标签： Asia

Hundreds of young Indian supporters of the viral grassroots movement Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) gathered near India’s Parliament in New Delhi on Saturday, staging a noisy, creative demonstration that ratcheted up political pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s incumbent government. Protesters called for the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, responding to widespread public anger over persistent examination irregularities and multiple high-stakes exam paper leaks that have upended the futures of thousands of student candidates across the country.

In a display of unconventional protest, participants banged steel plates with wooden spoons to create a raucous din, while many carried hand-drawn placards highlighting their grievances. Deepak Kumar, one of the CJP supporters who spoke on-site at the demonstration, warned that the demonstration was only an opening step. “This is just the beginning,” Kumar said. “If Dharmendra Pradhan does not resign, and no meaningful action is taken to resolve this issue, this protest will not end here.”

The immediate trigger for the demonstration was last month’s leak of the entrance exam for a nationwide postgraduate medical program, which was shared widely via the messaging platform Telegram. Indian authorities responded by postponing the scheduled exam, imposing a temporary nationwide ban on Telegram’s services, and launching an official investigation into the breach. The rescheduled exam is set to be held this coming Sunday, with the government still yet to release findings from its ongoing probe.

For Vicky Kumar, a participating student, the repeated leaks represent a devastating betrayal of years of hard work for low-income youth like himself. “We study in poverty, live in poverty 24 hours a day, for years on end, and after all that, our exam papers get leaked,” he told reporters. “Will I not get angry at that?”

Local law enforcement responded to the demonstration by deploying heavy security personnel across the area, and used both fixed surveillance cameras and aerial drones to monitor the crowd and track protest activity, a common precaution for demonstrations held near India’s central legislative complex.

The CJP is a newly emerged grassroots political movement that took its unusual name from an offhand comment by a Supreme Court judge that sparked national outrage. In May, Supreme Court Justice Surya Kant made remarks comparing a group of unemployed young protestors to “cockroaches,” a comment that drew widespread condemnation from youth groups across the country. Instead of rejecting the label, unemployed young activists embraced it as a badge of resilience, adopting the name Cockroach Janta Party — or Cockroach People’s Party — and building a massive online following in just a few months.

The movement has gained viral traction across Indian social media, boasting more than 22 million followers on the platform Instagram alone. CJP’s political identity blends self-deprecating internet humor with sharp criticism of government policy: supporters jokingly refer to themselves as “unemployed and chronically online,” while viral memes and short videos mocking systemic unemployment, institutional corruption, and political dysfunction have racked up hundreds of millions of views across social platforms. The movement’s messaging has expanded far beyond its origins to encompass broad popular grievances including widespread youth unemployment, skyrocketing living costs, and demands for greater government accountability. The cockroach symbol has even been adopted by dozens of parody political accounts, cementing its status as a viral satirical symbol of youth discontent with the status quo.

Once dismissed as a fringe extremist too radical for Israel’s mainstream political establishment, Itamar Ben Gvir has risen over the past 10 years to become one of the most powerful and controversial figures in Israeli politics, holding the post of national security minister and holding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future in his hands. As of 2026, multiple Western nations have banned Ben Gvir over his inflammatory anti-Palestinian rhetoric and actions, but his grip on Israeli politics remains unshaken, thanks to his central role in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

Born in 1976 to a working-class Mizrahi Kurdish family in Jerusalem and raised in the nearby Jerusalem suburb of Mevaseret Zion, Ben Gvir’s far-right ideology took root during the First Intifada, the 1987–1993 Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. Official Israeli data records roughly 1,300 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and 160 Israelis killed by Palestinians during that period, and by age 14, Ben Gvir was already active in far-right political circles, attending his first protest to counter a left-wing demonstration in Jerusalem.

Shortly after his first protest, Ben Gvir joined the youth wing of Moledet, a far-right party founded by former army general Rehavam Ze’evi that promoted the forced transfer of Palestinians out of the occupied Palestinian territories. By 16, he had moved further right to join the youth wing of Kach, an extremist party founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane that advocated for the expulsion of all Palestinians, full annexation of the occupied territories, and the imposition of Jewish religious law as Israeli state law. Ben Gvir would later confirm to Israeli media that he was drawn to Kach explicitly for its anti-Palestinian expulsion agenda and goal of creating an exclusively Jewish state.

Though Kach held a single Knesset seat before Kahane’s 1990 assassination, it was shunned by all other parliamentary factions for its overt racism, and was formally outlawed by the Israeli government in 1994 after Kach activist Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Muslim Palestinian worshippers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque. Far from disavowing the massacre, Ben Gvir called Goldstein his hero, dressed as the mass killer for a Purim celebration in Hebron the following year, and as late as 2011 referred to Goldstein as a “righteous man.” For years, a portrait of Goldstein hung in Ben Gvir’s home in the illegal West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba; he only claimed to remove it in 2020 during an unsuccessful attempt to moderate his public image to join a mainstream right-wing faction. Even after the Kach ban, Ben Gvir continued organizing for the movement, which he would later revive as his own political party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power).

