India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement makes schools next battleground against Modi
Cockroach leaders have asked supporters to audit their nearest government-run schools. But it has started with a killing.
Save
‘A disruptive change’
Ashutosh Ranka, a co-convenor of the Cockroach group, appeared emotional after meeting Hafeez’s family on Monday. He told reporters that the group proposed to press the government for compensation; however, Hafeez requested that a school be named after his father.
In Rajasthan, Ranka’s home state in western India, the group has faced other challenges.
Ranka joined a sit-in with primary school students in Alwar district on August 14 to demand additional rooms, clean toilets and drinking water. Local publications reported that the officials accepted the demands.
On Sunday, the Rajasthan government, also led by Modi’s BJP, imposed restrictions on so-called outsiders entering government schools and on taking photos and videos, citing students’ privacy.
The government notice, which ordered the school management to pursue criminal action against such surveys, came after Ranka had announced visits by CJP volunteers across the state.
Samina Bano, an education-policy expert who has advised several Indian states on reforms, told Al Jazeera that “it is essentially the system itself that is not working anymore for the people”.
In the last 10 years, Bano said, she had found “drunk teachers on duty during spot checks”, fake appointments in rural areas that many teachers do not want to go to, and other systemic failures that she insisted are common in the Indian public school system.
“Education in government-run schools a sorry state of affairs. It requires a disruptive change,” Bano said.
Advertisement
“The real problem is the quality of teaching, learning outcomes and the food,” Bano added, crediting the Cockroach pressure group for bringing the demands for reform into mainstream politics.
“They are bringing it into the discourse, but once people start demanding, there needs to be actual institution building, and that’s different work altogether,” Bano said. “There has to be an appetite to reimagine public education in India.”
‘Playing to strength’
After Gen Z protesters returned from the streets in New Delhi, the internet was instead flooded with videos of school-going children asking for better facilities across several states. They were blocking roads, circling local administration offices and fighting with bureaucrats.
The Cockroach party tapped into the momentum and announced its next phase in a smart mobilisation strategy, said Asim Ali, a political analyst in New Delhi.
“It plays to their strength of leveraging social media. Without many volunteers [like a traditional political party], they can outsource the grassroots work to followers on social media itself,” he said.
“By leveraging the power of social media, which is now felt in the remotest of corners in India, the Cockroach party has dramatically driven down organisational resource costs of a movement,” Ali added.
But Ali cautioned that this approach of relying on volunteers without political or organisational skills, protest experience or institutional support also exposes them to violence, as happened with the Hafeez family in West Bengal.
Yet the blood spilled in the eastern state hasn’t dimmed the drive from the CJP to demand accountability from authorities.
On Tuesday, Ranka announced on X that multiple venues in West Bengal’s capital Kolkata had cancelled or refused permission to the CJP to hold meet-ups with students.
“This only reinforces the fact that the BJP is scared from the cockroaches,” he wrote. “Cockroaches of Bengal will continue to visit govt schools and push the Bengal govt to get them fixed.
“The more you stop us, the bigger we become.”