India’s burgeoning youth-led protest movement won a key victory over the weekend with the resignation of the country’s Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.
The Cockroach Movement, which took its name from a derogatory remark made by India’s Chief Justice comparing young unemployed people to "cockroaches” and “parasites,” has quickly established itself as a formidable political force. You can read our primer on it here.
To discuss the movement and its future, TIME spoke with Mukul Kesavan, a historian, novelist, and one of India’s best-known writers.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: What is your view of the Cockroach Movement, and what do you think is unique about it?
MK: I’ve spent my life in Delhi. I’ve been to hundreds of demos because Jantar Mantar is the place where you go off and shout your slogans from the time I was an undergraduate, and I have to say, I’d never seen anything like this—not necessarily in terms of its size, though it was very large—but because it was so young.
Normally, demos in Jantar Mantar are fairly organized. Invariably, you will have unions, college or university associations, or left-wing groups organizing people into chanting and slogans. But if it’s possible to imagine 30,000 or 40,000 people in a state of perfect political innocence... I don’t mean to sound condescending, but it just seemed that these people had turned up because they felt there was a kind of existential crisis in their young lives. Because the one last thing that India has to even suggest that hard work might get you a reasonable job is, in fact, its examination system.
Q: How much of a threat do these protests pose to Narendra Modi?
MK: This movement is interesting. It’s a movement of the urban salariat. You know, these are very middle-class people. They are largely Hindus, very young, and so they pose a peculiar kind of challenge… What do you do with a group of young people who theoretically are the very basis of your political constituency? You know, middle class, broadly middle upper caste, salaried urban Hindus. And so I think that is one of the reasons you see this weird fluctuation between brutality and detentions on the one hand, and, on the other, these clumsy, appeasing noises the government makes.
I think it’s evident, in some ways, that this is bigger than just the education thing. Take, for example, the inspired insolence of the attacks on Modi. So, for example, there’s one slogan that translates as: “The real truth is bitter. Modi is a pimp.” To see a 17-year-old saying this in a culture like India, where the very young are sort of deferential, is remarkable.
The Modi juggernaut is generally seen as sinister but efficient at what it does, and the entire tenor of the taunting, the calling out, is that you’re an old, dysfunctional guy, that’s unusual because it seems to open the possibilities of this movement. Not because there’s a constructive program that’s been put forward, but simply because it seems to be open season on a man who, up to now, has seemed sort of inevitable.
Q: Where does the movement go from here?
MK: I’m so bewildered by the scale, intensity, and coming-from-nowhere part of this movement that it’s not clear to me how it sustains itself or where it goes. I’m not saying it won’t, but it surprised everybody, including its organizers.
Youth unemployment amongst the middle classes in India is massive. So entrance examinations that put you into courses that might get you jobs are, if you will, a kind of metaphor for that general sense of anomie about, where do we go? What will happen to us? And to the extent that this narrowly focused thing about examination represents a larger angst, I don’t know.
