The Cockroach Republic — Part 4: The Battle for the Young Hindu

Identity, masculinity, and the right wing after the cockroach

A cockroach among Ravan’s kin

This Dussehra, at the Keshav Ramlila grounds in Delhi’s Pitampura, a fourth figure will stand beside the familiar effigies of Ravan, his brother Kumbhkaran and his son Meghnad: a cockroach, thirty feet tall. The organising committee, headed by the BJP legislator Ashok Goel Devaraha, says the insect stands for filth, that the effigy supports the Swachh Bharat cleanliness campaign, and that the committee has added an effigy for a national issue in previous years too (The News Minute). The cockroach, he added, will appear among the asuras of Ravan’s army, and he insists the decision has nothing to do with politics (DT Next). Describing the effigy to a news agency, he predicted it would be “quite a striking sight” (Devdiscourse).

It will be. On Dussehra night, millions of young Hindus will stand in Ramlila grounds across India beside their parents and grandparents, as their families have done for generations, and watch Ravan burn. Many of them have spent the year wearing paper cockroach masks, singing the national anthem at police lines and posting #MainBhiCockroach. In one Delhi neighbourhood, they will watch the symbol they adopted go up in flames among the demons.

The image captures the question at the heart of this essay. India’s ruling party built its dominance on the loyalty of young Hindus. It won them in 2014 with a fusion of aspiration and identity, and it held a larger share of them than any other party as recently as 2024. In 2026, a movement drawn heavily from the same constituency turned against it, not by rejecting Hindu identity but by laughing at the people who claim to speak for it. Who, now, owns the young Hindu?

This essay argues that the decisive cultural contest of the coming decade is whether identity can outcompete livelihood for the loyalty of young Hindus. It argues, too, that the right wing’s own symbolic choices, its insults, its rhetoric of disgust and now a cockroach among Ravan’s kin, are making that contest harder for it to win. The right has real strengths in this battle, and this essay sets them out fully. But it is fighting on ground it once owned and can no longer take for granted.

How the right won the young

It is easy to forget how completely the right once owned youth politics in India. In 2011, the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare drew hundreds of thousands of young, urban Indians into the streets against a Congress-led government mired in scandal. It was, in its own way, an earlier generation’s cockroach moment: middle-class youth discovering that they could shame the powerful. Much of that energy flowed, three years later, into Narendra Modi’s campaign. In 2014, turnout among voters aged 18 to 25 exceeded that of the general population for the first time, at around 70%, and first-time voters played a crucial role in bringing the BJP to power (Scroll).

The appeal was a fusion that no rival could match. The first element was aspiration. Modi’s own story, the tea-seller’s son who rose to the top, was a parable of merit for a generation raised on entrance exams. His promises of jobs, development and a decisive government spoke directly to young people who felt held back by a sclerotic, dynastic establishment. The second element was identity, reframed for a new generation. Hindu nationalism was offered less as a doctrine than as pride: pride in a civilisation, in a resurgent nation, in a faith that the old secular elite had often treated with condescension. The third element was style. Long before its rivals understood social media, the BJP had built a formidable digital operation, and its supporters filled the internet with memes, videos and, later, an entire genre of devotional and nationalist pop music that the journalist Kunal Purohit has called Hindutva pop. The right was the original Indian meme army. Its energy online was insurgent, funny and, crucially, felt organic.

This fusion met needs that psychologists recognise as fundamental. It offered significance to young people anxious about their place in the world, belonging to a large and confident community, and a story in which their personal ambitions and the nation’s rise were the same story. It also offered a particular image of strength, which later sections of this essay examine, in a leader who promised to stand up to enemies at home and abroad.

The loyalty proved durable. Through demonetisation, the pandemic and a slowing job market, young Indians stayed with the BJP in larger numbers than with any other party. Even in 2024, when the party lost its outright majority, 39% of voters aged 18 to 25 chose the BJP, the largest share of any party in that group (Asia News Network). The CSDS political scientist Sanjay Kumar has noted that the party knows how instrumental young voters were to its victory in 2024, which is one reason it is so anxious not to lose them now.

That anxiety is the measure of what changed in 2026.

The lost organic touch

By June 2026, the arithmetic of online politics had inverted. The Cockroach Janta Party’s Instagram account had more than 22 million followers, over twice the BJP’s nine million and well ahead of the Congress party’s thirteen million (Prothom Alo). The meme army now belonged to someone else.

