The Cockroach Republic — Part 2: Laughter as a Weapon

Humour, the feminine, and the oldest grammar of Indian resistance

The barricade at Patel Chowk

On July 20, 2026, the day Parliament opened its monsoon session, thousands of young people set out from Jantar Mantar towards the Parliament building. They were demanding the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over the leak that had voided the national medical entrance exam (The Wire). Two days earlier, police had removed the activist Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site after roughly three weeks of fasting, and the crowds had swollen in response (ISAS).

At the barricade near Patel Chowk, police began a baton charge. Three young women broke from the crowd, walked to the front and linked arms in a human chain, hoping to talk to the officers. One of them, an eighteen-year-old student, later recalled that the police did not negotiate. Tear gas came moments later, and one of the women was hurt in the crush. Students who had travelled from across the country sang the national anthem in front of the Rapid Action Force and doused smoking shells in pothole water (Free Press Journal).

Then came the moment the internet would remember. A protester picked up a smoking tear-gas canister and lobbed it back towards the police lines. Within minutes, social media had reached its verdict: a real-life Uno Reverse card (Gulf News).

By evening the day had been remade as content. Footage of students fleeing batons was cut into videos styled on Subway Surfers, the endless-running mobile game, complete with obstacle-course graphics and a soundtrack of Bhaag DK Bose, a Bollywood song whose chorus is little more than the word for run. Students posted screenshots from Strava, the fitness app, logging the kilometres they had covered escaping the police and thanking officers for an unexpected cardio session. One mock reviewer certified the tear gas as genuine and unadulterated, a jab at India’s running quarrels over fuel quality.

Five days later, Pradhan resigned. The Tribune’s front page, showing the movement’s founder celebrating with supporters, carried a caption borrowed from the protesters’ own slang: “It’s all done, bro” (The Tribune).

Two things happened at that barricade at once, and this essay is about the relationship between them. One was disciplined, almost solemn: linked arms, the anthem, a refusal to strike back. The other was irreverent to the point of absurdity: Uno cards, fitness apps, a chase-game soundtrack laid over the batons. To an older eye they look like opposites, the dignity of satyagraha against the frivolity of the meme.

They are not opposites. Both are ways of refusing to be afraid. Both deny power the reaction it is built to produce. And both belong to a tradition far older than Instagram: the oldest grammar of Indian resistance, in which the weak defeat the strong not by matching their force but by refusing its terms.

An archive of laughter

Reporters at Scroll noticed that the memes were not a by-product of the movement but its medium: the way it recruited, coordinated and, afterwards, remembered itself (Scroll). Read as an archive, the humour of 2026 falls into four recognisable moves, each with its own psychological work to do.

The first move returned the insult to its sender. The movement had been founded on the charge that the young were lazy and unemployed, so its sharpest placard simply pointed at the education minister and observed, “Bro is still employed” (Gulf News). A Delhi University graduate rewrote the ruling party’s famous 2014 promise that good days were coming as a question: “Ache din kab leak honge?” When will the good days leak? (Free Press Journal). In Bengaluru, a placard declared, “My pad is more leakproof than the NTA,” the agency that runs the national exams (The AIDEM). That last joke deserves a pause. A young woman took a subject Indian public life still treats as unspeakable and made it the measure of state competence, in public, holding it above her head.

The second move stripped repression of its menace. Facing rows of police, protesters lip-synced a Lana Del Rey lyric in which the singer protests her innocence to an officer. After the baton charges, some carried placards inviting the police to detain them, in the language of flirtation, and someone sprayed a joke about consensual bondage across the police barricades, pretending the protesters welcomed what was being done to them. As Scroll noted, nobody was claiming the beatings were amusing. The joke was aimed at the fear itself, draining the state’s harshest instrument of the dread it exists to produce (Scroll). Students filmed “Get Ready With Me” videos for protest days, complete with tear-gas goggles. A police van full of detainees was captioned as the protester’s ride home, and young people filmed relationship-trend videos with lines of security personnel standing in for romantic partners (DeadAnt).

