The sparks that ignited the protests came in May. More than two million students took a punishing examination for admission in medical colleges. Not for the first time, papers were leaked, the examination was scrapped, and the government ordered the students to take the test again. Frustrations mounted.
On May 15, India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, disparaged the unemployed youth of India as "cockroaches" who complain about the system on social media. Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student in Boston, embraced the slur and created the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), on Instagram, deploying it to forge a new political vocabulary that spoke to India’s youth in a grammar they understood. The CJP page briskly gathered 20 million followers.