CJP protests: Long and short-term steps necessary

The controversy surrounding the paper leak and the student protests has once again exposed the widening trust deficit between the government, the Opposition and the public. While the demand for accountability is legitimate, the unrest has also reignited a broader debate on the conduct of politics, governance and electoral reforms

In mid-May, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, presiding over an unrelated contempt hearing, described a certain kind of unemployed young Indian as a “cockroach” — jobless, chronically online, prone to attacking people on social media. It was meant as a throwaway aside. Ten weeks on, it has produced the largest sustained street challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has faced since 2014, a paralysed Monsoon Session of Parliament, and a national argument that has long since outgrown the remark that started it.

Within a day, Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist with past ties to the Aam Aadmi Party, turned the insult into satire, launching a “Cockroach Janta Party” open to anyone unemployed, chronically online and willing to rant. The joke went viral — more than twenty million Instagram followers within days — and by June it had a physical address at Jantar Mantar, where it merged with genuine student anger over two real grievances: a leaked NEET-UG medical entrance paper and chaos in CBSE’s on-screen marking and revaluation process. The demand crystallised around one name: Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, whose resignation protesters have sought since the sit-in began on June 6.

What might have stayed a campus grievance gained national heft when Sonam Wangchuk, the Ladakhi education reformer who has spent two years leading hunger strikes for his region’s Sixth Schedule status, joined in solidarity on June 28, with an indefinite fast at the protest site. His forced hospitalisation on July 18, as his health declined, appears to have been the trigger for what followed. On July 20, the opening day of the Monsoon Session, more than ten thousand protesters tried to march on Parliament; Delhi Police met them with tear gas and baton charges, and by the force’s own count, roughly 180 people were hurt — 118 police personnel and 60 protesters — with some accounts of stones thrown as the crowd was pushed back. Amnesty International questioned whether the response met basic tests of proportionality. The next day, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra led a sit-in outside the Prime Minister’s residence and were briefly detained; the day after, Congress MPs disrupted both Houses of Parliament, forcing repeated adjournments. The government has offered talks — Union Health Minister JP Nadda has met protest representatives — without yet meeting the central demand. Solidarity protests have since spread to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Guwahati, Ahmedabad and beyond, and the story has drawn the kind of sustained foreign — press attention — Al Jazeera, NPR, Time, ABC News — that Indian street protests rarely get outside election season.

There is a genuine, and genuinely difficult, argument buried under all the noise. One side notes that ministers have resigned over a single accident before: Lal Bahadur Shastri stepped down as Railway Minister in 1956 after twin train disasters, still cited as a high-water mark of accountability in Indian public life, and asks why two consecutive examination failures touching lakhs of futures should count for less.

The other side argues that a resignation extracted by street pressure, rather than institutional review, does little to fix the process that produced the leak and the marking chaos, and sets an unstable precedent for every future crisis. Both arguments carry weight. Neither explains why this fight keeps happening in the street instead of somewhere upstream of it.

That missing upstream — a routine, unglamorous channel where accountability gets settled without a hunger strike or a baton charge — is really the story beneath this one. It points towards a reform conversation that has sat half-finished in Indian politics for years, some of it quite literally in a parliamentary committee room right now.

The most advanced piece is “One Nation, One Election”. A Joint Parliamentary Committee chaired by BJP MP PP Chaudhary has spent months touring states — Goa in mid-July, Lucknow next — gathering views on the Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, which would synchronise Lok Sabha and state assembly polls. Chaudhary has said the bill is unlikely to be tabled this session but could still be ready for a 2029 rollout. Supporters point out that simultaneous polls were, in fact, the norm from 1951 until the cycle broke down in 1967, and argue that reviving it would cut the recurring cost of India’s staggered election calendar and the governance drag of a near-permanent campaign; critics, including several Opposition-ruled states, warn it would weaken federalism and hand a structural advantage to whichever party dominates the national mood in a single synchronised moment. It is a serious, contested debate, and deserves to be treated as one rather than rushed through or shelved indefinitely.

Money in politics is the second unfinished piece. The Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional in February 2024, restoring at least the principle that voters have a right to know who funds their parties. In practice, financing has simply migrated to electoral trusts. Some trusts do disclose which party received what — filings for the year after bonds ended show the money heavily concentrated in a handful of trusts, with the ruling party by far the largest beneficiary — but political parties themselves remain outside the Right to Information Act, which the Central Information Commission ruled over a decade ago they should already fall under, and corporate donations, freed of the old cap tying them to company profits, remain the dominant and still murky source.

A third cluster concerns Parliament’s accountability to itself, where the record is more mixed than reformers often admit. Some ground has genuinely shifted: in 2024, a seven-judge Supreme Court bench in Sita Soren v Union of India unanimously overturned the notorious 1998 ruling — the one that grew out of the original JMM cash-for-votes scandal — which had treated a lawmaker’s bribe-for-vote as a protected “parliamentary proceeding”, immune from prosecution. What has not shifted: mandatory, public disclosure of MPs’ assets and pending criminal cases remains inconsistent; NOTA still carries no consequence for the candidates it rejects; and MPLADS, which lets each MP direct discretionary development spending in their constituency, continues to draw the patronage complaints it has drawn for decades, from the Comptroller and Auditor General on down.

Proposals to go further — minimum educational qualifications or fitness tests for candidates — resurface after almost every election cycle and remain genuinely contested on rights grounds; disclosure and transparency, rather than gatekeeping who may stand, is where reform energy has actually converged.

A satirical insult should not, by rights, have become the year’s defining protest movement. That it did says less about the joke than about how few other outlets existed for the grievance underneath it. None of the reforms above would by itself have prevented this particular Jantar Mantar — One Nation, One Election is contentious enough to invite protests of its own — but a political system that keeps rediscovering its accountability gaps through street clashes and adjourned Question Hours has more reason than most to stop treating “reform agenda” as a phrase reserved for committee rooms, and start treating it as the actual, unfinished work of this Parliament and the next.

The government has offered talks — Union Health Minister JP Nadda has met protest representatives — without yet meeting the central demand. Solidarity protests have since spread to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Guwahati, Ahmedabad and beyond, and the story has drawn the kind of sustained foreign-press attention

The writer is a Guinness World Record holder for writing the most letters and an RTI consultant; Views presented are personal.