The third move punctured the aura of power. One placard showed a “yassified” Prime Minister, digitally glamorised in the manner of internet diva culture, as if too busy serving looks to hear the protesters. Another borrowed the format of Dora the Explorer, in which a child is asked to find something hiding in plain sight, and asked, “Can you find the democracy, mitron?”, turning Narendra Modi’s signature form of address, mitron, friends, against him (Scroll). When the Prime Minister answered the protests with a midnight, selfie-style vertical video in the visual grammar of influencers, a screenshot of it was a meme by morning. When the ruling party released a gym-set video thick with Gen Z slang, Instagram users joked that it had paid young people to write propaganda aimed at their own generation (Al Jazeera).

The fourth move kept the joke alive by recycling it. When the actor Salman Khan first praised the protesters and then, after the Prime Minister intervened, urged them to go home with a post telling Wangchuk that it was done, bro, the protesters answered that it was not done. When Pradhan resigned, the line became a victory chant. By October, when the movement turned on the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, the phrase had become a liturgy. In Bengaluru, the founder shouted the commissioner’s nickname and the crowd answered in unison, “Gyanu, it’s done, bro” (The News Minute). In Mumbai, a placard read, “THE JANTA HAS A SPINE, GYANU MUST RESIGN” (Reuters, via Kathmandu Post), a quiet joke for anyone who knew that cockroaches are invertebrates. When the Election Commission conceded readable electoral rolls in mid-October, even the Congress party answered in the movement’s idiom: “Gyanu, it’s not enough bro” (Siasat). A joke that the opposition borrows has become a political language.

Running through all four moves was a costume drama. Protesters arrived as Batman, Spider-Man and Iron Man, and as Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar. One commenter remarked, “Things are so bad, Season 1 characters had to make a comeback” (DeadAnt). It was a better line than it knew. The founders of the republic had returned as cosplay, and the joke carried an argument: that the present had fallen so far from the founding that only its founders could judge it.

Old rituals were repurposed too. Protesters banged steel plates with spoons, the gesture the Prime Minister had asked the nation to perform in 2020 to thank health workers, turned now into a demand for accountability (Free Press Journal). In Pune, protesters held a protest called Lehra Do Tiranga, wave the tricolour (Free Press Journal). In Mumbai, on Gandhi’s birthday, the protest stage displayed quotations on non-violence beside tributes to Ambedkar (ThePrint).

And beneath the jokes ran a discipline that the jokes made easier to sustain. At Jantar Mantar, organisers asked supporters to send cleaning supplies instead of food; a Sikh service group ran shifts in the spirit of seva. In Kolkata, when a few people tried to throw stones at police lines, other protesters stopped them first, and women said they felt safe in crowds of a size where that cannot be taken for granted (Free Press Journal). The memes and the brooms came from the same place. Both were ways of saying: we are not what you said we are, and we will not become it to prove you right.

Why power fears laughter

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a blind monk commits murder to keep a single book hidden: the lost second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, on comedy. His reasoning is the plot’s dark centre. Laughter, he believes, frees people from fear, and an order that rests on fear cannot survive people who have stopped being afraid. The monk is a villain, but he is not a fool. Students of power have been arriving at his conclusion for centuries.

The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing about the carnivals of medieval Europe, argued that official culture was always solemn, because solemnity carried fear, and fear carried obedience. Carnival laughter suspended the hierarchy for a few days. The king could be mocked, the bishop parodied, the high brought low, and in that suspension ordinary people glimpsed that the order above them was not a law of nature. The baton charge at Patel Chowk was official culture at its most solemn. The Strava screenshots were carnival.

