Ah, young blood! Fierce minds, tight jawlines, uncompromising moral compasses, eyes ablaze with angst, and energy enough to power a dozen Sudhir Mishra films. Who doesn’t love a freshly minted young leader—be it a Gandhi, a Pilot, a Vijay, a Modi, or a Kejriwal? Aren’t they imagination-grabbing, and so romantic? At a panel discussion titled Is Romance Dead? at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios, in 2013, I opened with this, “A 45-year-old outsider has just defeated a veteran politician 30 years his senior to become chief minister of Delhi. What’s more romantic than that?”
But, is it just young people we love—or young ideas? Ideas that are radical, fresh, dynamic, subversive and (nowadays) meme-driven. All of which the Cockroach Janta Party seemed to have in spadefuls when, fathered by the NEET leak, midwifed by our CJI and birthed by Abhijeet Dipke, it burst to blazing, satirical life on our social media feeds. Gen Z had finally woken up, we all agreed. Today’s young people are not merely depressed, unemployed and pornography-obsessed after all; they are political, fearless, demanding answers, pulsating with energy and vision.
Then the young cockroach army got waylaid into a (hopefully non-fatal) cul-de-sac. It made the ouster of Dharmendra Pradhan its main demand and parameter of success. And Sonam Wangchuk, in the classic Gandhi-Jayaprakash Narayan mould, became its hunger-striking saint, expected to pressure the government into making it happen.
See, the BJP is not the UPA, which sent heavy-duty ministers like Pranab Mukherjee to talk to Anna Hazare as he fasted at Jantar Mantar—a strategy that arguably led to them losing the Delhi elections. The BJP prefers to turn a deaf ear and refuse protestors the oxygen of acknowledgement, or media attention. This is why people like Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh continue to flourish inspite of protests against him. This is how the BJP demonstrates strong governance—by riding out the news cycle and changing nothing—especially when no major election is around the corner.
So no matter how much the young cockroaches agitate, no matter how many emotionally charged, breast-beating aunty ji-type appeals they make to the government’s conscience about Sonam sir’s deteriorating health, nobody from Modi’s cabinet is going to show up at Jantar Mantar like a modern-day Jawaharlal, offering goat’s milk to a latter-day Gandhi. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Basically, Sonam sir (and the rest) need to be persuaded to chug a protein shake, asap. (Or a matcha tea or whatever it is that Gen Z drinks.) Not doing so and dying by inches is only making them look helpless, passive and weak. Sonam sir—much like L.K. Advani ji before him—needs to be offered a spectator seat (no offence, but he is ageing the entire movement), and the young ones need to pivot back to the core issues, education and employment. They need to brainstorm hard to regain the audacious, satirical swag that made them famous (maybe watch some Lego videos from Iran). They need to call out corruption, filth, patriarchy and opportunistic evil across the board, not just in the their ‘NEETly’ specified niche. They must broaden their search for strategic alliances—there are young people everywhere, after all, even in the ruling party, and the Congress. Like hard-working cockroaches, they must keep gnawing away at rotting structures and topple them once and for all.
Cockroaches are immortal if they behave like cockroaches. Not like copycats.
editor@theweek.in
