The Cockroach Republic

Scenarios, indicators, and what to watch

The limits of prophecy

In the early 2000s, the psychologist Philip Tetlock published the results of a long experiment. Over two decades, he had collected more than 28,000 predictions from hundreds of experts on politics and economics, and then checked them against what actually happened. On long-range political questions, the experts did little better than chance, and often worse than simple rules of thumb. The most confident forecasters, those Tetlock called hedgehogs, who knew one big thing and explained everything through it, were the least accurate. The best were the foxes: forecasters who knew many small things, held their views loosely, and changed their minds when the evidence changed.

Any honest attempt to say what lies ahead for India’s government, its right wing and its cockroaches should begin there. The events of 2026 were themselves a lesson in unpredictability. In April, few observers would have predicted that a remark in a courtroom would produce a movement larger than the ruling party on Instagram, or that a government that never conceded would lose a minister within ten weeks.

So this essay does not predict. It borrows instead from a method developed in the 1970s by the planner Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch Shell, whose scenarios helped the company anticipate the oil shock that blindsided its rivals. Scenarios are not forecasts. They are a small set of internally consistent stories about how the future might unfold, built around the forces that matter most and the uncertainties that cannot be resolved today. Their purpose is not to guess which one will happen, but to train us to recognise, early, which one is happening.

The argument of this series points to a starting judgment. The most likely near future is one of continued dominance with eroding legitimacy: the ruling party keeps power while the gap between its power and the consent of the young widens. Whether that condition turns into adaptation, hardening or realignment depends on a small number of choices and signals that can be watched. The rest of this essay sets them out, beginning with the next twelve months.

The next twelve months

The coming year has an unusually clear calendar of tests, and each of them will push events towards one scenario or another.

The first tests arrive within weeks. The movement must regroup after its leaders’ release and decide whether to continue its campaign against the Chief Election Commissioner in the same form or to reshape it. At the same time, the Congress party is moving to lead the same cause, with a march by its student wing and a rally at Ramlila Maidan on November 1 (The Week). Whether the movement and the opposition march separately, together, or with one absorbing the other will say a great deal about the movement’s independence. Abroad, Serbia’s student movement contests an early parliamentary election on October 25, a rare test of a youth protest movement at the ballot box against an incumbent who is still in power (AP, via NY1). Indian students will be watching.

The second set of tests concerns the electoral rolls. The Election Commission has resumed the routine summary revision of rolls in 17 states and union territories and has agreed to give parties searchable rolls (The Week). For the first time in years, parties and citizens’ groups will be able to check deletions and additions systematically. What they find, and how the Commission responds to what they find, will either cool the controversy or inflame it.

The third test is the examination system itself. The government has told the Supreme Court that NEET-UG will become a computer-based test from 2027 (Dinamalar), held over five or six days across nearly 1,000 centres, alongside an overhaul of the National Testing Agency (Outlook). The 2027 exam will be the single most important test of whether the government’s adaptation is real. If it runs cleanly, the government will have answered the movement’s founding grievance and taken much of its energy. If it leaks again, nothing the government says about reform will be believed.

The fourth test is the census. Its population enumeration, with a reference date of March 1, 2027, will include caste for the first time since independence, and the data will eventually shape the delimitation of constituencies and the implementation of the women’s reservation law (The News Minute). The census will not decide anything in the next year, but it will begin to reshape the terms of Indian politics in ways the later sections of this essay consider.

The fifth and largest test is electoral. In early 2027, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur go to the polls, and analysts have described these elections as the first real measure of whether young Indians’ anger carries into the ballot box (Reuters, via Aaj News). Uttar Pradesh matters above all. It is India’s most populous state, the home of Ayodhya, the place where the BJP’s national majority has been built and lost, and the state where the August Mood of the Nation survey projected the opposition alliance ahead in a national contest (Newsreel Asia). Most analysts expect state elections to turn on local factors and doubt that the movement will damage the BJP badly there. A strong BJP result would confirm that dominance holds. A weak one, especially among first-time voters, would suggest that something larger is moving.

By the first anniversary of the movement in May 2027, these tests will have produced their first answers. Those answers will point towards one of four broad futures.

The scenario map

Scenario planners build their stories around the two uncertainties that matter most and cannot be resolved today. The previous essays point clearly to which two those are here.