Laughter also attacks the aura that authority wears. Thomas Hobbes described laughter as a “sudden glory” we feel when we perceive our own eminence beside another’s weakness, which is why being laughed at feels like being dethroned. Max Weber observed that charismatic authority depends on followers believing their leader to be extraordinary; laughter drags the extraordinary back down to the ordinary. Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor is undone not by an army but by a child who says what everyone sees. In India this summer, the sociologist Surinder Jodhka argued that what unsettled the Prime Minister’s near-mythical persona was not the resignation alone but the protesters’ “complete lack of reverence” (The Christian Science Monitor). The political scientist Gilles Verniers put it more bluntly: the movement had made the Prime Minister seem, for the first time, his age (Al Jazeera).

A third mechanism is exposure. Most humour works through incongruity, the gap between what is claimed and what is true. Official language opens exactly such gaps, and jokes compress them into lines people can carry. Václav Havel, in The Power of the Powerless (1978), described a greengrocer who places a communist slogan in his shop window. He does not believe it; no one reading it believes it; the sign is simply a ritual of compliance. Havel called this condition “living within a lie”, and argued that the system depended on millions performing such rituals. A placard asking whether the good days will leak performs the opposite ritual. It takes an official promise and shows, in five words, the gap between the promise and the paper leak.

The fourth mechanism may be the most important. The economist Timur Kuran showed that unpopular orders can endure because people hide their true views and assume everyone else believes the official story. Laughter breaks that isolation. The psychologist Robert Provine found that people laugh far more often with others than alone; laughter is a social signal before it is anything else. When a crowd laughs at the same joke about power, each person learns, in an instant, that their private doubt is shared. That is why regimes have always feared collective laughter more than private grumbling. A joke told to one friend is a complaint. A joke laughed at by twenty million is a census.

Humour also traps power in a dilemma. A joke carries built-in deniability: it was only a joke. If the authorities tolerate it, the aura erodes. If they punish it, they look thin-skinned, confirm the joke, and spread it further. Serbia’s youth movement Otpor!, which helped bring down Slobodan Milošević in 2000, built a strategy around this trap; its co-founder Srdja Popovic later called the approach laughtivism. In one celebrated stunt, activists left a barrel bearing Milošević’s face on a busy street, with a bat for passers-by to hit it. When the police finally intervened, the only thing they could arrest was the barrel.

The historical record is consistent. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the wrong joke could mean prosecution for anti-Soviet agitation and years in the Gulag. In Nazi Germany, people traded whispered jokes, and the historian Rudolph Herzog has documented cases in which jokes about the regime cost people their lives. China has censored comparisons between Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh. Egypt’s most popular satirist, Bassem Youssef, was pushed off the air and left the country in 2014.

India is not a dictatorship, and the difference matters. But sensitivity to ridicule is not confined to dictatorships. Days after its launch, the Cockroach Janta Party’s account on X was withheld in India; it returned within minutes under a new handle, “Cockroach is Back” (Wikipedia). Its Instagram page was reportedly hacked, its website went offline, and one court petition accused the movement of commercially exploiting a judge’s courtroom remarks (Herald Goa). What distinguishes a democracy is not the absence of such reflexes but the presence of limits on them. The Delhi High Court, for instance, refused to entertain a petition seeking a national counter-terrorism agency’s probe into the movement’s march on Parliament (Moneylife). In a dictatorship, the joke is dangerous because nothing stands between the joker and the state. In a democracy, it is powerful because something does.

There is one more reason laughter works, and it concerns the people laughing rather than those laughed at. Freud, in his short essay “Humour” (1927), described humour as the mind’s refusal to be crushed by a painful reality, a way of treating a threat as material for a jest. The psychiatrist George Vaillant later placed humour among the most mature psychological defences, alongside sublimation and anticipation. Viktor Frankl, recalling the concentration camps, described humour as one of the soul’s weapons in the struggle for self-preservation. A generation that can joke while running from batons is not in denial about the batons. It is refusing to let them define what it feels.

