[00:00:00] Kiran: Mics, camera, action. Welcome back to Takaro, and this week we're gonna be talking about an insect. Is that right, Debbie?
[00:00:09] Debkanya: A very, very popular insect and a very hardy insect. If you haven't guessed it already, we're talking about cockroaches. The insects that survive, supposedly have been known to survive a nuclear fallout.
[00:00:23] Kiran: Correct. They survive everything. They have been known -- I think they've been identified to the dinosaur era as well, right? They're the remnants of the dinosaur era. And in fact, today, what we're gonna be talking about, which is cockroaches, is actually gonna be connected to political science and civics.
[00:00:44] Kiran: So that's interesting.
[00:00:45] Debkanya: Yep. This insect, this very, very humble insect that can be found everywhere, especially in your kitchen, came into the limelight very, very recently, as recently as May 15th, when a very important man, which is the Chief Justice of India, actually said that some of the youth in our country today are like cockroaches because they run --
[00:01:09] Debkanya: Unemployed youth are like cockroaches because they run into things like activism and journalism and try to, you know, be part of the media.
[00:01:17] Kiran: Basically, they --
[00:01:18] Kiran: They're just doing random other things.
[00:01:20] Debkanya: And you can imagine that did not go down well with a lot of people, especially the youth, you know, people who generally tend to go into the media or tend to go into activism. They want to do things for the country, so they felt really bad that they were being compared to the cockroach.
[00:01:36] Debkanya: But then someone decided, "Hey, you know what? It's probably not a bad thing at all. Let's lean into it."
[00:01:43] Kiran: So the person who actually made this statement of unemployed young people being like cockroaches or parasites is the Chief Justice of India. And the Chief Justice of India is basically one of the most important people, the highest judge in the country. And later on, he came back saying that he was misquoted.
[00:02:02] Kiran: He did not mean that. He was mainly meaning people who use fake degrees, certifications, and enter professions like law or medicine, which is dangerous. That was his whole point -- that those are the people he was basically calling cockroaches. But it was already too late because when you use words like this and you're such a powerful person, it immediately catches on.
[00:02:28] Kiran: And so what happened is, within basically hours of the Chief Justice saying this, a young man named Abhijeet Dipke -- he's now a political communications strategist, which basically means he works with political organizations on communications -- posted a very, very simple question on X, which is a social media platform formerly known as Twitter. He just asked a very simple question: what if all these cockroaches come together? That's it. Not an angry statement, nothing special about it, but a very, very simple statement.
[00:03:20] Debkanya: That's right. And I think one of the things that made the cockroach capture everybody's imagination is, A, because it's an insect that people usually find very disgusting, but it's also found everywhere. But also it's the timing, right? We are at a time when there aren't enough jobs.
[00:03:39] Debkanya: People are highly educated. There aren't enough jobs out there for them. They're unhappy with the way the country is run in certain ways. Or they just want to be heard more and they feel like they're not getting enough options to be heard.
[00:03:51] Kiran: You were talking about the unemployment -- actually 40% of Indian graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed today, that's a pretty large number, right? So there's that sort of frustration building up, that sort of anger building up slowly. So this guy, Abhijeet, he basically took the name cockroach and immediately founded a party called the Cockroach Janata Party.
[00:04:18] Debkanya: It's not a real party though. What Abhijeet did was make it a joke party, right? He didn't really mean to float a political party. It's not so easy to just up and say, "Hey, here's my political party and I'm gonna fight elections." That was never the point.
[00:04:31] Debkanya: The point was just to make a fun account, and he started off on X and on Instagram. But what happened is people identified with this issue so much that they actually got a huge number of followers,
[00:04:48] Debkanya: more than the BJP and more than the Congress accounts as well. The Congress is the opposition party, the largest opposition party. They had more followers than both of them. So can you imagine how many people got excited about this idea of a Cockroach Janata Party?
[00:05:03] Kiran: Within days, they basically had a bigger Instagram following than the two biggest political parties in India, which have been around for a long while, right? And if you think about it, what he did very cleverly -- and this is very common in politics, or in social movements -- is that you take an insult and you make it your identity. Very, very interesting, right?
[00:05:31] Kiran: Because when you insult someone, there is a group of people, and you make that your identity. And that's happened many times in the past through various different kinds of movements where people have taken on that insult and made it their own, made it their real motivation or mission to kind of go down that path, right?