The first is how the state and the ruling party respond to the young. They can adapt, conceding real reform on exams, jobs and the integrity of the rolls, softening their tone and bringing younger leaders forward. Or they can harden, answering discontent with identity politics, containment and legal pressure. The third essay of this series showed that the government has so far done both, conceding at the periphery while holding the core. Which instinct prevails over the next three years is genuinely open.

The second is what the movement becomes. It can organise, turning followers into members, building local teams, reframing its demands so they can be won and staying independent of the parties. Or it can fragment, splintering under arrests, partisan capture and fatigue, or radicalising as its moderate supporters drift away. The fifth essay argued that this is the movement’s own choice more than anyone else’s.

Cross the two uncertainties and four futures appear.

The map is a simplification, and two forces lie outside it. One is the opposition, whose capacity to offer young voters a credible alternative will shape whether their anger has anywhere to go. The other is the set of wildcards, from a new exam leak to an economic shock, that could push the country suddenly from one quadrant to another. Both are considered after the four scenarios themselves.

Scenario one: adaptive dominance

In this future, the ruling party reads 2026 as a warning and acts on it. The 2027 medical entrance exam, held for the first time on computers over several days, runs without a leak. The overhauled testing agency publishes its procedures and its audits. Government recruitment moves to published annual calendars, and vacancies are filled on schedule. Under sustained pressure and scrutiny, the Election Commission publishes deletion data in a form anyone can check and runs re-enrolment camps, and the controversy over the rolls slowly cools. The ruling party’s tone towards the young changes: the insults stop, younger leaders are given visible roles, and the Prime Minister positions himself as an elder who listens rather than an influencer who performs.

The movement, meanwhile, organises. It becomes a durable, federated pressure group with local chapters, a reform agenda and a reputation for rigorous evidence. It extracts candidate pledges before elections, publishes report cards, audits schools and exam centres, and helps young people onto the rolls. It wins reforms rather than power.

Electorally, the BJP holds Uttar Pradesh in 2027 with a reduced margin and wins the 2029 general election, perhaps with a smaller majority or a larger dependence on its allies. Its dominance survives, but on new terms: it has absorbed the grievance rather than crushed it.

There is a long Indian precedent for this future. The political scientist Rajni Kothari described the Congress system of the 1950s and 1960s as a dominant party that survived by absorbing pressure: it let dissent flourish within and around it, co-opted the demands of movements, and bent just enough to remain unbreakable. A BJP that learns this art would be harder to defeat than one that does not.

The drivers of this scenario are the BJP’s electoral pragmatism, the cost-driven restraint the third essay identified, a clean exam season and an economy that creates enough jobs to take the edge off the anger. The early signals would be a leak-free NEET in 2027, published recruitment calendars, the resumption of the government’s promised talks on the movement’s reform charter, a visible absence of insults from senior party figures, and a movement that grows steadily in chapters and members rather than followers.

For the government, this is the best available future: power retained and legitimacy partly repaired. For the right, it means rebalancing identity with livelihood. For the movement, it means a real but limited victory, the kind the Right to Information campaign won: a changed system, without a change of government.

Scenario two: hardened dominance

In this future, the government concludes that its July concession was a mistake that invited further demands, and resolves not to repeat it. The campaign against the Chief Election Commissioner is met with permission denials, preventive detention and cases that keep leaders in courtrooms. The ruling party’s ecosystem treats the movement as an enemy formation, the left-leaning, foreign-influenced, anti-national network that its harshest critics already describe. Electoral politics shifts decisively towards identity and security: faith, infiltrators, national strength, and whatever crisis on the borders or within them dominates the news.

The movement, under this pressure, fragments. Some of its leaders are absorbed by opposition parties; others exhaust themselves in court. Its moderate supporters, the young people from BJP-voting families who made it so hard to dismiss, drift away, unwilling to be seen as enemies of the nation or to risk the police verification that a government job requires. A smaller, angrier core remains, more confrontational and easier to discredit. As Erica Chenoweth’s research suggests, movements that lose their breadth and discipline become easier to defeat, and the state’s narrative about them becomes self-fulfilling.

Electorally, this scenario can still produce BJP victories in 2027 and 2029, since identity politics has repeatedly outweighed economic discontent in Indian elections, especially when national security dominates. But the victories come at a mounting cost. The gap between power and legitimacy widens, especially among the young; trust in institutions such as the Election Commission erodes further; and the political energy of a generation that learned in 2026 that protest works learns in 2027 that it does not.

