What Next for India’s Cockroach Movement?

The Modi juggernaut is generally seen as sinister but efficient at what it does, and the entire tenor of the taunting, the calling out, is that you’re an old, dysfunctional guy, that’s unusual because it seems to open the possibilities of this movement. Not because there’s a constructive program that’s been put forward, but simply because it seems to be open season on a man who, up to now, has seemed sort of inevitable.

Q: Where does the movement go from here? 

MK: I’m so bewildered by the scale, intensity, and coming-from-nowhere part of this movement that it’s not clear to me how it sustains itself or where it goes. I’m not saying it won’t, but it surprised everybody, including its organizers. 

Youth unemployment amongst the middle classes in India is massive. So entrance examinations that put you into courses that might get you jobs are, if you will, a kind of metaphor for that general sense of anomie about, where do we go? What will happen to us? And to the extent that this narrowly focused thing about examination represents a larger angst, I don’t know.