The oldest grammar of Indian resistance

To an older generation, a protest built on memes, cosplay and self-mockery can look unserious, even unmanly. That reaction is itself the clue. The movement’s style is what cultural psychologists would call feminine-coded: indirect rather than confrontational, enduring rather than retaliating, nurturing rather than destroying, playful rather than grave. The coding refers to qualities of action, not to the gender of the people acting. And in India, that coding has a remarkable history.

The psychologist Ashis Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy (1983), argued that colonial rule in India rested on a homology between political and sexual dominance. Power was masculine; subjection was feminine; and the colonisers cast themselves as the manly ruling race and Indians as effeminate subjects. Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in 1841 that the Bengali’s physical constitution was “feeble even to effeminacy”. Indian ideas of masculinity, femininity and the androgynous in-between, Nandy showed, were polarised into a ranking in which the feminine and the androgynous counted as a negation of political manhood (University of London).

Indians answered this ideology in two ways. One answer was to compete on the colonisers’ terms: to build bodies, cultivate martial pride and prove that Indians could be as hard as their rulers. Nandy argued that this response, however understandable, kept the colonised mind inside the coloniser’s categories. The second answer was Gandhi’s. He refused the ranking itself. He spun cloth, nursed the sick, fasted, and offered his body to blows without returning them. He spoke of himself in maternal terms and insisted that non-violence demanded more courage than violence, not less. “If by strength is meant moral power,” he wrote in 1930, “then woman is immeasurably man’s superior.” Nandy read this androgyny as a subversive project that built resistance out of the values and psychology of ordinary Indians (1947 Partition Archive), and that denied the British the enemy their self-image required.

Gandhi’s choice resonated because Indian culture already held meanings of the feminine that the colonial binary ignored. In much of the West, the feminine has been coded as passive. In Indian religious life it is also shakti, active cosmic energy, embodied in Durga and Kali, and in Ardhanarishvara, the form of Shiva that is half male and half female. Motherhood carries moral authority, and a mother’s anger is among the most feared forces in Indian family life. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar argued that the Indian psyche is shaped by an intense maternal bond and a cultural tolerance for androgyny. In such a culture, a feminine-coded protest does not read as weakness. It can read as the most formidable power there is.

Indian thought adds a second idea: tapas, the heat generated by austerity. In the epics, ascetics accumulate such power through self-restraint that even the gods must bend to them. That is why the fast has been so potent in Indian politics. Potti Sriramulu’s fatal fast in 1952 forced the creation of Andhra state. Anna Hazare’s fast in 2011 brought a government to the negotiating table. And in 2026, the movement’s turning point came not from a meme but from a fast: Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, and his removal after about three weeks, turned a gathering of hundreds into thousands (Al Jazeera).

Cultural psychology explains a third resonance. Richard Shweder and Joan Miller found that Indian moral reasoning leans more on duty than the rights-based reasoning common in the United States. Self-suffering appeals to duty and conscience, a form of moral influence familiar from Indian family life, where a mother’s or a wife’s fast carries enormous weight. The state, meanwhile, is often imagined as mai-baap, mother and father. A protest against a parent works far better as a child’s suffering appeal than as rebellion, which may be why the protesters sang the national anthem at the police lines. They were not storming the house. They were demanding to be heard in it.

The lineage runs through modern India. In 1939, Manipuri women besieged British offices at Kangla Fort over the export of rice amid local shortages, refusing to lift their siege despite bayonet wounds; Manipur still commemorates it as Nupi Lan, the women’s war (IPS). In the 1970s, village women in the Himalayas hugged trees to stop the loggers, and the Chipko movement helped win a ban on felling across the region. In 2004, after the custodial killing of Thangjam Manorama, twelve women in their sixties and seventies stripped naked in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters at the same Kangla Fort, holding a banner daring the army to rape them too. “We protested naked to show the anger of mothers of Manipur,” one of them, Ima Momon, later explained (Feminism in India). The Assam Rifles vacated the fort, the first time in nine decades it had returned to Manipuri hands, something militant groups had failed to achieve over decades (Chief Organizer). In 2020-21, a farmers’ movement sustained by community kitchens that fed all comers held a year-long, largely non-violent sit-in and forced a rare repeal of three farm laws (The Christian Science Monitor).

