Dissent and Delusion
In the age of resistance, every placard provokes a counter-narrative. When Gaza peaked, when a war born in the genocidal rage of an Islamist organisation with a cause larger than Palestine was painted in Manichean clarity by the streetfighters from London to New York, behind the slogan of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” lurked the ugly strain of antisemitism. The endorsement varies in degrees: the drawing-room liberal, hopelessly steeped in the trendy motifs of angst floating in seminar rooms and op-ed pages, loves to lob ‘fascism’ and ‘genocide’ at selectively chosen perpetrators with the least regard for the original potency of those terms; the mascot of democratic socialism in New York treats Israel with a disdain the Jewish state deserves. And the resistance against the “evil president”, who is the sum of all political and cultural assaults on freedom, doesn’t entirely hide the leftist elitism confusing vulgarity of style with the un-Americanism of policies, be it about borders or AI. From the barricades-defying romance of the Sixties to the Magic Lantern of the second Prague Spring in 1989 to the ephemeral Arab Spring of 2010-12 to the angry streets of France in 2026 reliving the thrills of 1968, resistance seems to have reached Delhi. What is written on the other side of the placard?
It was not Indian democracy on trial when the Cockroaches first swarmed Delhi, and the revenge of the metaphor could not have been bigger. The rage, no matter that it was feasted upon by a desperate I.N.D.I.A., was against the errors of the system, and the protest against a leaky structure in higher education was largely an organic display of dissent. In retrospect, the government could have saved its face had it reacted differently before the agitation reached Jantar Mandar. The current protest, born not in the misplaced metaphorical flourish of a judge but in a piece of investigative journalism, has launched the Cockroach Janta Party as India’s most media-friendly opposition, in terms of messaging and theatre, its strength mostly manifested in its power of absorption. It provided a forum for the opposition to gain camera space disproportionate to its electoral space. Still, the incongruities of this uprising, amplified by social media, are as apparent as the restlessness of a generation inspired by the streets elsewhere.
The Cockroaches would like to sloganise their protest as a struggle against stifled democracy, if not rightwing dictatorship. For so long, the loftiness of dissent in this country was maintained by pamphleteers in search of a cause to match their text, which itself was indebted to ideologies abandoned by history. The burden of conscience-keeping was such that they were desperate to create an entity of absolute wretchedness that was far removed from Actually Existing India. Cockroaches may not have the intellectual coherence of individual dissidents who saw in the ascent of the Indian Right the perversion of democracy, but they have become, not long after drawing first blood, the same sentiment multiplied on the street. The India they rage against is incompatible with the India some of those apprentice revolutionaries visualise in earnest naiveté.
That Indian democracy is dying under the wreckage of its institutions is a misreading by people who reduce any perceived anomaly of the state to a piece of fascism. Cockroaches play out their struggle against unfreedom on a creaky stage built by their imagination.
It is on this stage that the opposition parties have joined not exactly in a show of solidarity but in a sudden realisation of existential relevance. There is no denying the obvious that the political space in India can do with more arguments instead of lazy statements about controlled democracy. The allegations against the Election Commission, whatever their veracity, do not point to the illegitimacy of Indian democracy. They show how the opposition cannot cope with the mercilessness of the Indian voter. The cry over stolen elections is a cry of defeatism. This is not the first stirring of another “total revolution”.
Forget that there is no towering moral force like a JP out there as the spearhead; there is not even a vintage Kejriwal playing a sidewalk Mahatma. By latching on to the Cockroaches, the rejected and the redundant hope to turn the enormity of the BJP government’s mandate into a lie. Street theatre won’t take them beyond the television screen.
Time to form an argument, not to rehearse lines from the fear of losing.