Best Of Both Sides Cockroach Janta Party Frames Raw Energy Undercurrent

The calculus of conventional political analysis doesn t get it. For it asks clever, pointless questions: Whodunnit? The calculus of conventional political analysis doesn’t get it. For it asks clever, pointless questions: Whodunnit? What’s the motive? What’s the next move? Its attempt at weighing a shadow reveals nothing but its own fantasies. Or nightmares. This is where political minds could learn something from a poet or a psychologist. Most reactions to the Cockroach Janta Party miss a simple truth in plain sight. The CJP is not a party. It is no more and no less than the public. It is not a community. Not even a crowd. It is a stack of emotions. It is nowhere close to a movement. It is just a moment. And that is why it matters. That is why it must not be dismissed. It is a moment that offers us a glimpse. A rare glimpse of an energy that can reclaim the republic from authoritarian assault. Provided we recognise that this is not a wave, but an undercurrent. Provided we can resist the foolish temptation to capture it. Or the stubborn reflex to stand in its way. At first sight, it fits in with a pattern of midlife crisis of governments with massive mandates, when protest movements came up from nowhere to expose the underbelly of power. The Gujarat and Bihar movements in 1973-74, Assam movement in 1983, Anna movement in 2012 and Kisan Morcha in 2021 — all successfully challenged seemingly invincible governments, bypassing a lacklustre Opposition. The Narendra Modi government is poised at a similar stage. While the BJP scraped back into power in 2024, it did not retain the kind of dominance or legitimacy that it enjoyed for a decade. Over the past two years, culminating in the successful conquest of Bengal, the BJP government has regained dominance, even if its legitimacy remains fractured. It is no coincidence that the CJP erupted just when the ruling party’s stranglehold over electoral contestations appeared near total. The NEET cancellation and the CJI’s remarks were the occasion, not the cause. Yet this moment is much more and much less than the other historical parallels. For starters, it is not a real expression of political energy on the ground. It is one thing to generate synchronised outrage on social media, quite another to convert that into a movement that has feet on the ground, or take it towards a viable political alternative. The incipient CJP is nowhere there. It has a founder, not necessarily a leader. A vast number of its followers could just be spectators or curious neophytes with little stomach for real-life political action. A large majority could be expressing diverse, unrelated or even contradictory grievances against an unspecified adversary. As per Ernesto Laclau, this is a defining feature of every such popular protest. This is the raw energy powerful movements are built from. What makes the CJP more special is the context of growing authoritarianism and its choice of “dilemma action” to