The evidence beyond India points the same way. The political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found that non-violent campaigns between 1900 and 2006 succeeded at nearly twice the rate of violent ones (Pax et Bellum). Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, studying 338 resistance movements, found that campaigns with extensive frontline participation by women were more likely to stay non-violent, more likely to win over members of the security forces, and more likely to succeed, even after accounting for other factors (Our Secure Future).

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott offered a vocabulary for the difference. He associated the male element of the psyche with doing and the female element with being. Most Indian forms of protest are forms of being: the dharna, the sit-in, the fast, the vigil, the long occupation of a place. They resist through presence and endurance rather than assault. The cockroach, a creature that wins simply by remaining, belongs to that family. So does a joke, which wounds no one’s body and yet leaves power diminished.

How laughter and endurance work on the mind of power

Why should a joke or a fast move anyone who holds batons and courts and a parliamentary majority? Psychoanalysis offers several answers, and they converge.

The first comes from Erik Erikson, whose Gandhi’s Truth (1969) remains the deepest psychological study of satyagraha. Erikson described Gandhi’s method as militant non-violence: aggression not suppressed but redirected, turned from the opponent’s body towards one’s own suffering, and aimed at converting the opponent rather than destroying him. The distinction matters because humiliation breeds revenge. An opponent who has been defeated by force spends years planning his return. An opponent who has been shamed by his own conduct, and offered a dignified way to change course, has somewhere to go.

The second answer concerns which part of the opponent’s mind is engaged. Violence speaks to aggression, and aggression answers in kind; a thrown stone justifies the baton that follows. Self-suffering speaks to conscience. In 1934, the American writer Richard Gregg called this moral jiu-jitsu: when an attacker strikes someone who does not strike back, the attacker loses his moral balance, as a wrestler loses his footing when the expected resistance never comes. In 1930, at the Dharasana salt works, column after column of Gandhi’s volunteers walked towards police lines and were beaten down without raising a hand, and the reports sent abroad by the American journalist Webb Miller did more damage to the empire’s moral standing than any riot could have. The sociologist Brian Martin later generalised the pattern as backfire: repression of non-violent protest tends to generate more outrage than it suppresses, provided it is seen to be unjust and the news of it travels.

2026 followed the script. The removal of a fasting Wangchuk and the baton charge of July 20 did not shrink the movement; they grew it, drawing in army veterans and, by one MP’s account, even serving police officers. The Samajwadi Party MP Pushpendra Saroj, who visited the protest site repeatedly, offered the simplest explanation: “Nobody likes to see children getting beaten up” (Al Jazeera).

The third answer is the subtlest. Melanie Klein described how people defend themselves by projecting disowned parts of themselves onto others; in projective identification, the projector also pressures the other to live up to the projection. Colonial discourse worked this way. The rulers’ own disowned vulnerability was projected onto Indians as effeminacy, and Indians were pressured to perform it. The hypermasculine response tried to disprove the projection while accepting its terms. Gandhi did something else, which Wilfred Bion’s language captures exactly. Bion described how a mother contains an infant’s unbearable feelings: she takes them in, digests them, and returns them in a form the infant can bear. Gandhi contained the colonial projection. He took in the charge of weakness, transformed it into a moral strength, and returned it in a form that exposed the violence of the man who had made the charge.

The Cockroach Janta Party performed the same operation on a smaller stage. The word cockroach, coming from the summit of the judiciary, was a projection of contempt. The movement took it in, metabolised it through humour, and sent it back transformed: no longer an insult to the young, but a mirror held up to those who used it. “Bro is still employed” is containment in four words.

