The Cockroach Republic — Part 3: The Strongman's Dilemma

How the ruling party responded, and what its response reveals

The government that did not resign

In 2015, as opposition parties demanded cabinet resignations over two scandals, the then home minister, Rajnath Singh, drew a line between the new government and the coalition that had preceded it: ministers, he said, do not resign here. The clip circulated widely again in July 2026 (The Christian Science Monitor). For eleven years the line held. As the scholar Apoorvanand put it, through a disruptive currency overhaul, a chaotic pandemic response and fatal train accidents, nobody took responsibility. The Modi government cultivated the image of a leadership that does not bend under pressure.

On July 25, 2026, it bent. Dharmendra Pradhan, education minister since 2021 and a trusted lieutenant of the Prime Minister, resigned after thirty-six days of protests led by a movement that had begun as a satirical Instagram page. Within hours, two senior ministers had agreed with the movement’s representatives to drop police cases against protesters, compensate the families of students who had died by suicide after the leaks, and meet again to discuss a charter of examination reforms (Khaleej Times).

Two months later, the same government faced the same movement over a different target, the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, and did not bend at all. Police detained thousands of protesters in Delhi and picked up the movement’s leaders as they landed at Delhi airport (NPR); its founder was later arrested (Dawn). The commissioner remains in office.

Why bend once and then hold firm? This essay argues that the answer reveals the logic of the government itself. Its response to the cockroaches was neither the unrestrained repression its fiercest critics describe nor the democratic responsiveness its defenders claim. It was something more calculated: restraint governed by cost. Concede at the periphery, where a concession is cheap. Hold the core, where a concession would be expensive.

That logic has preserved the government’s power. It has also widened a gap that may matter more over time: the gap between holding power and being seen to deserve it.

The arc of response

The government’s handling of the movement unfolded in six recognisable phases, and the sequence itself is revealing.

The first phase was distance. The insult that launched the movement came from the Chief Justice, not the government, and he quickly said he had been misquoted. The ruling party said little. But within days, the movement’s account on X was withheld in India in response to a legal demand (BBC, via Podbean). Its Instagram page was reportedly hacked, its website went offline, backup handles were taken down, and petitions appeared in court accusing it of commercially exploiting a judge’s remarks (Herald Goa). Who requested what remains opaque, which is part of the point. Pressure in this phase was diffuse, deniable and directed at platforms rather than people.

The second phase was containment. When the movement stepped off the screen in June, Delhi Police granted it permission to protest at Jantar Mantar (UNB), the capital’s designated protest street. A sit-in began on June 20. The activist Sonam Wangchuk joined and began a hunger strike, and for weeks, as his health worsened, the government made no significant acknowledgment of it (Britannica). Protesters alleged that lights, power and water at the site were cut (Global Voices). On June 23, a protester’s father suffered a head injury in a scuffle with men later identified as Hindutva activists; police maintained the injury was minor and that a case had been registered (Telangana Today). One analyst described the state’s approach in this period as calibrated containment: permit protest within narrow limits, police its reach, and wait for the coalition to fragment (Al Jazeera).

The third phase was coercion. On July 18, Wangchuk was removed from the site to a government hospital; police said a court had ordered it, while the movement called it a detention (ISAS). Two days later, the march on Parliament was met with barricades, baton charges and tear gas. The movement alleged that pellet guns were fired, and a journalist covering the march was treated for 26 small, round wounds (Pedestrian). Delhi Police, for its part, said more than 118 personnel had been injured and accused protesters of throwing stones, breaching barricades and damaging property (Onmanorama).

The fourth phase was persuasion. The Prime Minister released selfie-style videos addressing students directly (CNN) and announced fast-track courts to prosecute those responsible for exam leaks (Gulf News). He reportedly told cabinet colleagues that young people were simply on Instagram and urged ministers to court them there (Al Jazeera). The government also sent a minister to assure the leader of the opposition that Parliament would debate the exam scandal (ISAS).