The right’s institutions responded in revealing ways. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Sangh Parivar and one of the largest student organisations in the country, dismissed the movement as a social media stunt with no grassroots presence and no connection to the country’s youth (OrissaPOST). An editorial in Organiser, the RSS-affiliated weekly, went further, calling the movement a politically engineered operation belonging to a freebie-centric, left-leaning ecosystem (The Wire). The party’s electoral wing took the opposite tack. The Prime Minister stepped up his presence on Instagram with selfie-style vertical videos, pop-culture references and a lighter, less formal tone, and BJP-ruled states asked young bureaucrats to meet students and guide them on careers (Asia News Network). The party released videos thick with Gen Z slang.

None of it landed as intended. The political analyst Asim Ali observed that the BJP’s youth outreach had come to feel managed and paid for, in sharp contrast with the organic energy that once defined its online presence (Al Jazeera). Young users mocked the slang videos as propaganda written by people their age for money. Satire of the government spread faster than the government’s attempts at self-promotion.

The deeper reason is structural, not tactical. The right’s online energy between 2011 and 2014 was the energy of insurgency. It was mocking an establishment, the Congress-led government, from below. Twelve years later, the right is the establishment. With its allies, it controls the central government and a majority of the states, and commands the largest party organisation on earth. Humour, as the previous essays argued, flows upward. The young mock whoever sits on top, and no amount of money or slang can make the people on top sound like the underdog.

There is an authenticity paradox at work too. The more a party invests in sounding spontaneous, the less spontaneous it sounds. A generation raised on influencer marketing can detect a paid post at a glance, and it reads every carefully casual video from a ministry as exactly what it is.

The right lost something more valuable than followers in 2026. It lost the role of the underdog, the role it had played for most of its history, through the long decades of Congress dominance, as the voice of those excluded from the English-speaking, secular establishment. That role has a new occupant. Its mascot is a cockroach in sunglasses.

Masculinity and its discontents

To understand why a laughing, self-mocking protest unsettled the right so deeply, we need to understand the image of strength at the heart of Hindu nationalism.

That image was born in the colonial encounter described in the second essay of this series. Colonial ideology cast the British as a manly ruling race and Indians, especially Hindus, as effeminate subjects. Gandhi answered by refusing the ranking. Hindu nationalism answered by accepting it and vowing to climb it. V. D. Savarkar, its most influential ideologue, condemned Gandhian non-violence as a weakness that had left Hindus defenceless and urged his followers to Hinduise politics and militarise Hindudom. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, built its daily shakha around physical training, drill and discipline, cultivating a disciplined, strong Hindu manhood. Ashis Nandy read this project as the mirror image of the colonisers’ own hypermasculinity: an attempt to defeat the empire by becoming like it.

The image found its modern expression in Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign, when he told a rally in Gorakhpur that turning Uttar Pradesh into another Gujarat would take a 56-inch chest. The phrase stuck because it captured what many supporters admired: decisiveness, toughness and a refusal to be pushed around. The politics of the decade that followed, from surgical strikes to the image of a leader who never apologises, drew heavily on this idea of strength.

Now consider what unemployment does to young men in such a culture. The psychologists Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson have shown that manhood, unlike womanhood, is widely seen as precarious: it must be earned and can be lost, and it is lost above all through failing to provide. In India, where a son is expected to become the family’s support, the unemployed graduate in Gregor Samsa’s room is not only economically stranded. His manhood is in question.

Threatened manhood tends to seek repair, and there are two broad routes. The first is compensation. The sociologist Robb Willer and colleagues found that men whose masculinity was experimentally threatened responded by expressing more support for war, more homophobic attitudes and stronger attachment to symbols of dominance. In politics, this route leads to identification with a strong leader, a powerful nation and a community defined against its enemies. For a decade, the right offered young men exactly this repair: if your own life is stalled, the nation’s strength can stand in for yours.

The second route is the one the cockroaches took. It does not seek to recover dignity through dominance; it dissolves the shame through laughter. To call yourself a cockroach is to refuse the whole contest of manhood on which the insult depended. That refusal is what unsettled the right. A movement that answered contempt with anger could have been met with force and framed as a threat. A movement that answered with self-mockery could only be met with contempt again, and the contempt kept reaching for the same register: disgust. The protests were called filthy and crass by a BJP MP, the insect was cast as a symbol of filth, and the effigy will burn it as such. Disgust, as the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, is the emotion of purity and contamination. It is how communities mark what does not belong. Directed at a movement drawn heavily from the right’s own constituency, it risks marking those young people as outsiders in their own community.