The fourth answer concerns the psychology of authority itself. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut showed how a grandiose sense of self depends on mirroring, a steady supply of admiration from others. Power that rests on a personal aura needs the mirror of awe, or at least of fear. Laughter withdraws the mirror. The resulting injury tends to provoke overreaction, and overreaction is precisely what makes power look small. Jacques Lacan offers a final angle. In his account of the four discourses, the hysteric, a position historically coded as feminine, addresses the master with question after question until the master’s lack becomes visible. Satire works this way. It does not overthrow the master. It reveals that he is not what he claims to be.

The political scientist James C. Scott, studying peasants in Malaysia, described the jokes, gossip and mockery that subordinate groups share out of the hearing of the powerful as a hidden transcript. Every regime has one; what changes politics is the moment it is spoken aloud. In May 2026, the hidden transcript of millions of young Indians, the private joke about being useless and the private rage at being called so, was spoken aloud, all at once, by twenty million people.

Put these together and a single logic emerges. Laughter and endurance work through the same channel. Both refuse power the reaction it is built to answer: fear, or counter-violence. Both move the contest away from force, where the state is strong, towards legitimacy, where it is vulnerable. That was Gandhi’s insight, and Nandy’s reading of it: the weak win not by matching the strong, but by refusing the terms on which the strong are strong.

The case against laughter

An argument this sympathetic to its subject owes its critics a full hearing. There are serious objections to the grammar described above, and some of them are right.

The first objection is that the humour coarsens public life. The BJP MP and actor Kangana Ranaut called the protests filthy and crass, and wrote that the protesters, having called themselves cockroaches, now looked and behaved like them (Business Today). Strip away the insult and a real argument remains. Indian tradition prizes maryada, propriety and restraint, and many Indians across the political spectrum believe that public mockery of a Prime Minister or a Chief Election Commissioner erodes respect not just for individuals but for offices that belong to everyone. Some online critics argued that the satire trivialised serious national problems (News Karnataka). And some of the jokes, the sexualised placards and the bondage graffiti, will have offended exactly the parents and religious young people whose sympathy the movement most needs. Institutions such as the Election Commission depend on public trust; humour that sneers at institutions as such, rather than at the conduct of the people running them, can leave behind a cynicism that outlasts any campaign.

The second objection comes from a rival tradition. From Savarkar onward, Hindu nationalist thinkers criticised Gandhian non-violence as a weakness that left Indians, and Hindus in particular, unable to defend themselves. Strength, on this view, deters aggression, and the feminine idiom of satyagraha was a romance. Many in this tradition argue that independence owed far more to armed revolutionaries, the Indian National Army and the naval mutiny of 1946 than to spinning wheels, and historians do agree that Britain’s exhaustion after the Second World War mattered enormously. Nandy read the same history the opposite way, as the colonised mind finally escaping the coloniser’s categories. The debate is not settled, and it is very much alive in Indian politics today.

The third objection is Orwell’s. In “Reflections on Gandhi” (1949), George Orwell admired Gandhi but argued that his methods worked partly because the British were, in the end, answerable to public opinion. Against a regime that makes its opponents disappear, fasting and self-suffering would achieve nothing. The point generalises to laughter. Both depend on an audience that can feel shame, a press that can carry the images, and institutions that can respond. Even in India the method has failed: Irom Sharmila fasted for sixteen years against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Manipur, and her demand for its repeal was never met (Chief Organizer). The women of Shaheen Bagh held a months-long sit-in against the 2019 citizenship law, and the law stands.

The fourth objection is that self-suffering can coerce. In 1932, Gandhi fasted against the separate electorates the British had granted to Dalits. B. R. Ambedkar, facing the prospect of being blamed for Gandhi’s death, gave way and signed the Poona Pact, and later described the fast as a form of coercion that had forced the weaker party to surrender. The moral jiu-jitsu that unbalances an oppressor can unbalance the oppressed just as easily. The method has no conscience of its own.