The fifth phase was concession. On July 25, Pradhan resigned. His letter framed the decision as a sacrifice to keep “anti-India forces” at bay (The Tribune): the government conceded the demand while declining the movement’s account of why it was necessary. The ministers who negotiated with the movement agreed to drop police cases and to compensate the families of students who had died, within the limits of the rules. In September, after the government gave assurances in court, the Supreme Court used its extraordinary powers under Article 142 to quash the FIRs registered over the July protests (Asianet Newsable).

The sixth phase was renewed firmness. In August, campaigning in a by-election, the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, denounced Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country” (Al Jazeera). When the movement’s volunteers began auditing government schools, they faced attacks and police action over allegedly unauthorised visits (Al Jazeera). And when the movement turned on the Chief Election Commissioner in October, the state’s posture hardened markedly. Mobile internet was suspended near protest sites (Prothom Alo). Police denied permission for a second Jantar Mantar protest and dozens of Metro stations were shut (ThePrint). Thousands were detained. A woman journalist who accused a police officer of sexual harassment found herself named in an FIR under the SC/ST Act on the officer’s complaint (The Wire). And a Ramlila committee headed by a BJP legislator announced it would burn a thirty-foot cockroach beside Ravan this Dussehra.

Read as a sequence, the arc has a clear shape: deniable pressure, then containment, then coercion, then the cheapest available concession, then reassertion. Each phase was a response to cost. When ignoring the movement became expensive, the state contained it. When containment produced images of a fasting activist and beaten students, it conceded a minister. When the target moved to the machinery of elections, it held.

The ledger

Any honest account of 2026 has to keep two columns, because both are real.

The first column records what the movement won or was given. A Union minister resigned, the first under public pressure in this government’s tenure. Police cases from the July protests were dropped and then quashed by the Supreme Court. The families of students who died after the leaks were promised compensation within the rules. Fast-track courts were announced for exam-leak prosecutions, and the movement’s five-point reform charter was accepted for discussion, though what became of those talks remains unclear. On the electoral front, the Election Commission ordered a review of its voter-roll software by a committee including an independent technology expert, and said local officials would visit voters flagged for discrepancies rather than summoning them to offices (Reuters, via TimesLIVE). On October 1 it directed officials to identify omitted voters and ease their re-enrolment (Reuters, via ARY), and in mid-October it agreed, for the first time, to give parties readable electoral rolls (Siasat). After videos circulated showing men from a fringe Hindu group assaulting protesters, Delhi Police arrested four of them on its own initiative (ThePrint). The Supreme Court barred coercive action against the journalist who had accused a police officer of sexual harassment, and signalled it would lay down guidelines to protect journalists covering protests (LiveLaw). The Delhi High Court refused to entertain a petition seeking a counter-terrorism probe of the movement’s march on Parliament (Moneylife).

The second column records what was done to the movement. Its accounts were withheld, hacked or taken down. A fasting activist was removed from the protest site. Protesters were baton-charged and tear-gassed, and the movement alleges they were fired on with pellets. Mobile internet was suspended near protest sites; Metro stations were closed; protesters say they were picked up from trains to keep them away from Delhi. Thousands were detained in October, the movement’s leaders were taken into custody, and two of them were held in judicial custody (The Week). A journalist’s harassment complaint was met with a counter-case under a law designed to protect Dalits and Adivasis. Women who made the movement’s memes faced doxxing and threats. A student leader whose organisation marched alongside the movement told Al Jazeera that Muslim and Dalit students were the first to be jailed and intimidated (Al Jazeera). And senior figures in the ruling party called the protesters a virus, filthy, and a gang out to break the country.