Gender adds a final fault line. Across many democracies, young women and young men have been drifting apart politically, with young women moving left and young men moving right, a pattern the data journalist John Burn-Murdoch documented across several countries in 2024. Whether India’s Gen Z will divide the same way is an open question. But the cockroach movement’s most visible faces included women who linked arms at police lines and made its most daring jokes, and the backlash against them, the doxxing and the threats, was sharply gendered. If the right’s image of strength comes to be read by young women as hostility, and by young men as a promise the economy cannot keep, it will have lost both halves of the generation in different ways.

The contest over Ram

The effigy in Pitampura makes a claim about meaning. It places the cockroach, and by implication those who have adopted it, among the asuras of Ravan’s army, on the side of adharma. The organisers say the meaning is cleanliness. But symbols are read in context, and in October 2026 the context is unmistakable. The question it raises is one the Ramayana itself has always invited: who owns the story, and what does it actually say?

The right has long claimed a special guardianship of Ram, and the claim carries real emotional weight. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement was the making of the modern BJP, and the consecration of the Ayodhya temple in January 2024 was, for millions of Hindus, the fulfilment of a centuries-old longing. But the Ramayana has never belonged to any single interpreter. The scholar A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” traced the epic’s countless tellings across languages, regions and religions, each with its own emphases. The contest over that plurality is not new. In 2011, Delhi University removed the essay from its history syllabus after protests by the ABVP and other groups who found it offensive. Who decides what Ram’s story means has been a political question for decades.

Read with fresh eyes, the epic offers the cockroach movement more than it offers its opponents. Ram does not defeat Ravan with the armies of kings. He wins with an alliance of the humble and the overlooked: an army of forest-dwelling vanars and bears; Jatayu, the old vulture who gives his life trying to stop Sita’s abduction; Shabari, the tribal woman whose half-tasted berries Ram accepts with love; Guha, the boatman chieftain who ferries him across the Ganga. In a much-loved folk telling, a small squirrel carries grains of sand to help build the bridge to Lanka, and Ram strokes its back in gratitude, leaving the stripes it bears to this day. In the Ramayana, the smallest creatures are not filth to be burned. They are the allies who make victory possible.

Ravan, meanwhile, is not a monster of filth. He is a learned, powerful king, a devotee of Shiva, undone by arrogance. When his brother Vibhishan counsels him to return Sita and avoid ruin, Ravan insults him and drives him out, and Vibhishan crosses over to Ram. The epic’s lesson about power could hardly be clearer: the ruler who exiles his loyal critics hastens his own fall. What burns on Dussehra is not the small and the despised. It is ahankar, the arrogance of the mighty. A young Hindu standing in a Ramlila ground does not need a protest leaflet to notice which way that lesson cuts.

Ayodhya itself has complicated the right’s claim. At the consecration in January 2024, the Prime Minister declared that Ram is not a dispute but a solution (ThePrint). A few months later, in the general election, the BJP lost the Faizabad parliamentary constituency, which includes Ayodhya, to the Samajwadi Party, amid local grievances over land acquisition and demolitions. In 2026, the temple returned to the headlines for darker reasons. Allegations surfaced that donations had been stolen; the temple trust filed a police complaint, a special investigation team questioned staff, and several people were arrested. The trust introduced new safeguards, including 360-degree cameras in the counting room (National Herald). Opposition leaders turned the scandal into a slogan against the ruling party, while BJP leaders said the temple was managed through established institutional mechanisms and accused their rivals of trying to mislead devotees (Free Press Journal). According to an analysis of the Mood of the Nation survey, 62% of respondents expressed disapproval over the controversy and said it had shaken their faith in the Modi and Yogi Adityanath governments (National Herald).

The lesson is subtle but important. Faith is not the same thing as loyalty to a party. When the self-declared guardians of a faith appear to fall short of its standards, devout believers may punish them not despite their devotion but because of it. Ram is called maryada purushottam, the ideal man bound by propriety and duty. A movement that invokes maryada against those in power, that practises seva, sings the anthem and reads the Ramayana as a story of the humble against the arrogant, is not attacking Hindu tradition. It is contesting who gets to interpret it. For the right, that may be a more dangerous challenge than any secular critique, because it is made from inside the tradition, in its own language.