The fifth objection is feminist. Valorising endurance and sacrifice can reinforce the oldest patriarchal ideal of all: the woman who suffers silently for others. Feminist scholars such as Madhu Kishwar have noted that Gandhi drew millions of women into public life, but largely within an idiom of sacrifice and purity. A feminine-coded protest is not the same as one that empowers women. In 2026 the gap showed. Many of the women whose reels and memes powered the movement found themselves harassed and targeted as meme pages leaked their identities (Free Press Journal). The movement drew on a feminine grammar; women paid much of its price.

The sixth objection concerns irony itself. The novelist David Foster Wallace warned in 1993 that irony is superb at diagnosis and useless at construction, and that a culture fluent only in irony can end up unable to commit to anything. The sociologist Christie Davies argued that the famous jokes of the Soviet bloc were a symptom of decay rather than a cause of collapse, and regimes have long tolerated jokes as a safety valve that releases anger while changing nothing. Orwell himself called every joke a tiny revolution. The adjective deserves as much attention as the noun.

A final caution concerns the vocabulary of this essay. To call a style of protest feminine risks reinforcing the very stereotypes Gandhi worked to unsettle. The more precise terms are indirect, self-suffering and nurturing, as against direct and retaliatory. The gendered language is useful only because Indian culture, and colonial ideology before it, coded these qualities that way.

Weigh these objections, and a verdict emerges. The critics are right that laughter can coarsen, that endurance can coerce, and that both depend on an audience capable of shame. They are wrong that this grammar is weakness. Its record in India, from Kangla Fort to Jantar Mantar, says otherwise. Its power is real, but it is conditional.

Laughter is not yet power

The laughter of 2026 did a great deal. It dissolved fear at the barricades. It punctured an aura that had seemed untouchable for a decade. It disarmed the familiar charge that protesters are anti-national, because it is hard to call a movement sinister when it mocks itself first and sings the national anthem at the police. And, joined to a fast and a sit-in, it brought down a minister.

But laughter is not yet power. Hong Kong’s young protesters of 2019 were among the most inventive in modern history, fluid, witty and leaderless, and they still lost to a state that did not need their consent. Otpor! won in Serbia not because its jokes were better, but because its humour sat on top of a disciplined organisation, a broad coalition and an election that Milošević could be made to lose. Jokes are how the weak announce that they are no longer afraid. Organisation is how they make that matter.

Power, meanwhile, has begun to answer in its own idiom. This Dussehra, a Ramlila committee in Delhi’s Pitampura, headed by a BJP legislator, plans to burn a thirty-foot effigy of a cockroach beside Ravan and his brothers, describing the insect as a symbol of filth for the Swachh Bharat cleanliness campaign and denying any political motive (Deccan Herald). Whatever its intent, the image is striking. A joke born on Instagram has entered the mythological calendar, and the answer offered to laughter is fire.

How did the ruling party and the state respond to the movement over the course of 2026, what does that response reveal about the nature of power in India today, and why did a government that rarely bends choose to bend once and then hold firm? That is the subject of the next essay.

Next in The Cockroach Republic, Essay 3: The Strongman’s Dilemma. How the ruling party responded, and what its response reveals.

Sources

The protests and their humour

Power, the state and the response

The lineage of resistance

Scholarly and literary works referenced: Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965); Bion, Learning from Experience (1962); Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011); Davies, Jokes and Targets (2011); Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980); Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (1969); Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946); Freud, “Humour” (1927); Gandhi, Young India (April 10, 1930); Gregg, The Power of Non-Violence (1934); Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1978); Herzog, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (2011); Hobbes, Leviathan (1651); Kakar, The Inner World (1978); Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women” (1985); Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946); Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (1971); Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies (1995); Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XVII, 1969-70); Macaulay, “Warren Hastings” (1841); Martin, Justice Ignited (2007); Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (1983); Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi” (1949); Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution (2015); Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000); Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990); Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures (1991); Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977); Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993); Weber, Economy and Society (1922); Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971).

Author’s Note: This article was conceptualized, researched, and outlined by the author, with generative AI tools utilized to assist in drafting and refining the prose.

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