[00:05:50] Kiran: So why did it catch fire so much? It's because of that unemployed rate we have in India today, and we're starting to see more and more conversation about what's happening with the IT industry, which is one of the largest employers, with AI coming in. Are there gonna be jobs? What kind of jobs? So there's a lot of uncertainty, and even from an economy perspective, all of you are aware of the Iran war, and that's creating a lot of concerns globally. There's a lot of unrest and unknowns happening in the world today, which really lends itself to this.
[00:06:25] Debkanya: One of the other interesting things to note -- and this is something that if you ever decide to study politics and want to go into the history of how movements are built -- when you say cockroach, it's funny, right? It's supposed to be, you know, a tool.
[00:06:41] Debkanya: It's actually a popular tool called using satire. Satire is basically when you make fun of something but are trying to make a very serious point, and that's what is happening here. They are leaning into satire as a tool to make their point. It's been used very popularly. In fact, you find a lot of cartoonists -- if you've ever looked at the newspaper, there'll be a little cartoon that will usually comment on something happening in the world around you.
[00:07:06] Debkanya: And the cartoon usually can say things that most other people can't, right? Because you're leaning into humor and jokes to make a very, very serious point, and that's exactly this as well. The Cockroach Janata Party is using a joke, is using satire.
[00:07:20] Debkanya: It's using something that is not so serious to make a very, very serious point about how the youth want changes to happen in the country. And they've actually created a list of demands that they want the government to take seriously.
[00:07:34] Kiran: So actually those demands are quite serious, right? While the satire piece is to kind of bring people together because it automatically disarms you. So once they got all these people -- and I think it was a surprise even for Abhijeet to get so many people -- but once that happened, he used the platform to talk about some very serious demands. One is that there should be 50% women's representation in the government, in the parliament and in cabinet, 50%.
[00:08:03] Kiran: We are drastically lower than that percentage today as a current reality. He also looked at -- one of the initial demands was a 20-year ban for politicians who switch parties for personal gain. And this is very interesting because every time a government is formed in India, in a state or at the center level, there are politicians who jump from one party to another to try and create that majority. It's kind of become almost a joke because of the number of times people jump parties, and they'll say, "Oh, now I'm going from one to the other because the other one has more votes," and so on.
[00:08:45] Debkanya: Because decisions are taken in our country based on majority, right? Majority wins in a democracy, and that's exactly why people move around so much. Imagine you're trying to make a decision about what you should get for lunch tomorrow in your class. One group wants burgers, the other group wants biryani. Say it's a class of 100 -- 50 people who want biryani, 50 who want burgers. That's a tie. How do you make sure one group wins?
[00:09:14] Debkanya: You move from one group to the other, right? So you try to get more people maybe into the biryani group, and that's exactly what keeps happening in Indian politics. And that's what they said -- that we cannot allow that to happen because that's unfair, so we're gonna ban any politician who jumps around like this.
[00:09:28] Kiran: Now, that biryani and burger talk sounds yummy -- some of the other things he was also talking about were vote tampering, electoral fraud. He was talking about media ownership, the fact that no big entity should own the media so that it's actually free and neutral. He also talked about fast-track appointments for retired judges into political roles.
[00:09:55] Kiran: So someone who --
[00:09:55] Debkanya: should not be allowed --
[00:09:56] Kiran: coming into the political role, it shouldn't be allowed. So while the entire thing was a satire, and Cockroach Janata Party as a name is funny, some of these demands are actually very, very serious because it's exactly what's happening in our country. And in fact, they actually had a protest which was extremely successful.
[00:10:16] Kiran: No one expected it -- basically, the Cockroach Janata Party asked all of its supporters to come to Delhi.
[00:10:21] Debkanya: Yeah, that's right. They all congregated in a place called Jantar Mantar. Now, Jantar Mantar is a very, very famous spot in Delhi, which is a designated spot for protests. Remember, protesting is actually a very important part of who we are as Indians, right? That's how it played a big role in our independence struggle against the British, and we continue to build that as a democracy, as an essential part of who we are and how we make our voices heard.
[00:10:48] Debkanya: So Jantar Mantar is a designated spot for peaceful protests. We are allowed to do it as per the Constitution as well. Under Article 19, we're allowed to come together -- you have the freedom of speech and the freedom to congregate. So thousands of people turned up and they were told to just show up with a couple of things --
[00:11:03] Debkanya: they were told to bring a book and to carry the national flag, the Tiranga, to showcase their patriotism. And they were also told that everything has to be as peaceful as possible because this is not to fight, this is not about anger, this is about being heard.
[00:11:16] Debkanya: Thousands and thousands of people turned up. They had these cockroach masks that they printed out, and they wore those and came. They made fun posters, and it actually was a really, really successful congregation.
[00:11:28] Debkanya: Um, and that's where these demands were made.
