Jantar Mantar, New Delhi has become a symbol of camaraderie and undaunting courage shown by the younger generation. Instead of fearing the lathis and the brutal attack of the police, the young people are standing against them staring in their eyes as if they have nothing to lose. A huge support of people across the country and abroad has also evidently shaped the general mood of the times.I remember being a young student activist during the 90s and being frequently jailed for protests but had a strong support from the people around. There is an anecdote whence along with other university activists I was put behind bars, there was a sweet shop adjacent to the Boileauganj police station in Shimla, and there were frequent services of milk and jalebi (during that period that was a common treat) served to us by the visitors which were innumerable.Also read: ‘How Dare You Threaten Students?’: After Delhi University’s ‘Benevolent Diktat’, JNU Issues Similar AdviceThis irked the police station head and he said it seems “we are criminals and those who have been arrested are saints”. With large number of people supporting with whatever they have to help in the form of food packages being dropped to water, there is an evident support.This has come after a long period. The post 90s period is the one when there was euphoric resonance in the environment and parents would not allow their children to do any kind of politics. The neo liberal atmosphere was also responsible for either completely banning student union elections or holding them partially. Career development was considered an antithesis to political participation.However, the continuing movement has brought the spiral once again to a point where, due to phenomenal precarity, breaking down of the myth of neo liberal capitalism in serving the humankind, the parents are supporting their children in issues of accountability, and political mobilisations are not considered to be an anathema to individual’s development.What has happenedWe know how in May this year, the Chief Justice of India, presiding over a hearing that touched on RTI and media activism, brought this metaphor. Unemployed young people, he suggested, behave like cockroaches and parasites, attaching themselves to institutions, feeding off litigation, refusing to go away. It was meant, presumably, as a dismissal. Within days, it had become a party. Not a party in the electoral sense, the Cockroach Janta Party carries no ballot symbol, a gathering of people who have decided to stop being afraid of the word used to shame them. Abhijeet Dipke, a political-communications strategist, turned the insult into a platform within a day of the remark. A Bengaluru software engineer put on a cockroach mask. A Delhi University student made a meme. By July, tens of thousands were marching on parliament. Security personnel stand guard during a protest organised by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on July 24, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.What happened on July 20, thousands of people most of them students, many of them first-time protesters attempted to walk from Jantar Mantar toward the parliament, demanding the resignation of the education minister over an exam-leak scandal that had come to symbolise a wider theft: of futures, of fairness, of the basic promise that merit might still mean something in a rigged system. The police met them with tear gas and baton charges. Officers in plain clothes beat the crowd. By evening, the pavements of Connaught Place carried the debris of the encounter, blood on the walls, torn shirts, a scattering of chappals where people had been dragged. Over a hundred protesters were injured, some seriously. Days earlier, the sixty-year-old Ladakhi activist Sonam Wangchuk, three weeks into a hunger strike in solidarity with the movement, had been forcibly removed to hospital by the police who had until then permitted his protest site to stand.There is something interesting here, the protesters did not scatter they reassembled on July 21. This in fact breaks the script of the ruling establishment that it has tried for a decade or so. Which is scare them, beat them and then they will go back to their homes. However, Gen Z as they are called considered to be the depoliticised generation has dismantled the script of the current dispensation.But why do they lose their fear?Well it is difficult to understand that but let me try to build it from the formulation of Marx, to the working class that it had nothing to lose but its chains. But this was written for people bound by wage labour to a factory floor, people with a determinate relation to production. However, the kind of precariat gathering at Jantar Mantar occupies a stranger position.A graffiti on a wall in New Delhi reads, “Kya socha tha darjayenge? Modi hain? (What did you think we will get scared? Is Modi there?)”. Photo: Special Arrangement.Many are what classical Marxist categories would call lumpenproletariat: not yet absorbed into productive labour, expelled from the promise of a job before ever entering one, existing in the gap the economy has manufactured for them. What India’s Gen Z demonstrates, at least partially, is that this mass of people produced en masse by a jobless and job-loss economy, and possessing nothing to bargain with no wage to withhold, no shop floor to occupy can convert that very dispossession into a form of fearlessness. When you have no stake in the system’s continuation, the system’s threats lose their grip.The digital surplus, and who eats itThe deeper contradiction runs through the architecture of the economy itself. India’s coaching and competitive exam complex, the platforms that promise gig work, the ed-tech apps that monetised the aspiration of a whole generation, these are the digital-era mechanisms through which surplus is extracted from young people before they have even entered formal employment.Also read: Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and DangerousThe exam leak that triggered this month’s march was not an anomaly; it was the system’s logic made visible, the moment this manufactured scarcity, namely limited seats, coached advantage, leaked papers sold to those who could pay, could no longer be laundered as meritocracy. Platform capitalism has perfected the trick of making extraction invisible: the algorithm sets the terms; the app, not a factory owner, keeps the difference. Youth unemployment across India remains near 17% by recent estimates, and the jobs that do exist are increasingly short-term, gig-mediated, without security. This is neoliberalism’s contradiction in its purest digital form: a system generating spectacular data-driven wealth for a handful of platforms while manufacturing, at scale, exactly the population it then calls parasitic.Cities that cannot holdIt is worth noting that even the custodians of global capital have begun to sound alarmed. The World Economic Forum’s own risk assessments have, in successive years, flagged the erosion of social cohesion and rising societal polarisation as among the gravest threats the world faces, a startling admission from an institution not given to anti-capitalist diagnosis. The cities are imploding they say. What they are gesturing toward, without naming it as such, is a crisis of urban absorption: cities built as engines of exchange value, increasingly unable to offer their young inhabitants any use value in return, meaning there are no jobs, no affordable shelter, no dignity of employment. Delhi in July was one manifestation. Noida in April was another. When workers in the industrial belt of Greater Noida erupted this spring after decades of suppressed wage anger spilling into the streets until the state was forced into a hasty 21% wage revision. Instead of talking the pattern of filing criminal complaints repeats because the underlying condition repeats: the economy is in severe crisis and the dispensation is just not ready to accept.Sustainability for whomThis is also why the language of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sits so uneasily over India’s cities right now. Sustainability has become a planning vocabulary detached from the question that should organise it: sustainable for whom? A city can meet its green-building targets and its smart-mobility indices while the young people who built it queue for exams they cannot afford to fail, in a labour market that will not receive them.Also read: ‘Enraged and Horrified’: Over 950 Feminists Stand With Students, Against Continuing Police BrutalityThe SDG framework, as currently deployed by municipal and national governments alike, measures the durability of infrastructure and carbon metrics while remaining silent on the durability of a generation’s prospects. Until sustainability is asked to answer for whom a city is being sustained, it will keep functioning as an alibi rather than a diagnosis.None of this ends at Jantar Mantar. The young people have made clear they intend to stay, to organise on the streets. The economy that keeps producing young people with nothing to lose, in cities that keep failing to absorb them, is not manufacturing a passing controversy. It is manufacturing a constituency. And constituencies, unlike protests, do not disperse when the tear gas shells are thrown at them.Tikender Singh Panwar is former deputy mayor of Shimla. He worked on the Leh Vision document and has written vision documents for a dozen cities. Author of three books, he is an urban specialist working in the design of inclusive cities and a member of the Kerala Urban Commission.