Last month, the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court inadvertently set a movement into motion. During a May 15 hearing, Surya Kant described the country’s unemployed youth as “like cockroaches” and “parasites of society.” The remarks led Abhijeet Dipke, a recent Boston University graduate, to post a sardonically on X: “What if all cockroaches come together?”
Now, Dipke is headed home to New Delhi, where he plans to hold a public rally on June 6. His post tapped into an undercurrent of discontent, quickly gaining widespread support. Emboldened, Dipke founded the Cockroach Janta Party, a riff on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Within days, the satirical party’s Instagram account had more followers than the BJP or the opposition Indian National Congress (INC). That count now stands at more than 20 million.
Last month, the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court inadvertently set a movement into motion. During a May 15 hearing, Surya Kant described the country’s unemployed youth as “like cockroaches” and “parasites of society.” The remarks led Abhijeet Dipke, a recent Boston University graduate, to post a sardonically on X: “What if all cockroaches come together?”
Now, Dipke is headed home to New Delhi, where he plans to hold a public rally on June 6. His post tapped into an undercurrent of discontent, quickly gaining widespread support. Emboldened, Dipke founded the Cockroach Janta Party, a riff on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Within days, the satirical party’s Instagram account had more followers than the BJP or the opposition Indian National Congress (INC). That count now stands at more than 20 million.
It is unclear whether this nascent phenomenon can turn into a full-blown social movement—let alone a formal political party—that builds on the simmering grievances of a young generation in India. But there is little question that Kant’s careless remarks struck a chord. Confronting the backlash, the chief justice said that his comments were misinterpreted and referred only to those with bogus degrees; regardless, the damage has been done.
Such cynicism among India’s youth should not come as a surprise. According to a recent study, as many as 40 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 25 are unemployed in India, despite a dramatic expansion in higher education in recent decades. (For those between the ages of 25 and 29, the figure is 20 percent.) Notably, many of the unemployed and underemployed are highly educated.
India’s youth unemployment has persisted despite steady and high economic expansion in the last 10 years, with annual GDP growth rates hovering at around 7 percent—among the highest in the world. Clearly, growth alone is not a panacea.
A few issues related to unemployment are sandbagging India. First, even those who find employment often do not see their knowledge and skills fully utilized. Second, around one-third of India’s labor force works fewer than 36 hours a week. Thus, educated youth effectively face an underemployment crisis both in terms of the exercise of their professional training and the number of work hours available to them.
The third issue is perhaps the most damning: More than half of India’s university graduates are ill-suited for the professions for which they were trained. Based on employer surveys, they frequently lack the requisite skills for the job. To compound matters, certain forms of work that require specialized training, such as medicine, still face a critical shortage.
Kant’s comments have echoes in the recent past. In 2018, as his first term was ending, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggested flippantly that unemployed young people resort to selling pakoras, a popular fried snack. Understandably, the INC seized on his remark and argued that the failure to create jobs was indeed a failure of public policy under Modi’s watch. In response to his comments, some college students started to fry pakoras in protest. Still, Modi returned to power for a second term the next year.
Now, after nearly 12 years in power, Modi’s BJP government confronts a similar problem. However, for those protesting, sustaining this online movement and turning it into a national public policy issue will require difficult collective action. Whether that happens will become evident in the next few weeks. India’s sheer size, its linguistic barriers, and the demands of everyday life present significant challenges to organizing.
Whatever the outcome, the Cockroach Janta Party movement has returned a critical issue to the fore. For years, politicians and social scientists have touted India’s “demographic dividend,” the idea that the country’s labor force is growing more rapidly than the nonworking population dependent on it. This theoretically frees up productive financial resources for investment and can start a cycle of prosperity.
These conditions in large part explain the dramatic growth of the so-called Asian tigers—South Korea, Taiwan, and even Singapore—and Indian policymakers have suggested that the country’s youth bulge would give its economy a significant competitive advantage. Though attractive, this argument has proved somewhat facile. A youth bulge only benefits a country when it offers this emergent generation suitable skills, adequate health care, and decent employment prospects.
In India, these attributes are available in a patchwork fashion at best—starting with higher education.
Some of India’s universities are truly world-class, especially those focused on technical education. However, admission into these institutions is brutally competitive. More than a million students take the Joint Entrance Examination for a mere 20,000 slots at India’s highly prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. Of the top 100 scorers on the exam, 62 percent head overseas, primarily for graduate education. Most of these students do not return to India; those who stay have little trouble finding employment.
However, apart from these highly selective elite institutions, many of India’s science and technology graduates are subpar. Even though India’s vast educational infrastructure produces as many as 1.5 million engineering graduates, a recent study revealed that 83 percent lack the skills to be employed in the areas in which they have been trained.
These statistics are bad enough, but they do not capture the significant and growing regional disparities across India, where a few northern and eastern states are economic laggards and a swath of states in the south are increasingly prosperous, with superior health and social indicators.
None of these challenges can be tackled in short order. However, the surge in frustration on display in the wake of Kant’s callous comments has highlighted a critical dimension of India’s growth spurt. If not now, the government’s failure to address underlying economic malaise may eventually culminate in nationwide social unrest—even violent protest. However inchoate, the Cockroach Janta Party should serve as a warning.
