A theoretical intervention to the ongoing CJP protest
Aditya Ankur
The emergence of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) needs to be situated within the wider crisis surrounding the failure of public education, crisis of unemployment, inequality in accessing education which is ironically placed in Indian constitutions as fundamental rights (article 21A). It further unveils declining confidence of sections of Indian youth in institutions that are expected to guarantee procedural fairness. The controversy over the description of unemployed youth as “cockroaches” became politically consequential as it appeared to reproduce a wider tendency to individualise what are fundamentally structural questions. It shows the tendency of Indian state to transfer the responsibilities to unemployed themselves.Instead of simply rejecting and critiquing the term, the protesters appropriated it to counter the narrative and gave it a different political meaning. Throughout this piece I try to examine the current phenomenon through two complementary theoretical lenses- Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and Foucault’s account of power and discourse. It reveals the suppression of dissent in electoral democracies rarely depends on coercion alone, it come up with prior capture of what a population is willing to accept as common sense and as truth.The manufacturing of common sense and Truth becomes central here .
In his magnum opus the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci outlined the conception of hegemony . leadership secured through consent, achieved when a ruling group’s particular interests come to be experienced by subordinate groups as universal and self-evident. in societies with a developed civil society, the state rules through schools, media, religious institutions, and popular culture, which together produce the “common sense” (senso comune) .In his word , a fragmentary, taken-for-granted worldview that ordinary people absorb without conscious ideological commitment.
Crucially, Gramsci distinguished common sense from a coherent and concrete philosophy. It is contradictory, uncritical, and precisely for that reason durable, because it does not present itself as a chosen position but as simply “how things are.” The current student protest exemplifies the same as still a large sections of the public describe the protest as an attack on the nation or the majority faith. This dynamic shows That they are reproducing a common-sense frame that has already been stored and sedimented into everyday perception through years of media framing, and religious-nationalist civil society organisations and producing of certain things as knowledge through the textbooks . This process is well descried by Gramsci as a “war of position” . The naming of dissenters as anti-national is therefore best read as the visible string of a long hegemonic project that has already redefined national belonging in majoritarian-religious terms, so that a demand for democratic governance reads, to many, as a demand against the nation itself.
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Where Gramsci foregrounds consent and civil society, Foucault takes us to get a idea of how power operates through discourse to produce subjects and truths rather than simply repress pre-existing ones. In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault argued that modern power is not primarily prohibitive , it appears as productive . It does not just say “no” to dissent, it actively constructs the categories through which dissent becomes intelligible and judgeable in the first place. As per him power and knowledge directly imply one another . It helps us to examine how a state produces an entire vocabulary, for instance (sedition, anti-national activity, urban naxal, foreign conspiracy) that pre-classifies protest before any specific act has occurred.
a “regime of truth” as mentioned by Foucault , every society has mechanisms that determine which statements function as true, which institutions are authorized to pronounce the truth, and what techniques and procedures are used in the production of truth. A government that monotonously , through various medium , frames national identity around a single religious-cultural majority is installing a regime of truth in which any assertion of minority , protest for equality or peaceful dissent against the majority will is structurally legible only as devince.
The response of CJP is better understood through Gramsci’s idea of counter-hegemony. A term that could have produced humiliation ,was converted into a common identity around which people could use a site to express their frustration. Following Gramscian notion which tells us , that particular interpretations of society though appear natural and obvious, but are never permanently fixed. Subordinate groups can challenge them by producing alternative interpretations of their own experiences. CJP’s transformation of “cockroach” shows this dynamics .Even the name Cockroach Janta Party carries this political significance . Its similarity to the name and initials of the Bharatiya Janata Party introduces an element of parody into the protest. Rather than confronting political authority only through conventional slogans, CJP uses humour and satire to question the existing language . In Gramscian sense , this can be understood as part of a war of position. The important question revolves not around whether CJP succeeds in its immediate demands, but whether it can change how structural lacunae like unemployment, material issues , inequality are understood in wider public discourse.
As discussed earlier , Instead of discussing why people are protesting, attention shifts toward whether the protesters themselves are legitimate, patriotic or politically motivated. The original grievance can then become secondary to the identity of those making the grievance. This is where Gramsci and Foucault together become useful. Foucault provides a helping hand to explain how categories such as “anti-national” can classify and manufacture a suspicious political subject, while Gramsci helps in explaining how such classifications can become an integral part of wider social “common sense” when they are repeatedly circulated through discourses .
The larger democratic significance of the episode therefore goes beyond the word “cockroach.” It concerns the relationship between power, language and the legitimacy of dissent. When protesters are first understood through labels such as disruptive, parasitic, politically motivated or anti-national, their actual grievances can easily disappear from public discussion. The struggle over dissent and visibility is therefore also a struggle over language between the power to classify citizens from above and the capacity of citizens to challenge those classifications from below.
About the contributor :
Aditya Ankur Nath Is a student of social science and recently completed his masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University, in the School of International Studies (SIS) New Delhi.
