same way we all had it right at eight years old, before the filters got installed. Their opening premise was the purest political statement made in this country in years: we are the lazy and unemployed, we are everyone, and the paper leaked on all of us equally. No caste. No religion. No wing. Just the scoreboard.

Then the adults arrived — with their flags, their slogans, their celebrities, their papads and their polis and their boycotts — and did to the protest what we’ve done to everything else: demanded it pick a side before we’d agree it deserved justice.

Somewhere in your past there’s a fast bowler with a real leather ball, and the two of you built something out of nothing but shared afternoons — no ideology check, no surname check, no timeline scan. You were capable of it once. And it wasn’t innocence, actually. It was CLARITY. You judged people by whether they showed up, played fair, and shared their tiffin. Honestly? Still the best political framework this country has ever produced. Better than anything the left or right has published. Someone should put it in a manifesto.

The country doesn’t need you to abandon your ideology. Keep it. Wear it. Argue for it — loudly, at length, with charts if you must. The country just needs you to remember that the person on the other side of the argument is a countryman first and an opponent a distant second. That your child holding a different opinion is proof you raised a thinker, not a traitor. That a protest can deserve your support even when its guest list annoys you — and deserve your criticism even when its cause is yours.

The ball doesn’t ask who’s bowling. The exam paper didn’t ask who was appearing. The lathi didn’t ask who it was hitting.

Maybe our outrage — and our love — should be equally bad at asking.

Now go call your fast bowler. You know exactly who I mean. Don’t check his timeline first.

If this blog offended you — good, check which paragraph offended you and you’ll know which wing you’re on. If both halves offended you equally, even better: you might just be Indian first. Share it in the family group and watch the fireworks. Entry free. Popcorn not included.

Sources (So You Can’t Call Me a Sold, Shiny Shit)

I told you at the start and I’m repeating it at the end: everything factual in this blog — the CJI’s “cockroach” remark, the founding of CJP, the NEET 2026 result cancellation, the CBSE marking mess, Wangchuk’s hunger strike from 28 June, the 20 July “Sansad Chalo” march, the ~180 injured figure, the ten-minute ministerial meeting, the ink attack, the approved four-slogan list, the Azadi slogan controversy, the celebrity appearances, the metro station closures, CJP’s own “outsiders sent to disrupt us” allegation, the names and roles of the NTA leadership — comes from the reporting below. I have deliberately mixed international outlets, Indian outlets, left-leaning outlets, and right-leaning outlets, because if you only read one team’s newspapers, you’re not informed, you’re subscribed.

The opinions, the jokes, the papad-poli taxonomy, and the gully cricket philosophy are 100% mine. Nobody paid for them. Trust me, I checked my account.

1. Wikipedia — “2026 Delhi Jantar Mantar protests” — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Delhi_Jantar_Mantar_protests
2. Wikipedia — “Cockroach Janta Party” — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_Janta_Party
3. CNN — “India’s CJP protests: Why Gen-Z’s political fury is boiling over in Delhi” (22 July 2026) — cnn.com/2026/07/22/india/india-cockroach-party-protest-anger-intl-hnk
4. TIME — “What Is the Youth-Led ‘Cockroach Movement’ Staging Mass Protests in India?” (22 July 2026) — time.com/article/2026/07/22/india-cockroach-janta-party-protest-movement
5. NPR — “India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach People’s Party’ started as satire but is serious about change” (20 July 2026) — npr.org/2026/07/20/nx-s1-5889515/india-gen-z-cockroach-party-protests
6. NPR — “India’s youth-led Cockroach movement vows to continue protest after police crackdown” (21 July 2026) — npr.org/2026/07/21/g-s1-134722
7. Al Jazeera — “‘Cockroach Janta Party’: Top Indian judge’s comment sparks satire, protest” (20 May 2026) — aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/20
8. ThePrint — “4 slogans cleared by CJP for protesters to chant at Jantar Mantar” (July 2026) — theprint.in/feature/2993521
9. Organiser — “From Azadi slogans to disrespect of national flag: Inside the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar” (7 June 2026) — organiser.org/2026/06/07/357004
10. Gulf News — “What is India’s Cockroach Janta Party and why is it exploding online” (May 2026) — gulfnews.com/world/asia/india
11. Onmanorama — “CJP accuses BJP of sending ‘outsiders’ to disrupt Jantar Mantar protest, 16 Delhi Metro stations shut” (23 July 2026) — onmanorama.com/news/india/2026/07/23
12. The Tribune — “From Jantar Mantar to social media, Gen Z gives CJP protest a viral twist” (July 2026) — tribuneindia.com/news/india
13. National Testing Agency (official website) — “Governing Body” — nta.ac.in/governing — for the names of DG Shri Abhishek Singh, IAS and Governing Body Chairperson Prof. (Retd.) Pradeep Kumar Joshi
14. Bollywood Bubble — “Huma Qureshi joins CJP Jantar Mantar protest with Saqib Saleem at 2 AM” (July 2026) — bollywoodbubble.com/bollywood-news

Yes, I read the Organiser AND the international press AND ThePrint for the same story. That’s what monitoring from day one actually looks like. It’s exhausting, it’s confusing, and it’s the minimum. Do it before you scream at me in the comments.

— Written by one guy, one laptop, zero funding, and an unhealthy amount of chai.