When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts. –Ethiopian proverbOn July 24, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union education minister – the first such casualty a citizens’ movement has extracted from Narendra Modi’s government in more than a decade in power. It is worth asking why this movement, of all the movements this government has faced down and outlasted, actually worked. Part of the answer lies in something India’s commentariat has been strangely reluctant to say out loud: the “Cockroaches” won partly because they were rude.Every generation invents its own tongue, and Gen Z’s happens to be foul-mouthed, sarcastic, and entirely uninterested in asking permission to speak that way. The posters at Jantar Mantar, the Instagram reels, the placards outside the education minister’s residence did not read like the earnest, morally solemn banners of an older Indian protest tradition.They read like group chats – abusive, vulgar, absurd, gleefully profane – and this offended precisely the people it was designed to offend: the self-styled sanskari faithful of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ecosystem, and the Bhakts for whom reverence toward the leader is close to a civic religion. That offence was not a design flaw. It was the whole point, and it deserves to be recognised as one of the reasons this movement won – because vulgarity, deployed with intent against sacred power, has a much older and much more successful political career than most respectable commentary is willing to admit.An insult that would not stay an insultThe movement’s very name records the strategy in miniature. On May 15, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant, hearing a case about fraudulent legal credentials, remarked from the bench that unemployed young people were “like cockroaches” who, having “no place in the profession,” turned to social media and activism to “attack everyone.” It was meant as a dismissal – the kind of casual contempt from an institution of state that Indians have simply learned to absorb without complaint.Within a day, Abhijeet Dipke, a student at Boston, had launched a platform for “all the cockroaches out there,” with eligibility criteria listed, only half in jest, as being “unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to rant professionally.” Within seventy-eight hours it had three million followers. Within five days, ten million – more than the ruling party’s own official accounts. An insult meant to shame an entire generation into silence had been converted, in under a week, into a badge nobody could take back.This is a classic political strategy of reappropriation: a movement seizes an insult coined by those in authority and transforms it into a badge of collective identity. We have seen this historically with terms such as “sans-culottes” during the French Revolution, “Black” in the Black Power movement, “queer” in LGBTQ politics, and, in a different context, the Dalit movement’s reclamation of “Dalit” itself. The slogan “What if all the cockroaches came together?” was powerful not because it was vulgar, but because it converted humiliation into collective agency; the irreverent language surrounding it was part of the same political inversion. This reclamation is, in fact, an even stronger argument than a simple defence of profanity for its own sake – it shows why the crude and the strategic are so often the same thing.Everything that followed extended the same instinct. Diapers mailed to the education minister’s office to “plug the leaks.” Placards no newspaper could print in full. A slogan announcing itself, without a trace of embarrassment, as the “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.” Older commentators – and no small number of well-meaning liberals – winced at all of it and called it juvenile. They were not wrong that it was crude. They were wrong to think crudeness and political seriousness are incompatible.The hidden transcript enters the squareEvery hegemonic order establishes not only acceptable political opinions but also an acceptable political language. Civility, respectability and decorum become part of the discipline through which power regulates dissent: protesters are expected to be polite even while protesting injustice. But history suggests that ruptures typically begin by breaking this linguistic convention. The language of revolt is seldom parliamentary. It is emotional rather than measured, mocking rather than deferential, often deliberately transgressive – and what looks like vulgarity to the establishment is frequently the first public expression of accumulated humiliation and anger.The political theorist James C. Scott [James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press New Haven And London,1990], in his study of everyday domination and resistance, drew a distinction that captures exactly what happened this summer: between the “public transcript” of deference that subordinate groups perform in front of power, and the “hidden transcript” – the mockery, the jokes, the contempt – that they otherwise keep private. Rebellion, in Scott’s account, is the moment the hidden transcript walks into the public square. What shocked polite society about the “Cockroach” movement was not really its vulgarity; it was the sudden, unauthorised publication of sentiments that had always existed, just never where the state or the anchors could hear them.Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) supporters hold posters during a protest demanding Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation over alleged irregularities in the NEET examination, at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, Sunday, July 19, 2026. Photo: PTI /Atul YadavThe cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin [Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 (original Russian 1965)] offered the companion concept for why that publication is so destabilising. Writing on the carnival traditions of early modern Europe, he described the “carnivalesque”: moments when the grotesque, the bodily and the scatological are deployed deliberately to invert official hierarchy, when kings are crowned in mockery and sacred things are dragged down to the level of the body and its indignities.For as long as the laughter lasts, the world’s actual rulers are, if only symbolically, made small. Bakhtin’s point was that this laughter is never mere entertainment – it is a real, if temporary, suspension of the psychological hold hierarchy exercises over those beneath it. Regimes built on being taken with absolute seriousness have historically had no durable answer to being laughed at in a language they cannot dignify by answering in kind.What the libelles did to a kingBy the 1770s, more than a decade before a single stone of the Bastille fell, the French monarchy was already losing something it could not easily recover: its aura. Not its armies, not its treasury, not yet its throne – the quasi-sacred mystique that had allowed French kings to claim an authority ordinary politics could not touch. What eroded that aura, historians have argued, was not primarily the reasoned constitutional argument of the Enlightenment philosophes circulating among the literate elite. It was something cruder and far more widely read: the libelles – illegal, pornographic and scurrilous pamphlets, printed abroad or smuggled in, passed hand to hand – whose favourite target was the queen.Marie Antoinette was accused, pamphlet after pamphlet, of every imaginable depravity; the king himself was mocked as impotent and ridiculous, a weak man wearing a crown too heavy for him. None of this was measured argument, and much of it was not even true. But as the historian Robert Darnton [Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.] has shown in his studies of the “literary underground of the Old Regime,” the libelles did something the philosophes’ treatises never managed alone: they made the monarchy sayable in the register of the gutter.Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) supporters celebrate after Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned and took responsibility for the NEET paper leak, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo: PTI /Atul YadavOnce a king and queen could be laughed at and imagined in obscene detail by ordinary readers, they had already lost the one thing absolutism actually depended on — the presumption that they were simply above that kind of talk. Darnton, and later Lynn Hunt [Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.] in her work on the erotic literature of the Revolution, both describe this as a desacralisation of monarchy that was largely complete well before 1789. By the time the Estates-General met, the crown Louis XVI wore had already been quietly emptied of the mystique that once made it worth dying to defend.The Revolution did not abandon this weapon once it began; it professionalised it. Jacques Hébert’s newspaper Le Père Duchesne became one of the most consequential publications of the revolutionary years precisely because it refused every convention of respectable pamphleteering. Its narrator, a fictional stove-maker, swore constantly in the idiom of the Parisian street and addressed readers not as citizens to be persuaded but as comrades already in on the joke.It was crude by design, because its political function was to speak in a voice the old order had no way of answering with dignity intact. And the identity that came to define the Revolution’s popular base, the sans-culottes – literally, “those without knee-breeches” – began life as an aristocratic sneer at the coarse trousers of the labouring poor, exactly as “cockroach” began as Surya Kant’s sneer at unemployed youth. The Parisian crowds did what the Cockroaches would do two and a half centuries later: they picked up the insult, wore it as a name, and turned the mockery back on those who had coined it.None of this is to claim obscene pamphlets caused the French Revolution, any more than diaper mailers alone brought down an Indian education minister. Bread prices, war debt and a paralysed political system did the heavier structural work in both cases. But the libelles explain why the crude and the political are so often the same weapon: they strip the reverence on which entrenched authority depends.A lineage closer to homeIndia has its own version of this history, and it goes back to early 1970s. Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry scandalised the literary establishment with its profanity and rawness, but Golpitha could never have been written in the sanitised Marathi of the middle classes – its language was inseparable from the brutal social reality it represented. The same can be said of Black protest literature, punk music, rap, feminist slogans, and countless working-class movements elsewhere: the language of the oppressed has rarely conformed to the standards of those who dominate them.This is not a romance of abuse. There is a crucial distinction between abuse directed downward, at women, minorities or other vulnerable groups – which merely reproduces the structures of domination – and profanity directed upward, at entrenched institutions of power. The Cockroach idiom, whatever its liberal critics made of it, was aimed unmistakably at the latter: at a Chief Justice’s bench, a minister’s office, a party machine and system’s impunity.A protestor wearing a Spiderman mask poses in Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. Photo: PTI.Directed upward, transgressive language becomes an act of symbolic insubordination, stripping authority of the reverence much of its power depends on. Seen this way, the Gen Z idiom of the agitation was more than youthful irreverence – it was the expression of a generation’s accumulated frustration with unemployment