Any cat to catch the mice (original) (raw)
THREE parallel events now underway or recently held carry the potential in varying measure to reset India’s destiny, in all likelihood for the better. From a bird’s eye view, the field looks set for a change. The fact that Germany lost the election for the first time in 40 years for a non-permanent member’s seat at the UN Security Council offers stark lessons for the Modi government to ponder.
Germany turned Palestine averse and cosied up to Israel, much like Narendra Modi’s India, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the saddle. The UN defeat is being linked to Merz’s embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s future is also under a cloud, his ties with the Zionist lobby being a key factor. Ergo: Israel’s chums are being globally isolated.
India’s proximity to Israel was nudged by right-wing ideologues to counter Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov’s 1998 doctrine to form the Russia-India-China group as a stabilising force in a post-USSR Global South. The Western countermeasures included America’s ‘pivot to the east’, dragging India into the Quad. But when the RIC went on to become BRICS, a ‘West Asian Quad’ was conceived including India, Israel, the UAE and the US. The faint outlines of the outcome of the Iran war are threatening to end India’s entanglement with both Quads. And the German debacle at the UN is the writing on the wall.
Potentially, also crucial for the country’s future is the internet-spawned Cockroach Janta Party, which launched its first street protests in New Delhi over the weekend. The party minted into an untested force after a senior judge insulted unemployed youth as cockroaches. The ‘cockroaches’ have given a tart reply to the judiciary, but they’re also demanding the resignation of Modi’s education minister, hitherto an unthinkable prospect.
The third albeit widely underplayed event is the fractious INDIA opposition group seeking to get its act together. Twenty-three parties, including Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress were holding a make-or-break meeting on Monday (June 8) under the Congress party’s stewardship. All three events have the heft to cause tremors in the Modi establishment. Some say the jolt could be more rattling to him than he experienced in 12 years of unbridled power.
Questions have surfaced over the Cockroach lot with insinuations that the cluster of motivated urban youth is supported by the Hindutva order to vent the steam gathering from months of a crippling economic crisis, not all of which is linked to the Iran war. There is also the issue of an overtly corrupt administration keeling over with criminal incompetence amid lacerating acts of omission and commission.
Hundreds of thousands of school-leaving students and admission-seeking medical college aspirants have been grievously harmed by leaked papers and erring tabulation mechanisms. The Cockroach party has sought probity in judiciary, education and the nexus between business and the media, but its critics have sought to portray the group as left oriented with some of them belonging to this or that communist party.
Another suggestion is that they are an extension of the Aam Aadmi Party, a ploy to shift the focus from the improving chances of opposition unity. It’s a fact that AAP came out of the India Against Corruption campaign of 2011 in which the RSS played a backroom role to successfully undermine the Manmohan Singh government.
There’s no need to spread fear of those such as the Cockroach party before they do something wrong.
While the AAP’s birth pangs indeed created the grounds for the coronation of Narendra Modi as prime minister in May 2014, it is equally a fact that AAP was applauded the following year as the sheet anchor that stalled the BJP juggernaut in Delhi. Before this, the Modi wave had easily evicted Congress governments in Maharashtra and Haryana polls. And there was no AAP in Maharashtra to blame the defeat on, although in Haryana it did cut some votes.
The AAP subsequently propagated a soft temple-hopping Hindutva, in which Arvind Kejriwal scrupulously avoided standing with Muslims when they were under attack from the BJP and the police in 2020. But if he or the Cockroach group can yet consciously or unwittingly help stall the rightward, obscurantist drift the Modi government has set India on, it would make Deng Xiaoping’s spirit burst into a smile. “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.” Deng’s dictum applies to anybody who would rescue India from its current trauma. And there’s no need to spread fear of those such as the Cockroach party before they do something wrong.
But let’s not get too swayed also by the shouts of youth power or the roar of something called Gen Z. As far as one could see, it was the youth that demolished the Babri Masjid with their raw sinews. It’s the youth that goes about lynching and harassing innocent citizens in the name of religion. Of course, on the other side, it’s the youth that’s languishing in Modi’s prisons, if they are not out on strictly monitored bail terms, for fighting for a just and equal society in a democratic system that doesn’t discriminate between citizens. Think Umar Khalid.
There’s a youth component in almost every political party. The mighty US is split between youthful Zionists and their youthful adversaries. When I looked up Gen Z on a search engine, an option pointed to Gen Ziaul Haq! I think the idea of Gen Z or Gen Alpha etc is conjured to obscure the reality of universal class struggle, and in India’s of its defining caste identity.
A few donning cockroach masks at the Delhi rally were seen carrying portraits of Bhimrao Ambedkar thereby putting Dalit politics at the centre. But again, hasn’t everyone used Ambedkar’s portraits to lure support? Finally, while Deng’s point is priceless, a useful caution in T.S. Elliott’s line says: “Youth is cruel and has no remorse. It smiles at situations which it cannot see.” A fair point to ponder.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, June 9th, 2026