Between the columns sits a contested zone. A self-described Hindutva influencer boasted on video of assaulting a protester’s father and claimed political protection; Delhi Police rejected any suggestion of political interference and said the accused had been dealt with according to law (Telangana Today). In October, one video of right-wing men attacking protesters also showed police personnel nearby, prompting the opposition to accuse the police of encouraging the violence (Outlook), even as the police went on to arrest four of the attackers. Whether the state tolerates allied vigilantes, or simply polices unevenly under pressure, is a question the evidence raises without settling.

The ledger yields one observation that matters more than any single entry. Most of the restraints recorded in the first column did not originate with the government. They came from the Supreme Court and the High Court, from the Election Commission under the pressure of a newspaper investigation, from viral videos that made inaction costly, and from a minister’s resignation that followed the most damaging images of the summer. The government’s own concessions arrived when the price of refusing them rose. That is the signature of a particular kind of power, and it is worth describing carefully.

A personality profile of power

Governments are not people, but long-ruling, leader-centred governments acquire something like a personality: a stable pattern of perceiving threats, making decisions and responding to pressure. The political psychologist Margaret Hermann, who spent decades profiling world leaders, reduced the question of leadership style to three diagnostic questions. Does the leader respect constraints or challenge them? Is the leader open to information or closed to it? Is the leader driven chiefly by a mission or by the need to manage relationships? Applied to the government’s conduct in 2026, those questions yield a recognisable profile. It is an interpretation drawn from public behaviour, not a diagnosis, and readers should test it against the record.

The first trait is a mission-driven core. The government understands itself as the agent of a civilisational project, a national renewal grounded in Hindu nationalism and a vision of India as a developed great power by 2047. Leaders who see themselves as carriers of a mission tend to read opposition as obstruction of the nation rather than disagreement with a party. The language of 2026 fits the pattern. The departing education minister framed his resignation as a sacrifice to keep “anti-India forces” at bay; the party president described the protesters as devoted to breaking the country. In both statements, a dispute about exam leaks and voter rolls was translated into a question of national loyalty.

The second trait is centralisation. Authority in this government flows visibly from the top, and its public face is overwhelmingly the Prime Minister’s own. When the crisis peaked, he addressed students himself, in selfie videos. The resignation was framed as an individual minister’s sacrifice rather than an acknowledgment of systemic failure, which protected the centre of the system from the blame. Leaders of this type, in Hermann’s terms, tend to challenge constraints rather than accommodate them, and to keep decisions within a narrow circle.

The third trait is high sensitivity to threat. Dissent tends to be read as conspiracy, and the protesters as instruments of hidden hands. One of the government’s allies in Uttar Pradesh dismissed the protests as the work of opponents trying to repeat what had happened in Bangladesh (Times Now). In Hermann’s vocabulary, this pattern combines distrust of outsiders with strong in-group bias, and it tends to produce responses that are disproportionate to the actual threat, which is part of why repression so often backfires.

The fourth trait is legalism. The government’s preferred instruments were rarely raw force alone. They were legal demands to platforms, FIRs, preventive detention, permission denials and, in one case, a counter-complaint under the SC/ST Act. Power exercised through law has two advantages for a government: it is deniable, since the courts and the police appear to act on their own, and it is exhausting, since the process becomes the punishment.

The fifth trait is image-consciousness. A government whose authority rests heavily on one leader’s persona is unusually sensitive to ridicule. The speed of the action against a satirical account, the Prime Minister’s attempt to speak in the grammar of influencers, the party’s slang-heavy gym video and, now, a cockroach effigy in a Ramlila all suggest a government that treats the symbolic contest as seriously as the political one.

The sixth trait, and the one that most complicates the portrait drawn by critics, is calibration. This is not a government without limits. It is a government whose limits are set by cost. It resigned a minister when the images of July became politically expensive. It let the courts quash cases, let the Election Commission make procedural concessions, and arrested vigilantes when their videos went viral. It did not budge on the Chief Election Commissioner, whose removal would have implicated the integrity of elections the party had won. Restraint, in this pattern, comes mostly from outside the government, from courts, cameras and voters, rather than from within it. But it comes.

