From the digital underground rises a transitional generation – educated in secular India’s ghost yet graduating into its corpse, victims of right-wing educational distortion, economic scandal, and the absolute non-governance of their future. Now the cockroach revolution migrates from online voice to offline streets, the very technology rulers manufactured to broadcast propaganda becoming the weapon broadcasting the revolt they cannot silence, aged leaders anchored in religion-as-power, amassing wealth through captured institutions, facing the bitter irony that they created the digital megaphone amplifying the revolt they cannot stop.The State’s grisly gambleBetween paper leaks that turn examinations into state-sponsored circuses and the slow poisonous seep of religion into curriculum, the Indian state has made a grisly gamble – playing Russian roulette with the country’s youth while offering no jobs, no educational future, no dignity beyond the hollow ritual of certificates whose only value is the cheap paper they’re printed on and the false promise that poisons families who sacrifice everything for a credential that lands them in the unemployment queue like discarded receipts.The present generation in power has learned a darker lesson: forget competence, forget governance, forget the old myths about meritocracy, because the real game is amassing control over land, forest, water, wealth, cementing that control by capturing constitutional bodies until institutions meant to check power become its most loyal servants, winning elections without governing, ruling by acclamation not administration, leaving a nation paused at the moment of its own promise, trading its future for entrenched control, mastering the art of staying exactly where it is while the young rot in the queue like flowers forgotten in winter.The architecture of controlAmerican mirror reflects this pathology: 70% of white evangelicals voted Trump despite 43% lacking college degrees, evangelical schools teaching biblical literalism over critical inquiry, creating parallel epistemology where facts bow to faith like subjects bowing to king. From Foucault’s lens, religious education is disciplinary power producing docile minds that internalise authority as divine truth, curriculum becoming biopower managing populations by controlling what can be thought, what can be said, until dissent becomes not wrong but sinful. From Gramsci, this is hegemony: religious elites embedding worldview in schools, churches, families, youth becoming human collateral in a war over meaning itself.In India, since Vajpayee opened the RSS’s hand into education and Modi solidified it over twelve years, the state engineered a quiet epistemic coup – Ambedkar excised, Gandhi erased, replaced with right-wing heroes of Greater Ideal India, curriculum transformed into technology of discipline where the student’s body trains to obey, mind internalises ideology as natural law. When the Chief Justice calls a youth a cockroach, it is biopower exposed naked: you are less than human, you are vermin, you do not deserve the air you breathe.The vermin will inherit the earthThe aged rulers, sitting on thrones of captured constitutional bodies, trading land and forest and water for the illusion of eternal power, think they are playing chess while the youth are playing for survival, but the youth are not playing at all—they are fighting for the right to exist, to think, to question, to dissent. The cockroaches no pesticide will kill are the ones who will inherit the earth because they refuse to die quietly, rising from digital underground to physical streets, understanding that when education becomes indoctrination, when curriculum becomes control, when the state becomes a machine reproducing power rather than possibility, the only rational response is revolt.They are not the future being gambled away – they are the future doing the taking back. Let the aged rulers keep their temples of power, their captured institutions, their religion-as-weapon: the cockroaches are already in the walls, already online, already alive, and when the power finally flickers out and the megaphones go silent, the vermin will be the only ones left holding the earth.The vermin inherit everything.Navina Jafa is vice-president of Centre for New Perspectives, a think tank that works on intangible heritage, traditional knowledge through research and pilot programmes for sustainable development.This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.