The Cockroach Janta Party must resist the temptation to enter electoral politics and preserve its independence to hold governments accountable. Assam’s student movement offers a cautionary lesson in what can be lost when a movement embraces power
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has reached a moment that could decide its future. Emerging as a student-led force against the failures of India’s examination system, particularly over the NEET controversy, the movement has achieved something few outside electoral politics ever do. It has put the government on the defensive and forced accountability at the highest level.
Its leaders have said they do not intend to enter electoral politics and will instead take up issues concerning the country, beginning with education reform. They should hold to that position, come what may.
The greatest danger to the CJP may not be failure. It may be success. As its leaders grow in popularity after mobilising students and young people around examination reform and other grievances, political parties will begin to see them as electoral assets. Offers, invitations and overtures are likely to follow.
The temptation will be considerable, and the CJP must resist it. If it wants to become a force to be reckoned with, it should stay outside the political establishment and use its growing public influence to compel governments, irrespective of which party is in power, to listen.
There is a fundamental difference between a movement and a party. A movement can question everyone; a party eventually has to defend someone. A movement can demand that a government act; a party in government must explain why it could not. A movement can remain uncompromising on an issue; a government must contend with laws, courts, bureaucracy, finances and competing interests. The transformation does more than give a movement access to power; it changes its nature. Assam offers a cautionary tale. The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) spearheaded the Assam Movement against illegal immigration from 1979 to 1985, mobilising a generation and gaining extraordinary public support.The signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 marked a historic moment, forcing the political establishment to negotiate with student leaders on the foreigners issue. Then came the decision that changed everything: the student leaders entered electoral politics.
The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) was formed by leaders associated with the Assam Movement and won the 1985 Assembly election. The very people who had stood outside the government demanding action became the government. But in winning the power to govern, the movement lost something that is often invisible until it disappears: the freedom to stand outside power and hold it to account.
The foreigners issue, the movement’s principal plank, did not vanish with an AGP government. Implementing the Accord proved far more complicated than the slogans of an agitation had suggested. Detection and deportation involved constitutional provisions, courts, tribunals, administrative machinery and, eventually, negotiations with the Centre. Four decades on, the Accord remains an unfinished chapter.
None of this means that every shortcoming of the Assam Movement can be traced to its leaders entering politics, or that electoral politics was itself a mistake. But the experience shows that once a movement becomes the establishment, its relationship with the people changes. Those who once demanded answers are suddenly required to provide them.
This is the trap the CJP should avoid. Today, it can tell the government that students deserve a fair examination system. It can demand accountability for paper leaks, question examination agencies and ask why students are repeatedly made to pay for administrative failures. It can back a reform introduced by one government and oppose another introduced by its rival. Nobody can dismiss it as just another Opposition party.
That independence is enormously valuable, and it would not survive a move into electoral politics. Every demand would acquire a political colour. If the CJP criticised the government, opponents would say it was doing so for electoral gain. If it supported the government, critics would call it compromised. The very ambiguity that gives a movement its influence would vanish.
India already has hundreds of political parties. What it needs is a strong, independent civil society and youth movements capable of keeping governments under pressure. The CJP can become precisely that.
Its education campaign could grow into a national movement for examination reform: greater transparency in competitive examinations, accountability for testing agencies, stronger safeguards against paper leaks, time-bound investigations and institutional changes that stop students’ careers from being repeatedly disrupted. It can build expertise rather than candidates, produce research rather than manifestos, and mobilise students rather than voters. It can make governments compete with one another to address the issues young citizens raise. That would give the CJP something more valuable than a handful of Assembly or parliamentary seats: sustained public leverage. Political power does not necessarily mean occupying office. It can also mean being able to force those in office to respond.
A movement with no minister, MLA or MP can sometimes achieve what a small party with elected representatives cannot. It can mobilise public opinion without defending an electoral record and raise an issue without worrying about losing a constituency.
The CJP has already shown a version of this power. Its greatest achievement is not that one minister resigned. It is that students discovered that sustained collective action could force the establishment to acknowledge their concerns. That is the power the movement should cultivate.
AASU’s leaders once held precisely this kind of influence. They could bring the state to a standstill, command enormous public respect and lend their words a weight far beyond any formal position. Once they entered electoral politics, that relationship changed.
The lesson is not that they should never have entered politics; history cannot be rewritten so simply.
It is that a movement’s greatest strength can sometimes be its distance from power. The CJP should understand this before parties begin turning its leaders into recruits.
Young leaders who have suddenly become nationally recognisable will attract political attention. Parties will see their organisational skills, popularity and ability to connect with young voters as assets. Some will be offered tickets. Some may be invited to join established parties. Others may be told they can achieve much more from inside the system. The argument will sound convincing. But the CJP should ask itself a simple question: is it better to become one more participant in India’s crowded electoral marketplace, or to remain an independent force capable of influencing every government?
Once a movement becomes a party, it must make compromises to survive. Once its leaders become politicians, they will have constituencies to protect, alliances to manage and electoral calculations to make. The movement will gradually become what it once challenged.
The CJP has an opportunity few student movements get. It can become a force multiplier, amplifying the concerns of students and young Indians and carrying them into national political discourse without becoming captive to any party. It can be the voice of people whose hopes too often disappear beneath the noise of electoral politics. It can make governments listen. And it can remain free to tell every government, whatever its colour, when it is wrong.
That is not a lesser form of power. It may be the more enduring one.
The CJP should, therefore, reject the seductive logic that every successful movement must eventually become a party. It need not. Assam shows what can be lost when a movement with extraordinary moral authority enters the political arena.
The CJP has already tasted victory. Now comes the harder test: whether it can resist the temptation that victory brings. If it can, it may become something far more consequential than another party: an independent national force that makes those who govern answer to those they govern.
That may be the real power worth pursuing.
AASU’s leaders once held precisely this kind of influence. They could bring the state to a standstill, command enormous public respect and lend their words a weight far beyond any formal position. Once they entered electoral politics, that relationship changed
The writer is Deputy Director, Assam Information Centre, New Delhi; Views presented are personal.