Some observers would add a seventh trait: permissiveness towards allied informal actors, the influencers, fringe groups and local functionaries who do what the state itself cannot be seen to do. The evidence from 2026 is suggestive but contested, and the police did, eventually, arrest attackers. It is best held as an open question.

None of these traits is unique to India. Together they describe a familiar species of contemporary government, one that political scientists have spent two decades trying to name.

Naming the system

What kind of system produces this pattern? The question is itself politically charged, and the labels on offer deserve to be examined rather than recited.

The Varieties of Democracy Institute in Gothenburg has classified India as an “electoral autocracy” since 2017, and its 2026 report placed the country 105th of 179 on its Liberal Democracy Index, down from 100th a year earlier (The Wire). Freedom House rates India “Partly Free”, with a score of 62 out of 100 (Freedom House), while noting that its elections remain competitive and are generally regarded as free and fair. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined a related term, competitive authoritarianism, for systems in which elections are real and the opposition can sometimes win, but the playing field is tilted through control of media, money, investigative agencies and the law.

A third concept may fit 2026 most precisely. The scholars Javier Corrales and Kim Lane Scheppele have described autocratic legalism: the use of laws, courts and formally legal procedures to weaken checks on power without ever openly breaking the rules. The political scientist Nancy Bermeo calls the broader pattern executive aggrandisement, a slow erosion carried out by elected governments through legal means rather than coups. The government’s preference for legal instruments over raw force fits this description. So does the institutional background to the October protests. In 2023, Parliament changed the law on appointing election commissioners, replacing the Chief Justice on the selection panel with a Union minister nominated by the Prime Minister, which gave the government a majority on the panel. Gyanesh Kumar was the first Chief Election Commissioner appointed under that law, over the dissent of the leader of the opposition. To the movement, this is why the commissioner became the target. To the government, it is simply Parliament exercising its constitutional authority to legislate on appointments.

The government and its defenders reject the labels outright, and their objections are not trivial. A 2022 working paper by members of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister argued that these indices are almost entirely perception-based, rest on the opinions of small groups of unnamed experts, and use questions that are subjective or poorly suited to measuring democracy across countries (EAC-PM). Defenders also point to facts that sit awkwardly with the word autocracy. Indian elections are vast and fiercely contested, with turnouts many established democracies would envy. Opposition parties govern several large states. In 2024, voters denied the BJP a parliamentary majority of its own, forcing it to rely on coalition partners. And in 2026 itself, the Supreme Court quashed cases against protesters and shielded a journalist, a High Court refused to unleash a counter-terrorism agency on the movement, and the ruling party lost a seat it had held for three decades.

Where does that leave the question? The most defensible answer is that India does not fit neatly into either box. It is not an autocracy in the sense that Russia or China is: power can be challenged, courts can intervene, and the ruling party can lose. Nor is it a liberal democracy operating as its Constitution intends: the playing field is uneven, and much of the restraint on power has to be won from outside the government rather than offered from within it. The pattern of 2026, with its concessions at the margins, firmness at the core and restraint imposed rather than chosen, is precisely what a system in between would produce. That the label itself has become a partisan battlefield tells us something too. In a fully confident democracy, the question would be boring.

The government’s case

An essay this critical owes the government its strongest defence, made as its most thoughtful supporters would make it. That defence has five parts, and several of them carry real weight.

The first is that the government responded, and substantially. Within five weeks of the sit-in’s start, a senior minister had resigned, police cases had been dropped, compensation had been promised, fast-track courts had been announced, and the movement’s reform charter had been accepted for discussion. Within weeks of the October protests, the Election Commission had ordered an independent review of its software, eased re-enrolment and agreed to share readable rolls. An autocracy does not behave this way. Few democracies concede so much to a movement that is less than six months old.