By the mid-1990s, Ben Gvir was already a prominent figure in radical right-wing protests against the Oslo Accords, led at the time by then-opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben Gvir, who was arrested dozens of times for extremist activism during this period, gained national notoriety in 1995 when he was filmed on national television holding the stolen emblem from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car, threatening that “just as we got to this symbol, we can get to Rabin.” Weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist. For years after the assassination, Ben Gvir campaigned for the assassin’s release, only later softening his stance while continuing to criticize the assassin’s prison conditions as overly harsh compared to what he claimed jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti received. In 2025, now in control of Israel’s Prison Service, Ben Gvir was filmed publicly confronting and taunting Barghouti in his cell.

Over the course of his early activism, Ben Gvir accumulated at least 13 criminal convictions, including for supporting the Kach terrorist movement and racist incitement against Palestinians. Despite this record, he completed law studies at Ono Academic College and received his Israeli bar license in 2012 after resolving outstanding criminal charges. He went on to build a profile representing far-right activists accused of anti-Palestinian violence, including members of the Hilltop Youth extremist settler movement and Amiram Ben-Uliel, convicted of murdering a Palestinian family including an 18-month-old toddler in a 2015 arson attack in Duma. Ben Gvir’s wife later confirmed that Ben Gvir improved Ben-Uliel’s prison conditions after taking national office.

Ben Gvir made multiple failed attempts to win a Knesset seat between 2012 and 2020, as repeated national elections brought little success for his Otzma Yehudit party. His breakthrough came in 2021, when he formed an electoral alliance with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party, crossing the electoral threshold to win six Knesset seats and secure his own seat in parliament. That same year, Ben Gvir stoked widespread intercommunal violence by opening a parliamentary office in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah during ongoing clashes over planned evictions of Palestinian families. Then-police commissioner Kobi Shabtai explicitly labeled Ben Gvir the person responsible for the subsequent uprising, which left 313 Palestinians and eight Israelis dead.

The 2021 government collapsed after 18 months, and in the 2022 elections, despite earlier claims Ben Gvir would not receive a ministerial post, Netanyahu relied on the far-right alliance of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, which won 14 Knesset seats, to return to power. Ben Gvir was appointed head of the newly renamed National Security Ministry, fulfilling a decades-long career goal. Even before his appointment, scholars of Israeli extremism warned that Ben Gvir posed a greater threat to Israeli democracy than Kach founder Meir Kahane ever had, framing him as a figure who had mainstreamed Kahanist ideology by softening its public tone while retaining its core extremist goals.

Since taking office in 2022, Ben Gvir has overhauled Israeli security institutions to advance his anti-Palestinian agenda. Critics accuse him of politicizing the Israeli police force, appointing loyalist officers to top posts and using police to suppress anti-government protests and restrict independent journalism. In 2026, Israel’s attorney general called on the Supreme Court to order Ben Gvir’s dismissal over his politicization of police, but the court declined to remove him, ordering only a negotiated agreement on his ministerial responsibilities.

Ben Gvir has overseen a dramatic surge in home demolitions targeting Palestinian communities, including a 115 percent increase in the Negev as part of what he calls a policy to “restore sovereignty” over the area. After the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza, he relaxed gun laws to arm Israeli settlers and overhauled the long-standing status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, repeatedly joining far-right incursions and holding public religious rituals there to assert Israeli control. In 2026, his party introduced a racially discriminatory death penalty law that applies only to Palestinians convicted of terrorism against Israelis, with no equivalent penalty for Jews who murder Palestinians.

Ben Gvir’s most controversial policies have targeted Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has described the Israeli incarceration system under Ben Gvir as a “network of torture camps” for Palestinians. Between October 2023 and June 2026, at least 94 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody, per Physicians for Human Rights Israel, with Haaretz putting the figure at more than 100. B’Tselem has documented widespread abuses including sexual violence, routine humiliation, inhumane overcrowding, and systemic denial of medical care. In May 2026, the United Nations for the first time added Israel to its blacklist of states accused of warzone sexual violence, explicitly naming the Israeli Prison Service, overseen by Ben Gvir, as a perpetrator of mass rape and sexual assault against Palestinian detainees.

One high-profile incident in May 2026 amplified international outrage against Ben Gvir: he was filmed verbally abusing and humiliating activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, a Gaza-bound aid group intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters. The incident sparked global condemnation, with multiple world leaders criticizing the treatment of their citizens, and even some Israeli politicians including Netanyahu acknowledging that the incident damaged Israel’s international image. By June 2026, Ben Gvir had been banned from entering more than a dozen Western nations including the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Ireland, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, and Spain.

As Israel prepares for new parliamentary elections by October 2026, polling shows Otzma Yehudit currently holds roughly eight Knesset seats, and Netanyahu’s ruling coalition is projected to win around 50 of 120 total seats, leaving the prime minister completely dependent on Ben Gvir’s support to remain in power. Political analysts note that the ideological gap between Netanyahu’s Likud party, once considered a center-right liberal faction, and Ben Gvir’s Kahanist Otzma Yehudit has nearly disappeared, with large majorities of voters from both parties supporting full annexation of the West Bank. In recent months, senior Netanyahu allies have joined Ben Gvir’s team, and top Likud ministers have publicly voiced support for Ben Gvir and opposed any attempt to remove him from office. Netanyahu is currently negotiating a new electoral alliance between Ben Gvir and Smotrich, potentially even adding their candidates to the Likud party list, though it is expected Ben Gvir would demand to lead any joint list if the alliance goes forward.