Aruni Kashyap on India’s Cockroach Youth Movement

Novelist Aruni Kashyap joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Jennifer Maritza McCauley to talk about the surprising surge of a new youth movement in India. Kashyap, the author of a new novel, How to Date a Fanatic, about young queer academics navigating the Indian campus protests of the mid-2010s, explains how the Chief Justice of India likening unemployed youth to “cockroaches and parasites” has prompted the rise of a wildly popular satirical group. He shares the history of the Cockroach Janta Party or Cockroach People’s Party, whose followers now number in the millions and whose political demands have become well known. Kashyap discusses those demands and the historical significance of campus politics in India, considers how a satirical organization is pushing real reform, and recalls his own experiences with campus protests in India, where he grew up and previously taught. Kashyap reflects on writing about political violence, love, and queer life in India. He reads from How to Date a Fanatic.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Christian Barter.

Aruni Kashyap

How to Date a Fanatic • How to Date a Fanatic excerpt from LitHub • The Way You Want to Be Loved • The House with a Thousand Stories How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency 

Others

The rise of the Cockroaches – The Hindu

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH ARUNI KASHYAP

Jennifer Maritza McCauley: We’re going to talk about your exciting new novel, but first I want to discuss some recent headlines in India and explain the political lay of the land a bit. In mid-May, India’s chief justice made some comments comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. Subsequently, an Indian student in Boston posted on X, “What if all the cockroaches came together?” Why did the judge’s comments anger so many people, and how did that one post turn into such a large movement?

Aruni Kashyap: There’s a lot of underlying factors ever since the Modi government came to power in 2014. The short answer is that unemployment among youth is more than 40 percent at this point, and there are many other reasons among the young people to be frustrated. The people who voted the current government to power in 2014 are in their early 30s right now, or late 20s, and they have seen that everything that they were promised—there were a lot of promises made of India becoming a superpower, India becoming a Vishakuru, as in like the world guru—none of those have come true.

There’s also rampant economic decline. Foreign direct investments to India have been decreasing a lot, yet there is nothing about that in the media. The media is completely under the control of the Indian government because a lot of them are owned by massive corporate organizations who only serve the government and who only sing praises to the government.

There is a lot of frustration among the young people and, along with this, Modi wanted to start something called the Digital India Movement when he came to power. The primary reasons for this was to spread economic expansion and consumerism, so that people can sell products. What happened was the growth of social media in India. There are people everywhere who are content creators, and because the dollar translates progressively better to India, the Indian currency is declining. There are lots of people who are content creators and they are venting out their frustration.

An internet movement like that spreads like wildfire, but it also became so widely popular because it was satirical. There was fun, it was creative, and we can dwell on that later. This is the political bedrock of that, and people are just tired of the massive Hindu-Muslim-who-is-to-be-hated sentiment. The idea that if you critique the government, you should go to Pakistan directly. People are just absolutely tired of that, and the new generation is not having it, and I’m so proud of them for doing this.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It was huge fun to watch. It reminded me of so many other things like the Arab Spring or the uprisings in Sri Lanka that led to the ouster of the president in 2022. In this case, at first it was sort of like ha ha, but the person in Boston who tweeted this is actually not only a student, but also a former political comms person.

Although the Cockroach People’s Party is not an officially registered party, it has something like 22 million followers online. People were blowing it off a little bit at the beginning, kind of like, “Oh, these young people, what are they doing?” And it has this massive outreach, and the website—for our listeners who haven’t seen this, if you find a website for the Cockroach People’s Party, the imagery is very funny—which has been really interesting to see. So, how did they end up attracting so much attention? Also, the education minister actually resigned, which is a major victory for these folks. How did that happen?

AK: It attracted so much attention because it was fun and satirical at first. The reason why the Cockroach Janta Party movement or the party became so successful was for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons was that when the current government came to power in 2014, they ramped up a communally divisive narrative. Over the years, the communally divisive rhetoric failed in some states, because the number of Muslims are very minimal. The initial pitch was Hindu Muslims are the enemies and they are against India, etc.

When that failed, they also created divisions between Hindu communities, who are the majority caste in that state, and they would fan that rivalry between the two of them. They also fanned ethnic rivalries, tribal rivalries, and even in my state, Assam, there were a lot of conversations about different kinds of Muslim communities within the Muslims. So there was division created between the indigenous Muslim community, and also division created among the immigrant Muslim community. Within the immigrant indigenous Muslim community, there were divisions created between ethnic lines and linguistics lines and many other lines.

This was widely challenged by the Cockroach Janta Party. They literally had an antenna and a cockroach mask. Suddenly everybody was not Muslim, not Hindu, not upper caste, not lower caste, not Dalit, but they were all cockroaches because the Chief Justice of India has said that. It is the most revered place of law, and as a result of that, suddenly everybody could be a cockroach. Everybody said, “I’m a cockroach too because I’m living in the gutters. Isn’t this the gutters?”

There’s also massive infrastructure problems even in a big city like Bombay, the richest city in India. One hour of rain will have so much waterlogging. It is unbelievable. People literally die. There was a huge water crisis in early May in Bombay in the peak of summer, and this is a problem in Indian cities. The government promised about 30 or 40 smart cities, so people would put up photographs of waterlogging and say, “Hey, we are living in a smart city.” So this divisive rhetoric was broken down because they could literally wear a mask.

Another reason was that the government was in the business of defining who was a patriot. If you disagree with the government, you are not a patriot. The Cockroach Janta Party people and their supporters challenged this because they broke down the authority that the government had of saying who is a patriot. They said “We are the patriots because we are asking about jobs, accountability, youth rights, healthcare—basic things that we need to live with dignity.”

One of the earliest working titles of my novel, and the longest surviving working title was “The Love Story of an Anti-National.” So many of my drafts are called “Love Story of an Anti-National” because the word anti-national was given currency in early 2014 and 2015, when a lot of student movements were also happening against the current government. If you are a woman, you are anti-national. If you are a journalist who questions, you are an anti-national, you should go to Pakistan. If you are gay, it’s a Western import. If you are queer, you are anti-national. If you are Dalit, you are anti-national. So that was a big thing, but eventually the title morphed into something like this. So, because of all of these reasons, the movement succeeded. The movement also succeeded because it attracted mass mass mobilization through the use of social media.

For a long time, we thought nothing would happen—no resignation would happen, no accountability would happen. This government is known to not provide accountability. They don’t care if there’s a mass movement going on, they will just go on doing their business. But suddenly, a lot of film stars and celebrities started posting on social media praising the young people. This was a huge thing because Indian actors and celebrities are famously known to keep quiet and be very pro-Modi and pro-government, but a lot of them broke grounds. It was fascinating to see some of the veteran actors like Shabana Azmi actually go there and support the protesters.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. Photograph of Aruni Kashyap by Jason Thrasher.