The second concerns the Election Commission. In May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, while ruling that the Commission cannot itself decide questions of citizenship (Reuters, via ARY). The Commission says its revision removed duplicate, deceased and fraudulent entries, and that anyone wrongly deleted can apply to be restored, while the BJP accuses its rivals of undermining democracy by attacking a lawful process (Dawn). The government’s allies add a pointed question: every party has booth-level agents who could have flagged errors during the revision, so why did the complaints arrive only afterwards (Times Now)? On this view, demanding the resignation of a constitutional officer for conducting a revision the Supreme Court upheld is not reform. It is pressure on an independent institution, the very thing critics accuse the government of.

The third concerns order. Delhi is the seat of Parliament, and a march towards it during a session is a serious security matter in any capital. Delhi Police reported more than a hundred personnel injured on July 20, alleging that protesters threw stones and damaged property (Onmanorama). The government also governs in a dangerous neighbourhood. In 2022, crowds in Sri Lanka stormed the president’s residence. In 2024, protests drove Bangladesh’s prime minister into exile. In 2025, Nepal’s parliament burned and at least 72 people died. A government that watched those scenes and treated a youth uprising in its capital as purely a matter of free expression would be negligent. Ministers’ warnings that India is not Bangladesh, whatever their tone, reflect a real fear.

The fourth concerns partisanship. The movement presents itself as above parties, but opposition leaders marched with it, its October campaign targeted an institution the opposition had been attacking for over a year, and the Leader of the Opposition was detained at one of its protests. From the government’s vantage point, this looks less like a spontaneous youth movement than opposition politics in a new costume, and governments everywhere treat opposition campaigns as contests to be won rather than grievances to be redressed.

The fifth is the mandate. The BJP-led alliance won the 2024 election. In August 2026, after the summer’s protests, the India Today-CVoter Mood of the Nation survey still projected 326 seats for the alliance if an election were held then, more than it won in 2024 (Business Today). Narendra Modi remained by far the most preferred choice for prime minister. A government with that standing can reasonably claim that a viral movement, however large online, does not speak for the nation.

How much of this holds? A good deal. The concessions were real and unusual. The Supreme Court did uphold the revision. The security concerns of a government in South Asia in 2026 are not imaginary, and opposition parties did attach themselves to the movement. But the defence has gaps it cannot close. It does not explain why senior party figures answered students with words like virus and filth, why a satirical account was withheld before it had broken any law anyone has identified, why thousands were detained pre-emptively in October, or why a journalist’s harassment complaint produced a case against her. And the poll it relies on has been criticised for drawing heavily on interviews conducted before the protests became a national movement (Newsreel Asia), while showing the alliance’s projected tally down 26 seats since January. The government’s best case, in short, is a case for its power. It is a weaker case for the manner in which it used it.

Why the playbook failed

Over the past decade, India’s ruling establishment developed a familiar repertoire for protest movements: question the protesters’ patriotism, suggest foreign or opposition funding, register cases, police the edges, and wait for fatigue. Against the cockroaches, almost every element of it misfired.

The first reason is that self-mockery pre-empted the insult. A movement that had already named itself after vermin could not be wounded by being called vermin. Gilles Verniers observed that by mocking themselves before anyone else could, the protesters had effectively inoculated themselves against the ruling party’s standard delegitimisation tactics (Al Jazeera). When the party president called them a virus, he was speaking a language they had already turned into a joke.

The second reason is that the movement overlapped with the party’s own base. Much of its energy came from young, urban, aspirational Indians of the middle and lower-middle classes, many from Hindu families, the very constituency that had powered the BJP’s rise in 2014. Its grievance, a leaked medical entrance exam, had no ideological colour; parents who vote for the BJP have children who sit for NEET. And its symbols were the tricolour and the national anthem. The anti-national charge needs a visibly alien target, and this movement offered none.