The swing constituency

The young Hindus at the centre of this contest are not the activists on either side. They are the much larger group in between: devout, aspirational, middle-class or striving to be, raised in families that mostly voted BJP, and frustrated by a job market and an exam system that have let them down. The first essay of this series described their portrait: a generation that is turning towards faith while much of the world turns away, that consults its parents on matters large and small, that remains strikingly optimistic, and that dissents through irony rather than confrontation. Every one of those traits pulls them in two directions at once.

Faith and cultural pride pull them towards the right, which has spent a decade presenting itself as the guardian of Hindu dignity. Family pulls the same way, since many of their parents are loyal BJP voters, and in a family-anchored culture a child’s politics does not easily break from the household’s. But frustration pulls them away. The leaked exam, the years in the queue for a government job and, above all, the experience of being called vermin by the establishment are personal in a way that ideology is not.

Political scientists have studied such voters since Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues observed American voters in 1940. Voters caught between competing loyalties, they found, tend to make up their minds late, abstain more often and switch more readily than those whose loyalties all point the same way. Cross-pressured voters are the most volatile in any electorate, and India’s young Hindus may now be the most cross-pressured group in the country.

There are signs of that volatility. Researchers at Lokniti-CSDS have noted that the BJP’s strong appeal among young voters in 2014 and 2019 came under strain in 2024, when the party lost significant ground (Studies in Indian Politics, via vLex). In May 2026, Tamil Nadu delivered what observers called a youth-powered change (Asia News Network), electing a new party led by the actor Vijay, who by August had entered the top three in national preference for prime minister (Gulte). In the August Mood of the Nation survey, the Prime Minister’s rating as the preferred choice fell from 55% to 49%, and the opposition alliance was projected to win more seats than the NDA in Uttar Pradesh (Newsreel Asia). None of this proves that young Hindus are leaving the right. It does suggest that they are no longer reliably attached to anyone.

The household is where this contest will be decided. Imagine a family in Lucknow or Indore in the autumn of 2026: parents who voted for Modi three times, proud of the Ayodhya temple and grateful for the free rations that saw relatives through the pandemic; a daughter who spent two years preparing for NEET only to see the exam cancelled; a son who has been applying for government jobs since he graduated. The children will not denounce their parents’ politics at the dinner table. That is not how Indian families work. But they may stop sharing it, quietly. And they now have a language, ironic, affectionate and deniable, in which to say so. The cockroach joke lets a young person dissent while remaining a good son or daughter.

The question for the coming decade is which way that quiet drift runs. If the right can persuade cross-pressured young Hindus that it remains the defender of their faith and the best bet for their future, the drift will stop. If those young people come to feel that the guardians of their faith look at them and see pests, it will not.

The right wing’s case

It would be easy, and wrong, to treat the right’s hold on young Hindus as false consciousness waiting to be dispelled. Its appeal rests on real things, and its strongest advocates would make the following case.

The first argument is cultural confidence. For most of independent India’s history, its intellectual and political elite treated religious devotion as a relic to be outgrown, and the culture of most Indians as something faintly embarrassing. Hindu nationalism, its supporters argue, ended that condescension. The temple in Ayodhya, the redeveloped corridor in Kashi, International Yoga Day, the place of Indian knowledge systems in the 2020 education policy and the renaming of colonial-era landmarks are, on this view, acts of civilisational repair after centuries of colonial denigration. Writers such as the lawyer J. Sai Deepak argue that coloniality still shapes India’s institutions and that decolonisation remains unfinished. There is an intriguing convergence here. Ashis Nandy, no friend of Hindu nationalism, also criticised a state secularism imposed from above by a Westernised elite and alienating to ordinary believers. Young Indians who feel pride in their faith and heritage are not dupes. They are responding to a genuine historical grievance.

The second argument is a critique of the movement itself. The right’s critics of the cockroaches are not only name-callers. The Organiser editorial examined the movement’s stated goals and found in them proposals that would alarm any liberal: invoking anti-terror laws against election officials, cancelling the licences of media houses owned by the Adani and Reliance groups, and mandating that half of Cabinet posts go to women regardless of parliamentary arithmetic. It called the programme a blueprint for institutional collapse dressed up as youthful rebellion, and argued that a country cannot demand a semiconductor revolution while seeking to cancel the conglomerates capable of funding one (The Wire). Whatever one makes of the editorial’s tone, some of those proposals are hard to defend. The right also points out that the movement’s founder previously worked as a political communications strategist for the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (The News), and that opposition leaders joined its protests. A movement that presents itself as above politics, on this view, has partisan roots it does not advertise.