and examination scams, communicating emotion as much as demands, and narrowing the distance between the movement and its social base in a way respectable language rarely manages.Why this matters for Modi’s image, not just Pradhan’s jobThere is an old, almost military logic to how weaker sides defeat stronger ones: you win by defying your adversary’s imagination, by fighting in a register they have no training to answer. This government did not build its dominance on policy delivery so much as on a carefully constructed image – disciplined, dignified, almost priestly, a leader positioned above criticism and certainly above mockery, sustained for a decade by friendly television anchors, staged rallies, and a social media machine that had, until this year, faced no real competition in its own arena.That image is the modern, secular equivalent of the sacred aura clinging, however threadbare, to Louis XVI in the 1770s: not literal divinity, but a cultivated presumption of untouchability.The state had a script for slogans, petitions, op-eds – the standard grammar of Indian dissent, which it had learned to out-shout, outspend or simply wait out over ten years in power. It had no script at all for being laughed at. Profanity and mockery do not request an audience with dignity; they refuse to grant it, and a government whose authority rests on being taken with total seriousness has no defence against being made ridiculous.For one month, that is precisely what happened to an image built at enormous cost – punctured not by a rival politician’s speech, but by teenagers with a meme account, using the same basic mechanism that helped empty a French throne of its mystique two hundred and fifty years earlier.That is why the resignation matters less than what made it possible. For more than a decade, Indians have governed themselves under the quiet assumption that this dispensation cannot be moved – that Parliament will not ask hard questions, that courts will not move quickly, that protest changes nothing, and that the only sensible posture toward power is resignation dressed up as patience.The “Cockroaches” broke that spell using exactly the weapon everyone told them was beneath a “serious” movement. Hope, once punctured back into public life, is not a small thing to recover – it is the precondition for everything that follows, as it was, in a very different century, for crowds who discovered that a king who could be laughed at could also be resisted.The old reflex reasserts itselfAnd something will have to follow, because the government has wasted no time showing what it actually thinks of the bargain it struck. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) ended its protests “in good faith,” on the understanding – confirmed publicly by the ministers who negotiated it – that no punitive action would follow. Within days, CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka was warning Union ministers J.P. Nadda and Jitendra Singh, in a message he made public, that “hundreds of students have been arrested in Bihar and Bengal,” with hundreds more “surveilled and harassed” in Delhi, and volunteers who had merely helped with logistics quietly picked up.By the movement’s own count, more than a hundred students had already been detained within forty-eight hours of the protests being paused. Delhi Police, for its part, has begun circulating a report claiming nearly three thousand “habitual offenders” had infiltrated the demonstrations – the familiar opening move of a state preparing to recast a citizens’ movement as a law-and-order problem once the cameras move on. Eighteenth-century absolutism answered mockery it could not out-argue with exactly this instinct: the lettre de cachet, the quiet arrest, the disappearance of pamphleteers into the Bastille without trial, once ridicule could no longer be laughed off.None of this should surprise anyone who has watched this government manage dissent before. A regime does not surrender the instinct to punish simply because it has been embarrassed into one concession; it usually punishes more quietly, once the television crews have packed up. Whether the “Cockroaches” understood this risk from the outset barely matters now. What matters is whether they meet it with the same irreverence that won their first fight.Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) supporters sleep on stone slabs along a footpath at the Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, early Thursday, July 23, 2026. Photo: PTI /Karma BhutiaMovements that discover the power of laughter and then grow embarrassed by it — that trade their profanity for the dignified idiom their critics always demanded — tend to lose exactly the advantage that made them dangerous. This too is a lesson the eighteenth century offers: it was precisely when the Revolution’s crudest and most popular voices, Hébert’s among them, were silenced from within that the movement’s connection to the streets that had carried it into being began to fray.The government is betting that a movement without a hierarchy, a headquarters, or a single leader it can summon and negotiate away will simply exhaust itself once the adrenaline of victory fades. It has bet wrong on this generation once already. The country does not belong to the men counting arrests in Bihar and Bengal. It belonged, at least for one long and unlikely month, to the cockroaches — and it will keep belonging to them for exactly as long as they refuse to go quiet, polite and forgettable now that the cameras have started looking elsewhere. History, from the libelles of the 1770s to the placards of Jantar Mantar, offers a fairly consistent lesson: power that insists on being taken seriously rarely survives being laughed at for long, but it survives easily the moment its opponents decide laughter was beneath them after all.Hope, the “Cockroaches” are listening.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.