The third reason is backfire. Every coercive act generated images: a fasting activist carried away, students running from batons, a journalist’s pellet wounds, an internet shutdown, Metro stations closed to keep citizens away from their capital. Each image recruited new sympathisers, exactly as Brian Martin’s research on backfire predicts.

The fourth reason is that humour flows upward, and power cannot easily answer it in kind. The party’s attempts to speak to the young in their own idiom were ridiculed. The political analyst Asim Ali observed that its outreach looked increasingly managed and paid for, a far cry from the organic online energy that had once made the BJP the master of digital politics (Al Jazeera). And the insults, the virus, the filth and now the effigy, did not shrink the movement. They confirmed its founding story: that the powerful look at the young and see pests.

Power and legitimacy

Verniers drew the distinction that matters most. The government’s power was never in danger. What the movement damaged was its legitimacy. The two are easily confused, but Max Weber separated them a century ago. Power is the capacity to get one’s way; legitimacy is the belief, among the governed, that this capacity is rightfully held and rightfully used. Power can be measured in seats and police battalions. Legitimacy shows up in quieter places.

It is beginning to show up in the data. In the August 2026 Mood of the Nation survey, 47% of respondents said democracy in India is under threat, against 42% who said it is not (The Wire). The share naming Modi as their preferred prime minister fell from 55% in January to 49%, the alliance’s projected tally fell by 26 seats, and in Uttar Pradesh, the state that decides national majorities, the opposition alliance was projected to win more seats than the NDA (Newsreel Asia). In August, the BJP lost the Bankipur assembly seat it had held for three decades (Al Jazeera). None of this threatens the government’s majority today. All of it points in one direction.

There is also a subtler cost, which might be called the boomer effect. Narendra Modi’s appeal to young Indians was built in part on modernity: the leader who embraced social media before his rivals, spoke the language of start-ups and Digital India, and seemed, despite his age, more contemporary than the dynastic opposition. Verniers argued that the movement had, for the first time, made the Prime Minister look his age. For a leader whose authority rests heavily on persona, that is not a trivial loss.

The deepest cost may lie in the future. Political scientists have long observed, in what is called the impressionable years hypothesis, that political attitudes formed between the late teens and the mid-twenties tend to persist for life. The generation whose formative political experience was the Emergency of 1975 carried its distrust of the Congress for decades. A generation whose first encounter with the state was a leaked exam, a judge’s insult and a baton charge may carry that memory just as long. Power can be held election by election. Legitimacy, once lost with a cohort, is far harder to win back.

Strongmen and the young

India is not the only country where a dominant, leader-centred government has faced a youth revolt. V-Dem’s researchers have long grouped India’s trajectory with those of Hungary under Viktor Orbán and Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu (DT Next). Four comparisons, each ending differently, show what decides the outcome.

Turkey offers the closest parallel, and the bleakest. In 2013, a protest against the redevelopment of Istanbul’s Gezi Park grew into a national uprising. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismissed the protesters as çapulcu, looters, and they did exactly what India’s young did with the word cockroach: they adopted it, turned it into an English verb, “chapulling”, and built a carnival of humour around it. It did not save them. The state absorbed the legitimacy costs, prosecuted the movement’s alleged organisers for years, and kept consolidating power. When the arrest of Istanbul’s opposition mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, in March 2025 set off the largest protests in a decade, with students at the front, the response was mass detention. The lesson of Turkey is that reappropriation and wit cannot by themselves defeat a government willing to pay any price in legitimacy, once courts and elections have been bent to its purposes.

Serbia offers the closest parallel in tactics. After a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people in a tragedy widely blamed on corruption, students blockaded their faculties for months. The government conceded at the periphery: Prime Minister Miloš Vučević and his government resigned in 2025. President Aleksandar Vučić held the core, refusing early elections for months, calling the protests unregistered and criminal gatherings (AP, via WTOP) and accusing them of being part of a foreign plot (eNCA). The pattern will be familiar to Indian readers. What happened next is the instructive part. The students turned their movement into an electoral list of professors, teachers and experts, and on October 25 they will contest an early parliamentary election that is widely seen as a major test for Vučić (AP, via NY1).