The international parallel is Turkey after Gezi Park: a youth movement that won the argument but lost the confrontation, followed by a decade of consolidation in which the government kept winning elections even as it lost the young. The cost of that path became visible only later, when Turkey’s youth turned away from the religious project the government had tried to build, and the opposition won the country’s major cities.

The drivers of this scenario are the ideological instincts of the Sangh’s core institutions, the government’s reading of dissent as threat, a security crisis that makes nationalism dominant, and a movement that fails to organise. The early signals would be further curbs on protest sites, new cases against movement leaders, the escalation of insult rhetoric and symbolic aggression, a stalled exam reform, a breakdown in the movement’s independence from the opposition, and a widening share of young people telling pollsters that democracy is under threat.

For the government, this is the path of least immediate resistance and greatest long-term risk. For the right, it means betting that identity can permanently outcompete livelihood. For the movement, it means defeat in the short run and, perhaps, a deeper radicalisation of a generation in the long run.

Scenario three: democratic realignment

In this future, the government hardens, but the movement does not break. It organises instead, and repression does what Brian Martin’s research says it often does: it backfires. Each arrest recruits new members, each closed protest site produces a new image, and the movement’s discipline and breadth make the charge of anti-national conspiracy impossible to sustain. The movement stays formally independent of the parties, but its agenda of exam integrity, recruitment and clean rolls becomes the centre of an opposition platform aimed squarely at the young. Its voter registration drives bring hundreds of thousands of first-time voters onto the rolls.

The decisive change happens in the opposition rather than the movement. Learning from the movement’s success, opposition parties promote younger leaders, adopt its reform charter and offer young voters something more than resentment of the BJP. The first test comes in Uttar Pradesh in 2027, where a strong swing among first-time voters dents the BJP’s majority or costs it the state. By 2029, the general election is genuinely open, with the youth vote as its deciding battleground.

This future has recent precedents. In Hungary in April 2026, an opposition long written off as hopeless won a two-thirds majority behind a new party and a new face, on a record turnout, by mobilising voters who had previously stayed home (OSW). In Tamil Nadu in May 2026, a new party led by the actor Vijay rode what observers called a youth-powered change to power (Asia News Network). Nepal’s uprising became an electoral landslide within six months. Elections with a tilted playing field can still be lost by incumbents who lose the young.

Realignment does not necessarily mean the BJP’s defeat. It could mean a hung parliament, a BJP government more dependent on allies than ever, or a coalition of opposition parties that governs uneasily. What defines this scenario is not who wins but that the terms of competition change: the youth vote becomes genuinely contestable, and the issues the movement raised become the issues every party must answer.

The drivers of this scenario are a state that overreaches, a movement that organises despite it, and, above all, an opposition capable of renewal, which is the least certain of the three. The early signals would be growth in the movement’s chapters and members during crackdowns rather than after them, a measurable rise in young voter registration, the adoption of the movement’s charter by opposition parties, defections or wavering among the BJP’s allies, and a youth swing in the 2027 state elections that exceeds the swing among older voters.

This is the future the movement’s supporters hope for, and it is not the most likely. It requires too many things to go right at once, and India’s opposition has disappointed its supporters before. But it is not fanciful either, and 2026 showed that the BJP’s hold on the young is less secure than it looked.

Scenario four: quiet exhaustion

The least dramatic future may be the most underestimated. In this scenario, the government adapts just enough. The exam goes online and runs cleanly, a few more procedural concessions are made on the rolls, and the insults fade from senior leaders’ speeches. Nothing fundamental changes, but the most visible grievances are blunted. The movement, meanwhile, fails to organise. Its founder’s legal troubles, the opposition’s absorption of its election campaign and the ordinary pressures of exams, jobs and family drain it. The follower count stays large, but the people behind it stop showing up. By the 2027 elections, the cockroach is a memory and a meme.

The young do not convert to the ruling party in this future. They withdraw. Some return to the queue for government jobs; some leave the country; many retreat into private life and online irony. This is the Indian version of China’s lying flat, a generation that concludes not that the system is wrong but that engaging with it is pointless. Turnout among young voters falls. Cynicism rises without ever becoming organised. The ruling party wins its elections against a demobilised generation and a fragmented opposition.

