What do Cockroaches have to do with Democracy?

NEARLY EIGHTY YEARS AGO, as the tricolour rose over an independent India, a nation dared to dream of what freedom might mean. Gandhi imagined a secular India where no religion could claim primacy over others. Ambedkar insisted that political democracy could not survive without liberty, equality and fraternity. They disagreed on many things, but both agreed that the Republic had to belong to all its citizens equally.

In the years since 2014, that idea has increasingly given way to another. We have watched a politics built on identities that divide us: Hindu v. Muslim, Majority v. Minority, Nationalist v. Anti-National. Before we are citizens, students, workers, farmers or even the unemployed, we are first defined through these divisions. 

This is not simply the unfortunate excess of election rhetoric. It reflects a larger ideological goal. Hindutva, as developed by the RSS and the wider Sangh Parivar, imagines India through a Hindu civilisational identity. The BJP has transformed that ideological inheritance into an extraordinarily successful electoral politics by persuading Indians to see one another not first as citizens or fellow human beings, but as adversaries. The result is a political binary: an “us” to defend and a “them” to fear.

Against this politics stands one of the Constitution’s most fascinating ideas. Fraternity. It is perhaps the most neglected word in the Indian Constitution. We remember liberty, equality, and secularism. We argue about socialism. But fraternity? Fraternity sounds almost embarrassingly gentle in this age of political aggression. And yet it may be the most radical constitutional idea of them all. 

The Preamble asks the Republic to promote “Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.” Article 51A, which goes further, posits it as a fundamental duty of every citizen to “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood” across religious, linguistic, regional and sectional differences. The constitutional demand could hardly be more at odds with a politics built on division. Fraternity cannot be built while teaching people to fear one another. A common brotherhood is impossible when citizens are constantly reminded that their neighbour belongs to another community, another tribe, maybe even another India. The loss of fraternity, therefore, was not accidental but a consequence of this politics. 

But then, suddenly, the ‘cockroaches’ crawled out. What began as a joke, sparked by a careless remark from the Chief Justice of India, soon spilled out of the internet and onto the streets. They came protesting examination leaks and the wider failures of India’s competitive-exam system. They came wearing T-shirts and jeans, kurtas and topis, turbans, swords and the unmistakable blue of the Nihang tradition. They came young and old. They came from different religions, castes and regions. They arrived angry, but they also arrived carrying food and water. Muslims served food to fellow protesters. Sikh men appeared in greater numbers among the crowds as the State’s hand grew violent. Strangers sent food for people they had never met. Volunteers distributed it without asking who would eat it.

There is something almost cinematic about this. The Republic in miniature. No longer in monochrome, but in vivid colour. In a political culture that has spent years asking Indians to fear the person next to them, strangers were, inexplicably, feeding one another. After all, the cockroach is wonderfully egalitarian. Everybody can be one. This too is politics. It is fraternity. 

It is what happens when the young Hindu preparing for NEET realises that the young Muslim preparing for NEET is simply a fellow victim. Or when the unemployed graduate from Bihar meets the unemployed graduate from Uttar Pradesh and discovers that neither of them needs to know the other’s religion to understand their frustration. Or when the Brahmin student and the Dalit student can disagree about almost everything but agree that an examination should not be compromised. 

Student protests have shaped political generations 

There is nothing unprecedented about this. India has a long history of students discovering their political power through fraternity with one another. 

In Gujarat in 1973-74, anger over hostel and food prices spread from the campuses into a statewide revolt against corruption and inflation, becoming the Navnirman Andolan. The agitation became powerful enough to force Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel to resign and eventually brought down the Gujarat Assembly.

In Bihar, student protests over corruption, inflation and unemployment drew Jayaprakash Narayan— one of the great moral figures of India’s freedom struggle — into the movement. What began as a student protest became a much broader campaign for Sampoorna Kranti, or Total Revolution, a demand not simply for a change of government, but for a transformation of political and public life.