[00:11:29] Kiran: Yeah. And I think one of the other things they also started demanding is about the education minister, right? The resignation of the education minister,
[00:11:36] Debkanya: Yep.
[00:11:37] Kiran: so many scandals about university entrance exams, about many of the state and board-level exams as well --
[00:11:46] Debkanya: Paper leaks, yeah.
[00:11:48] Kiran: -- with paper leaks. One of the new demands that they came up with was the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.
[00:11:55] Kiran: Now, again, this is not an official political party. CJP is not an official political party as yet. Whether it will become one, maybe. But it's a congregation of people who all have the same sort of problems, thoughts. They want the same kind of change to be seen. So that's what's kind of bringing everyone together. And this is a really, really important moment in the Indian political environment as well, because there's been one ruling party for a long while, not much of an opposition. It's always been struggling at the central level. There is a huge economic change happening. India was always known to be the place with tons of jobs and a lot of growth. The world is suffering, India is also suffering, a lot of unemployed youth. So I think all of this coming together really spurred this growth of the Cockroach Janata Party, and it's very important for us to understand that from a geopolitical, political science perspective, and how civic change can possibly take shape as well.
[00:13:05] Debkanya: And this has not just happened in India, it's happened all over the world in different countries as well. I mean, Fridays for the Future is one example of how students came together and started protesting. It started with Greta Thunberg, remember her?
[00:13:18] Kiran: Yep.
[00:13:19] Debkanya: It's all about coming together and making their voices heard, saying that you guys need to take the climate seriously, take climate change seriously, and make policies and rules around it so that we can have a safer planet, a better planet.
[00:13:31] Debkanya: Um, there have been many such movements. There have been movements that took place in Hong Kong, in Myanmar. More recently, we've covered it on Takaro as well -- it happened in Nepal, it happened in Sri Lanka. But of course, this is not the same thing because those protests went a little too far, and that's the difference right now.
[00:13:48] Debkanya: This is a peaceful movement. And it's, like I said, not a political party, it's a satire, right? It was a joke that became bigger than they ever expected it to become.
[00:13:57] Kiran: So no one knows where it's gonna go from here, but a lot of people are very interested to see what this Cockroach Janata Party will do. Whether they will continue to just be something that brings people together to talk about issues, or does it actually become a political party?
[00:14:11] Kiran: Does it fade away? Does everyone forget about it in the next two weeks, two months? But it's already made a few changes. It's made us sit up and start talking about the youth in India, what's happening, the opportunities or the lack of opportunities. And I think it's important for all of us to understand where we are at from a country perspective.
[00:14:35] Kiran: And so next time someone in power uses a word to insult or demean another group, you may want to rethink it. You know? It may actually turn out to be a complete mess because of what you started, and then you'll be --
[00:14:52] Debkanya: Unintentionally or whatever, yeah.
[00:14:54] Kiran: Correct.
[00:14:55] Debkanya: Absolutely. Absolutely. As we keep saying, the beauty of being in a democracy is the opportunity to have your voice heard, and there are different ways for that to happen, right? Great. With that, we will wrap up this episode of Takaro Kids.
[00:15:07] Debkanya: We hope we've given you a good understanding of political movements and how they could start and what they mean in a country like ours. But we will not go before we give you our quiz question for this week. I hope you're ready! The quiz question this week is: What is the meaning of Jantar Mantar?
[00:15:30] Debkanya: The place where the Cockroach Janata Party held its protest. Okay, I'll give you options. This is super interesting -- I want you to go back and research this yourselves and learn about what Jantar Mantar means. The options are: one, magical garden. Option two, calculating instrument.
[00:15:51] Debkanya: Option three, people's meeting place, and option four, protest park. Okay, go back. Look it up!
[00:15:58] Kiran: Sound like abracadabra? Jantar Mantar, abracadabra.
[00:16:01] Debkanya: That's why I said magical garden. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's that, Kiran, if that's your choice.
[00:16:07] Kiran: That, huh. Is --
[00:16:09] Debkanya: But --
[00:16:09] Kiran: -- that my choice?
[00:16:10] Debkanya: Look it up. Look it up, and you'll be surprised to find that the Jantar Mantar in Delhi is not the only one in our country.
[00:16:17] Debkanya: So that's enough information for you for now. Go look it up.
[00:16:20] Kiran: And go figure out what the Jantar Mantar means and send in your answers to takarokids.com, or ask your parent to direct message us on Instagram with the answer. And until next week --
[00:16:35] Debkanya: It's time for us to say bye-bye.
[00:16:38] Kiran: Bye-bye.