The historical warnings are close at hand. The anti-corruption movement of 2011, for all its energy, left many of its young participants disillusioned when its leaders split and its party disappointed them. Political scientists have long noted that disillusionment after a failed mobilisation can depress participation for years. The psychological gains described in the fifth essay of this series, the discovery of efficacy and the breaking of isolation, are perishable. If they are not reinforced by further success, they decay into the conviction that nothing can be done.

This scenario would suit the government in the short term and would be presented as proof that the movement was never more than an internet phenomenon. But it carries hidden costs. A democracy whose young have withdrawn becomes brittle: grievances accumulate without channels, and the next spark, another leaked exam, another insult, another shock, may produce something less disciplined and less funny than the cockroaches. Nepal’s 2025 uprising grew out of exactly such a reservoir of unchannelled youth frustration.

The drivers of this scenario are a government that adapts minimally, a movement that fails to build, an opposition that captures and then abandons its cause, and the sheer weight of economic insecurity on young lives. The early signals would be a falling number of local actions and members, rising engagement with the movement’s memes but falling attendance at its events, the opposition speaking for the movement’s issues more than the movement itself, and declining youth registration and turnout in 2027.

For the government, this is a comfortable future that stores up uncomfortable risks. For the right, it means retaining power over a generation it has not persuaded. For the movement, it means the fate the skeptics predicted.

Wildcards

Scenarios describe the futures that follow from the forces we can see. Wildcards are the events that can push a country from one future to another overnight. Six deserve attention.

The first is the caste census. The 2027 census will count caste for the first time since independence, and its results will eventually shape the delimitation of constituencies and the implementation of the law reserving a third of legislative seats for women, though officials have indicated the final data may come only after the 2029 election (The News Minute). Caste could cut across the generational politics of 2026 in either direction. It could split the cockroach coalition along lines of reservation and community, as scarce government jobs are fought over by quota; or it could deepen it, by giving young people of every caste a shared demand for more jobs rather than a larger share of too few. A related wildcard is delimitation itself, which threatens to shift parliamentary seats from the southern states to the northern ones and could reopen regional tensions that cut across every other alignment.

The second is succession. Narendra Modi will turn 79 in 2029. The question of who follows him has rarely been discussed openly within the BJP, although debates within the Sangh about age and leadership surfaced publicly in 2025. A succession, whenever it comes, will reset the relationship between the ruling party and the young. A younger leader could renew the BJP’s appeal to a generation that now sees the party as its parents’ establishment; a contested succession could fracture it.

The third is another failure of the examination system. If the first computer-based NEET in 2027 fails, or a major recruitment exam leaks, the movement’s founding grievance will return with doubled force, and the government’s claim to have reformed will collapse. Few single events could do more to move the country towards realignment.

The fourth is the economy. The global contraction in entry-level hiring, driven partly by artificial intelligence, could make graduate unemployment far worse, especially in the services and back-office jobs that absorbed many of India’s educated young. Alternatively, a manufacturing and investment boom could create enough work to dissolve much of the anger. The trajectory of youth employment is the single variable most likely to decide between the scenarios, and it is the one politics controls least.

The fifth is security. A military crisis with Pakistan, or tension along the border with China, would almost certainly produce a rally around the flag, strengthening the incumbent and the politics of identity, as the confrontation of May 2025 did. Hardened dominance becomes more likely in any year that national security dominates the news.

The sixth is the courts. Petitions challenging the 2023 law that changed how election commissioners are appointed, and continuing litigation over the revision of the electoral rolls, give the Supreme Court the power to settle, or to inflame, the movement’s second campaign. A ruling that restored a more independent appointment process could take much of the heat out of the Election Commission controversy. A ruling that upheld the status quo would leave the question to the streets and the ballot box.

Two further wildcards belong to the movement itself: an act of violence at a protest, which could destroy its moral authority in an afternoon, and the outcome of youth movements abroad, beginning with Serbia’s election on October 25, which young Indians will read as evidence of what is possible.

The signals to watch

The value of scenarios lies in the signals they teach us to notice. For readers who want to follow India’s trajectory over the next three years, seven families of indicators will reveal which future is unfolding, well before the 2029 election announces it.

The first family is electoral, and its most important number is not who wins but how the young vote. Watch the gap between the swing among first-time voters and the swing among everyone else in the 2027 state elections, especially Uttar Pradesh, as measured by post-poll surveys such as those of Lokniti-CSDS. Watch youth registration figures, which the Election Commission publishes before each election; a surge suggests mobilisation, a slump suggests exhaustion. Watch by-elections, which in 2026 delivered the BJP’s first defeats after the protests.