The third argument is that nationalism is genuinely popular among the young, and that the cockroaches themselves prove it. They wave the tricolour, sing the national anthem and frame their demands as patriotic. The right can reasonably claim credit for having made unapologetic national pride the common language of Indian politics, so that even its opponents now speak it.

The fourth argument is the development record. Over twelve years, the government has built highways, airports and railways at historic speed, created digital public infrastructure such as UPI that the world now studies, delivered free food grains to hundreds of millions during and after the pandemic, and extended housing, toilets, electricity and cooking gas to households that never had them. Supporters argue that the jobs problem is real but reflects skills mismatches and a global shift in entry-level work, not government failure, and they point to the fast-track courts, tougher exam-leak penalties and youth outreach of 2026 as evidence of a government that listens.

The fifth argument concerns tradition itself. The right has its own deep culture of seva, from disaster relief to the pandemic, and its student wing remains one of the largest in the country. It is not an alien force imposed on young Hindus. For millions of them, it is the community they grew up in.

This case is strong where it describes what the right has offered: pride, belonging, a development story and a confident national identity. It is weaker on what the right has recently done to the young people it is trying to keep: the insults, the disgust, the dismissals of their grievances as engineered by others, and a cockroach among Ravan’s kin. A movement can be criticised for its manifesto and its partisan links without its supporters being called a virus. The right’s problem in 2026 is not that its case is weak. It is that its conduct keeps undercutting its case.

Three roads for the right

The right wing now faces a strategic choice about young Hindus, and its institutions are already pulling in different directions. Broadly, three roads are open.

The first road is to double down on identity. On this path, the right answers material discontent by raising the temperature on questions of faith, nation and security, and treats the cockroach movement as a hostile ecosystem to be exposed rather than a constituency to be won. The Organiser editorial and the ABVP’s dismissal of the movement point in this direction. The approach has worked before; identity has repeatedly outweighed economic discontent in Indian elections, especially when national security dominates the news. But it carries two growing risks. One is diminishing returns. The Ayodhya temple, the movement’s great unifying goal for three decades, has been built, and no successor cause carries the same emotional force. The other is that identity politics aimed at outsiders works differently when the people being called outsiders are the right’s own children. A young Hindu who has been called a cockroach does not hear a campaign against enemies of the faith as being about someone else.

The second road is to adapt towards livelihood. On this path, the right accepts that its next decade with young voters will be won or lost on jobs, exams and dignity rather than temples. The signs of this road are visible too: fast-track courts and tougher penalties for exam leaks, the resignation of a minister, youth outreach through young bureaucrats and the Prime Minister’s own Instagram. A fuller version would mean credible recruitment calendars, an exam system young people trust, real power for younger leaders inside the party, and a tone towards dissenting youth that is paternal rather than contemptuous. This road plays to a genuine strength. The Sangh Parivar has always had an economic nationalist wing worried about jobless growth, and the party’s electoral machinery is pragmatic when its majorities are at stake. Its difficulty is that adaptation requires conceding that the young have a point, which a government built on an image of strength finds hard to do.

The third road is a division of labour, and it may best describe what is already happening. The central leadership adapts, offering selfie videos, fast-track courts and an occasional concession. Meanwhile, the wider ecosystem, local legislators, ideological publications, student wings, influencers and fringe groups, wages a symbolic war against the movement with insults, disgust and effigies. This arrangement has advantages. It lets the leadership appear responsive while the base hears that the protesters are enemies, and it preserves deniability for both. Its weakness is that young people do not experience the ecosystem in pieces. A student who sees the Prime Minister’s friendly video in the morning and a BJP legislator’s cockroach effigy in the evening does not conclude that the party is of two minds. She concludes that the friendly video was the performance.

Which road the right takes will depend partly on a tension that runs through the Hindu nationalist movement itself, between the ideological instincts of the Sangh, which tends to read dissent as civilisational threat, and the electoral instincts of the BJP, which tends to bend when majorities are at stake. How that tension resolves in the run-up to the 2027 elections in Uttar Pradesh, the first serious electoral test since the protests, will reveal a great deal.

The global mirror

Religious nationalism and the young have met in many places this century, and the outcomes point in strikingly different directions.

