The streets of New Delhi are sending a message that the corridors of power cannot silence with nationalist spectacles or police batons. Tens of thousands of young demonstrators under the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) have paralysed the capital, posing the fiercest challenge to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its twelve years of rule.
The eruption follows the deletion of over 130 million citizens from the electoral rolls under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. With The Indian Express revealing that Kumar’s own two deputy commissioners expressed internal dissent over these procedures, the state has responded with a siege: deploying over 25,000 police personnel, suspending mobile internet, shutting central metro stations, and detaining over 7,000 protesters in a single weekend.
Yet, this collision between alienated youth and a fortress state offers an urgent warning for Nepal. At the philosophical root of India’s crisis is the normalisation of the unanswerable ruler. Since assuming office on 26 May 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not held a single traditional, unscripted solo press conference in India to face unvetted questions from independent journalists, fashioning himself into an infallible political demigod. Across the border, Nepal risks adopting an identical form of democratic rot. Following the March 2026 political shifts, Kathmandu’s populist leader Balen Shah has retreated into an identical pattern of media evasion, avoiding open press conferences and public interviews. By morphing into a classic khopiko deuta (खोपिको देउता)—a cloistered idol in an alcove who demands unquestioned faith while remaining insulated from scrutiny—Balen replicates the very elite silence that has forced India’s youth onto the streets.
Reclaiming the Vermin: How Scorn Sparked a Revolt
The Cockroach movement was born of institutional contempt. In mid-May, Chief Justice Surya Kant sparked outrage by dismissively referring to unemployed youth as “cockroaches”. Recognising that the slur captured an establishment that views struggling citizens as disposable vermin, activist Abhijeet Dipke founded the Cockroach Janta Party, turning humiliation into an armour of defiance.
Alongside leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, Dipke mobilised millions caught in an economy plagued by recruitment freezes and broken promises. This anger had already been boiling for months: a weeks-long sit-in at Jantar Mantar and educator-activist Sonam Wangchuk’s 21-day hunger strike over recurring university entrance exam leaks had already forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.
When the state fails to secure even the sanctity of these tests, the social contract disintegrates. Dipke turned this collective betrayal into high-stakes resistance.
This revolt tore through the official propaganda of national prosperity. In an economy where more than 800 million Indians depend on government food rations while the richest one per cent of the population controls over 40% of the nation’s total wealth, competitive exams were the sole wager on social mobility for middle-class families.
When the state fails to secure even the sanctity of these tests, the social contract disintegrates. Dipke turned this collective betrayal into high-stakes resistance. As the CJP’s rallies gained momentum, the state’s calibrated containment broke down. Dipke’s detention on Instagram Live as he stepped onto the street for a protest at Connaught Place proved that a regime confident in its electoral mandate was fundamentally terrified of citizens who embraced the very identity meant to demean them.
The 130-Million Erasure and the Fortress State
The crisis escalated when the CJP shifted its focus from exam scandals to the survival of the franchise. The purge of over 130 million voters—a number larger than the population of Japan—was defended by the Election Commission as a routine clean-up, citing 63 million people who had permanently shifted residence, 30 million absent or untraceable entries, 28 million deceased individuals, and 10 million duplicate registrations.
However, opposition parties, led by Rahul Gandhi, who branded the exercise “vote chauri” (vote cheating), showed that deletions disproportionately targeted India’s 200 million Muslims and marginalised groups. With internal dissent leaking from Kumar’s deputies and the Supreme Court issuing notices on October 5, the controversy moved from administrative incompetence to suspected voter suppression.
The state’s reaction was brutal and swift. When the CJP called for Kumar’s resignation, the government deployed metal-grilled detention buses and turned sports facilities into temporary prisons. Student leader Neha Bora documented how demonstrators were crammed into locked, airless compartments while facing physical violence and caste-based slurs from the police.
Another undergraduate, 20-year-old Surbi Yadav of Delhi University, showed scars from being dragged across the asphalt before being detained. When Defence Minister Rajnath Singh dismissed these students as “pawns in the politics of anarchy” and BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia claimed there was “not an iota of evidence” of wrongdoing, they demonstrated how quickly an insecure regime retreats behind batons and emergency bans when its administrative manipulations are brought to light.
The Demigod Playbook: Narendra Modi to Balen Shah
This suppression of dissent is a direct by-product of a political culture that has abandoned open media scrutiny. Over his twelve years in power, Narendra Modi has systematically dismantled the expectation that the head of government must answer to the fourth estate, replacing adversarial press conferences with one-way theatrical broadcasts such as Mann Ki Baat.
In the prophetic closing address to India’s Constituent Assembly, Dr B. R. Ambedkar warned against this decay, stating: “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.” When a leader operates beyond the reach of journalistic interrogation, independent institutions inevitably shed their neutrality to protect the leader’s aura.
This authoritarian blueprint has crossed the Himalayas into Nepali politics. Since his election in March 2026, Balen Shah has embraced this very pattern of media evasion, avoiding open press conferences and declining adversarial interviews with independent journalists. Instead, Balen governs through unilateral social media missives and curated digital PR, adopting the mantle of the khopiko deuta.
A healthy democracy does not worship deities in an alcove; it demands accessible leaders who sit before independent journalists, answer uncomfortable questions, and justify their decisions to the public.
This posture relies on emotional devotion rather than administrative transparency. When a leader retreats into the alcove, shutting the door to the press and treating critical scrutiny as bad-faith interference, they are simply adopting Modi’s manual of populist insulation. Populism that dodges the free press inevitably breeds the same high-handed arrogance that now characterises New Delhi.
Shattering the Alcove: The Imperative for Public Accountability
The ongoing rebellion in India proves that the aura of the omnipotent ruler is fundamentally fragile. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence: “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.”
The BJP’s reliance on thousands of armed police, transit bans, and peace-bond ultimatums against activists like Abhijeet Dipke and Neha Bora is not an exhibition of democratic strength; it is an admission of institutional fear. A state that must shut down its capital and purge millions of voters to manage an election is a state whose moral legitimacy is eroding from within.
Nepal must internalise this lesson before its own democracy is hollowed out by silent idols. Nepal’s youth—similarly burdened by systemic unemployment, recurring recruitment scandals, and economic stagnation that drives thousands abroad each day—cannot afford to trade traditional political cartels for an unanswerable, media-shy messiah.
A healthy democracy does not worship deities in an alcove; it demands accessible leaders who sit before independent journalists, answer uncomfortable questions, and justify their decisions to the public. If Nepal’s emerging leaders continue to dodge scrutiny from the shadows of social media, they will eventually discover what New Delhi is learning the hard way: when leaders treat the public as disposable, citizens will shed their deference, emerge from the margins, and shake the foundations of the house.
(Diwakar Dhakal is a law graduate of Kathmandu School of Law.)
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