The second family measures legitimacy. In the August 2026 Mood of the Nation survey, 47% of respondents said democracy was under threat and 49% named Modi as their preferred prime minister, down from 55% in January (The Wire; Newsreel Asia). These numbers will be reported twice a year. If the first rises past half while the second keeps falling, the legitimacy gap is widening; if both stabilise, adaptation is working. Surveys of trust in the Election Commission deserve particular attention.

The third family tracks the state’s behaviour. Count the protest permissions granted and denied, the preventive detentions and new cases filed against activists, and the internet shutdowns, which civil liberties groups such as SFLC.in track. Note the tone of senior leaders’ speeches about the young: the disappearance of words like virus and filth would signal adaptation as surely as any policy. And watch the courts, whose rulings on protest rights, the electoral rolls and the appointment of election commissioners will set the limits within which every other actor plays.

The fourth family measures whether reforms are delivered. The first computer-based NEET is the headline test. Behind it lie quieter ones: whether the National Testing Agency’s overhaul produces published procedures and independent audits, whether recruitment calendars are announced and kept, whether the fast-track courts produce convictions for exam leaks, and whether the Election Commission publishes deletion data that outside researchers can verify.

The fifth family concerns the movement’s health, and here the essential discipline is to ignore the follower count. Watch instead the number of active local chapters, the number of members who pay dues or attend meetings, whether the movement functions when its founder is absent, whether it holds its own events or appears mainly at the opposition’s, whether its actions stay non-violent, and whether women, Dalit, Muslim and religious young people remain visible in its leadership.

The sixth family tracks the right’s choice of road. Read the editorials in its publications and the statements of its student wing. Count the young candidates the BJP fields in 2027. Notice whether effigies and insults recur, or quietly stop. Each will show whether the party is doubling down, adapting or dividing the labour.

The seventh family is economic, and it may matter most. The government’s quarterly labour force surveys report unemployment among 15- to 29-year-olds, which stood at 16.2% in June 2026 (Business Today). If that number falls steadily, adaptive dominance and quiet exhaustion become more likely. If it rises, realignment and hardened dominance do.

Weighing the futures

Tetlock’s best forecasters did something most pundits avoid: they put numbers on their judgments, so that they could be held to account and could update as evidence arrived. In that spirit, and with every caveat this essay has offered, here is one rough weighing of the four futures as of October 2026. These are subjective judgments, not calculations, and they are meant to be revised.

Adaptive dominance seems the single most likely future, perhaps a 35% chance. The government has already shown that it bends when the cost of refusal rises, as it did in July. The exam reforms are under way. The BJP remains the best-organised political force in the country, and its electoral machinery is pragmatic when its majorities are at stake.

Hardened dominance is close behind, perhaps 30%. The closing of Jantar Mantar to protest, the arrests of October, the rhetoric of the party’s ideological institutions and a cockroach effigy in a Ramlila all point this way. So does history: identity has repeatedly outweighed economic discontent in Indian elections, and any security crisis would strengthen it further.

Quiet exhaustion deserves perhaps 20%. It is the natural fate of movements that fail to build organisation, and the cockroaches have not yet built enough. The skeptics’ case set out in the previous essay is strong.

Democratic realignment is the least likely, perhaps 15%. It needs the state to overreach, the movement to organise and, hardest of all, the opposition to renew itself, all at once. Yet even 15% is a meaningful number. A year ago, before the leaked exam and the remark in the courtroom, few analysts would have given it any weight at all.

Two further points matter more than the individual numbers. First, the two dominance scenarios together carry roughly two-thirds of the weight: the most likely outcome in 2029, on present evidence, remains a BJP-led government. What is uncertain is not so much who governs as how, and with what consent. Second, the real future will almost certainly be a hybrid. The most probable shape is the division of labour described in the fourth essay, adaptation at the centre and hardening at the periphery, with the movement’s own choices deciding whether the country drifts towards the top of the map or the bottom.

The moment to revise these weights will come early in 2027. A clean computer-based NEET and a solid BJP result in Uttar Pradesh would shift weight towards adaptive dominance. A leak, a crackdown that backfires and a youth swing against the BJP would shift it towards realignment. A demobilised movement and falling youth turnout would shift it towards exhaustion. Readers who track the signals in the previous section will know which way to move before the commentators do.