Hungary offers the surprise. For sixteen years, Orbán was the model of the elected leader who uses legal means to tilt the field: friendly media, redrawn districts, captured institutions. Many concluded he could not be beaten at the ballot box. On April 12, 2026, he was beaten decisively. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, led by a former government insider, won a two-thirds majority on a record turnout of nearly 79%, and Orbán conceded on the night (RTHK). Analysts credited Tisza with mobilising new voter groups, including people who had previously stayed home and those disillusioned with the old opposition (OSW). The lesson of Hungary is that a tilted field is still a field. Where elections remain genuinely competitive, a legitimacy deficit can eventually be converted into defeat.

Israel offers the institutional lesson. In 2023, Netanyahu’s government pushed a judicial overhaul that would have curtailed the Supreme Court’s power to review government decisions. Months of mass protest followed, joined by military reservists, tech workers and former security chiefs; when the defence minister was fired for urging a pause, a general strike forced the government to suspend the plan. The government later passed part of it, and in January 2024 the Supreme Court struck that law down. The lesson of Israel is that the decisive defections are often within the establishment itself, and that an independent judiciary can hold a line that street protest alone cannot.

Set beside India, the four cases suggest that three variables decide how a strongman’s confrontation with the young ends. The first is whether elections remain competitive enough to punish an incumbent. The second is whether institutions, above all the courts and the election authorities, retain enough independence to impose limits. The third is whether the movement can convert its energy into organisation and, eventually, into an electoral vehicle. On the first two, India in 2026 sits somewhere between Hungary and Turkey: elections are competitive and the courts have intervened, but the election authority itself is now the contested ground. On the third, the cockroaches have barely begun.

The dilemma

Every government built on an image of strength faces the same trap when its young turn against it. If it concedes, it contradicts the image on which its authority rests and invites further demands. If it represses, it manufactures the images that recruit its opponents. If it does nothing, the grievance festers and the mockery spreads. There is no costless option. That is the strongman’s dilemma.

In 2026, the Indian government found a way through it, for a while. It conceded at the periphery, where a minister could be sacrificed, cases dropped and procedures tweaked without touching the centre of its power. It held the core. It let courts and commissions supply the restraint it would not supply itself. By the measure that matters most to any government, this worked: its majority is intact, its leader remains the country’s most popular politician, and the movement’s founder spent part of October in custody.

But the movement has done something that makes the old solution harder to repeat. By turning from a leaked exam to the electoral rolls, it has moved the contest to the one place where a government’s power and its legitimacy are the same thing: the vote. A minister can be replaced without conceding anything about how power was won. A Chief Election Commissioner cannot be defended without staking the credibility of the elections themselves. On this ground, concession is more expensive than ever, and so is refusal, for exactly the same reason.

There is also a contest the state cannot settle with police or procedure at all. It concerns not what the government does but who the young believe they are: whether a generation raised on faith, family and national pride will continue to see itself in the ruling party’s vision of India, or come to see that vision, in the shape of a burning cockroach beside Ravan, as aimed at them. That is a battle over identity, masculinity and the meaning of Hindu tradition itself, and it is the subject of the next essay.

Next in The Cockroach Republic, Essay 4: The Battle for the Young Hindu. Identity, masculinity, and the right wing after the cockroach.

Sources

The government’s response, May to October 2026

Democracy indices, polls and the government’s rebuttal

Strongmen and the young

Scholarly works referenced: Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding” (2016); Corrales, “Autocratic Legalism in Venezuela” (2015); Hermann, “Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis” (2005); Krosnick and Alwin, “Aging and Susceptibility to Attitude Change” (1989); Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism (2010); Martin, Justice Ignited (2007); Scheppele, “Autocratic Legalism” (2018); Weber, Economy and Society (1922).

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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