Turkey is the cautionary tale for any government that tries to manufacture devotion. In 2012, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that his party wanted to raise a pious generation, and his governments expanded religious schooling and religious broadcasting accordingly. Over the following decade, surveys such as those by the Istanbul polling firm KONDA reported the opposite of what he had hoped: young Turks becoming, if anything, less religious and more sceptical of religious authority. Many observers linked the drift to the fusion of faith with state power, so that disillusionment with the government spilled over into disillusionment with the religion it claimed to represent. In the 2024 local elections, the secular opposition party came first nationwide for the first time since 1977. The lesson for India is pointed. When the guardians of faith become the establishment, the young may turn against both together.

The United States shows a different pattern: religion and masculinity fusing on the right, with young men and young women moving apart. In 2024, young men swung sharply towards Donald Trump while young women remained with the Democrats, and some surveys since have found young men attending church more often than young women, reversing a long-standing pattern. The right, there, has won young men by offering exactly the repair for threatened manhood described earlier in this essay: strength, belonging, faith and a sense of grievance against an establishment coded as feminine and elitist. The lesson for India is that the right’s image of strength can still win a large share of young men, even as it loses young women.

Israel shows that religious nationalism can capture the young decisively. Surveys by the Israel Democracy Institute have found that a large majority of young Jewish Israelis place themselves on the political right, more than their parents’ generation. Two forces drive this: a security situation that keeps national identity permanently salient, and the faster growth of religious communities. Even the vast protests of 2023 against the government’s judicial overhaul, though they drew many young people, did not reverse the broader rightward tilt of the young. The lesson is that identity does outcompete livelihood under certain conditions, above all when a community feels besieged.

Set beside India, these cases suggest when the right is likely to win the battle for young Hindus and when it is likely to lose it. Identity tends to prevail when external threat is salient, when a religious community feels besieged and when the identity party can still present itself as the community’s defender against an establishment. It tends to fail when the identity party has become the establishment, when its guardianship of faith looks self-serving, and when the young experience its hostility directly. In 2026, India showed elements of both. The military confrontation with Pakistan in May 2025 kept national security salient, and Hindu identity remains strong. But the right is unmistakably the establishment now, the Ayodhya donation scandal has dented its guardianship, and young Hindus have just been called pests by the powerful. Which conditions dominate in the years ahead will decide the contest.

Identity against livelihood

For a decade, India’s ruling party did something its rivals never managed: it made identity and livelihood feel like the same promise. Vote for national pride, and you vote for jobs; vote for the temple, and you vote for development. A young Hindu did not have to choose between faith and future, because the right offered both in one package.

The cockroach movement has pulled that package apart. Its supporters did not reject Hindu identity. Many of them are devout, and their protest borrowed freely from the vocabulary of seva and maryada. What they rejected was the idea that pride in identity should substitute for a fair exam and a decent job, and that those who complain about the latter are enemies of the former. In doing so, they forced a question the right had long avoided: when identity and livelihood pull apart, which one will young Hindus follow?

The answer is not yet written, and it would be a mistake to assume it favours the protesters. The right retains powerful assets: a genuine and widely shared pride in Hindu civilisation, a formidable organisation, a development record it can point to, a leader who remains the most popular politician in the country, and an image of strength that still appeals to many young men. If it chooses the road of adaptation, offering young Hindus both dignity and a livelihood without asking them to choose between faith and voice, it may well keep most of them.

But the right is also the author of its greatest vulnerability. Every insult, every expression of disgust, every dismissal of the young as engineered by others tells cross-pressured young Hindus that the guardians of their faith regard them as a problem to be managed rather than children to be heard. The Ramayana itself warns against the ruler who drives out the brother who counsels him. Whatever burns in Pitampura this Dussehra, the more consequential fire may be the one that a governing movement lights under its own claim to speak for the young.

The movement faces its own test in this contest: whether it can keep showing religious young people that dissent and devotion are compatible, and whether it can turn a season of laughter into something that lasts. Whether the cockroaches can survive their own success is the subject of the next essay.

Next in The Cockroach Republic, Essay 5: Can the Cockroach Survive Its Success? The movement at a crossroads.

Sources

The effigy and the right’s response to the movement

Young voters and the right

Ayodhya and the contest over Ram

Scholarly and other works referenced: Burn-Murdoch, “A new global gender divide is emerging”, Financial Times (2024); Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012); Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet, The People’s Choice (1944); Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (1983) and “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance” (1988); Purohit, H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (2023); Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas” (1991); Sai Deepak, India, That Is Bharat (2021); Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923); Vandello and Bosson, “Precarious Manhood” (2008); Willer, Rogalin, Conlon and Wojnowicz, “Overdoing Gender” (2013).

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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