What India teaches the world

India’s cockroach year belongs to a global story. Between 2024 and 2026, young people brought down or shook governments in Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru and Serbia, and an incumbent long considered unbeatable lost in Hungary. At the same time, according to the V-Dem Institute, electoral autocracy became the most common regime type experienced by the world’s population, governing nearly half of humanity (The Wire). India sits at the intersection of these two trends: the largest democracy on earth, classified by its sharpest critics as an electoral autocracy, facing the largest youth population in human history. What happens here will be read everywhere. Five lessons are already visible.

The first is that the global youth revolt is not a story of narcissism or screen addiction. It is a story of material precarity meeting visible inequality, amplified by platforms but authored by economies that promised the young more than they delivered. Governments that treat it as a problem of online behaviour will keep misreading it.

The second is that humour is a serious political weapon in polarised information environments. A movement that mocks itself first cannot easily be demonised, and a government that answers mockery with force or insult tends to confirm the joke. Satire did what earnest protest has often failed to do in India over the past decade: it defeated the charge of being anti-national.

The third is that the oldest repertoires of resistance still work. The Indian movement drew, consciously or not, on a tradition of non-violent, self-suffering, feminine-coded resistance that runs from Gandhi through the mothers of Manipur. Under the right conditions, an audience capable of shame, courts capable of intervening and elections that can still be lost, that tradition remains formidable. Under the wrong conditions, as Turkey and Hong Kong showed, it is not enough.

The fourth is that digital mobilisation is a beginning, not an end. Movements that build nothing beneath their follower counts win moments and lose decades; movements that turn weak ties into strong ones, as Nepal’s and Serbia’s did, can shape their countries’ futures. The cockroaches’ fate will be read as a verdict on whether the internet generation can organise as well as it can mobilise.

The fifth concerns dominant governments. India in 2026 showed that a government with a commanding majority and an image of strength can be forced to concede, but also that it can concede at the periphery while holding the core, preserving its power as its legitimacy erodes. Whether that pattern ends in adaptation, as in the old Congress system, or in hardening, as in Turkey, or in defeat, as in Hungary, is the question that India’s next three years will answer, not only for India but for every democracy that wonders whether it is still one.

This series has carried a title with two meanings, and the coming years will decide which one fits.

In the first meaning, the cockroach republic is a republic of survivors. It is a country whose young, told by the powerful that they were vermin, laughed, organised and made the powerful bend. It is a democracy that bruises but does not break, whose courts can still intervene, whose elections can still be lost, and whose citizens can still mock their rulers without disappearing. In that republic, the events of 2026 will be remembered the way India remembers its other moments of democratic renewal: as the year a generation discovered that it could move power, and that power could be made to listen.

In the second meaning, the cockroach republic is a republic that has come to see its own citizens as pests. It is a country where a judge’s insult becomes a party’s slogan and a festival’s effigy, where protest sites are closed and protesters are bound to keep the peace, where young people learn that their grievances will be met with disgust, and where, in time, they stop protesting not because they are satisfied but because they no longer believe anyone is listening. That republic survives too. It simply survives emptier.

Which meaning prevails will not be decided by any single actor. It will depend on whether the government chooses to adapt or to harden, whether the right decides to court the young or to burn them in effigy, whether the opposition can renew itself, and whether the movement can turn a season of laughter into an organisation that lasts. It will depend, too, on things no one controls: the economy, the borders and the luck of an examination season.

Kafka’s Gregor Samsa dies, in the end, because his family stops seeing him as a person. They speak of him as “it”, and when he is gone they feel only relief. The young Indians who took up the cockroach in May 2026 were refusing that ending. Their joke was an insistence on being seen: we know what you think we are, and we are still here. What the republic does with that insistence will say less about them than about the republic.

A democracy is not measured by how it treats those it admires. It is measured by how it answers those it has called pests.

This concludes The Cockroach Republic: How India’s Young Learned to Laugh at Power.

Sources

The next twelve months

Scenarios and signals

Scholarly works referenced: Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011); Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India”, Asian Survey (1964); Martin, Justice Ignited (2007); Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (2005); Tetlock and Gardner, Superforecasting (2015); Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead”, Harvard Business Review (1985).

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.

Articles in this series:

Discover more from Numerons

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.