August 31, 2026

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CJP CAN THEY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

The children do the counting themselves, video-recording their grievances on a hand-held mobile. At the government school in Santuk Pimpari, a village in Maharashtra's Hingoli district, they list what they don't have: benches, clean drinking water, usable toilets, a working computer, enough teachers. It happens to be a school in the ancestral village of Abhijeet Dipke, national convenor of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Even as their Insta post goes viral, videos begin coming from elsewhere. In Balaghat, Madhya Pradesh, villagers post reels of broken windows, dirty washrooms and inadequate drinking water. In Bengaluru, volunteers spend a morning at a government school talking to teachers and parents. The instruction circulating online is simple: "inspect, ask, listen, document." The CJP calls the campaign `School Thik Karo' (Fix your school). Parents, students and citizens are being encouraged to audit their local government schools, record deficiencies on their phones, tag the CJP and demand that authorities fix them. It is an ingenious extension of the method that first propelled the CJP into national prominence: find a grievance young people recognise, document it, put it online, amplify it, mobilise around it and then force the state to respond.Fresh from the success of what it calls “Season 1”—the agitation against the leaked question paper of the Nation Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) at Delhi's Jantar M - an tar that culminated in the resignation of Union educati minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25—the CJP is at - tempting something considerably more ambitious. It is tak a movement born on Instagram to India's villages and town and widening its original battle over exam fairness into a -cam paign about education, jobs, health and state accountabilit Importantly, it is discovering what happens when digit- al a tivism meets power on the ground. In Thanagazi in Ra tj h aa sn's Alwar district, CJP co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka and or- gan isation co-head Deepak Baliyan reached after students bega protesting over the state of their school. The 180 students he have three teachers and just three rooms; water leaks throug the classrooms and there is no usable toilet or proper drinkin water. Some of the children protesting were six or seven year old. Their slogan was startlingly direct: 'Give us teachers or gi us TCs (transfer certificates to go to other schools).' Something has changed. When the protests began at J -an tar Mantar, Baliyan recalls, only 200-300 people turned up inita i lly. Many were frightened of confronting a powerful government. “Now,” he says, “that fear among the youth ha completely disappeared. Now, we are not afraid of officialdom Now, they are afraid of us.” That psychological shift is wha Ashok Dhawale, member of the CPI(M) politburo, too, regard as the CJP's first success. “The most important thing the CJ achieved was the demolition of fear,” he says. Something he believes has also emboldened Opposition parties and group that had supported the protests. However, now comes the much harder transition and th bigger question: can the CJP transform its movement into a major political force across the country?. Pressure Group or Political Party? Asits first avatar, the CJP prefers to be more of a “pressure group” rather than a political mo-ve ment, as Dipke puts it. “People have lost faith i all institutions,” he tells india tod. “ ay People's representatives change loyalties soon after being elected. Ind needs a social movement in which people rise above politica affiliations.” That said, he doesn't rule out the CJP emerging a political party at some point, “If the people want us to, we w have to consider it,” he says. “But we have no such plans now.” The lure of electoral politics, however, may be hard for the CJP to resist, given the sheer weight of the constituency it seeks to mobilise. Those aged 18-29 a ccount for nea rly 30 per cent of Ind ia's voting-age population. Tamil Nadu demonstrated what ca happen when this demographic heft translates into votes Vijay's Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) drew around 60 pe cent support among young voters, helping propel the fledglin party to a 108-seat win (out of a total of 234), breaking the

REVAMP FOR BIG TESTS AHEAD

Two days before the Sangh Parivar assembled at Gudilova in Visakhapatnam district, the Bharatiya Janata Party started its organisational overhaul. The Akhil Bharatiya Samanvay Bait- hak, which ran from August 19 to 21, brought together 32 Sangh organisations to compare notes on issues of national import. Nitin Nabin attended it for the first time as BJP president. A question awaiting him there: what was he doing to strengthen the party's network? His answer had already arrived on August 17, and its clearest feature was what it left out. There is no television face in the senior ranks, no celebrity import. Amit Malviya, who ran the party's IT and social media operation for 11 years, is gone. Tejasvi Surya, its most marketable young leader, is out of the Yuva Morcha. Sambit Patra, a familiar face on prime time, is now also Northeast coordinator.What Nabin has instead is a 64-member team, many of them new, the bulk of them drawn from state units rather than Parliament's front benches. The party has seen a testing phase in the past few months and has responded to it by promoting people who understand how the organisation is built rather than people who can explain it on air. That said, some familiar faces have found favour again after time in the political wilderness--Ram Madhav, a member of the RSS national executive who was dropped in 2020 (reportedly due to differences with Union home minister Amit Shah), is back as national vice-president while former Union minister Smriti Irani, who lost in Amethi in 2024, is a newly minted national general secretary. Nabin's predecessors had put newish teams in place after they took over, but the 2026 revamp cuts much deeper. Of the eight general secretaries under former party president J.P. Nadda, only two, Vinod Tawde and Sunil Bansal, survive. Nine of the 13 vice-presidents are new, as are 15 of the 16 secretaries, and all seven morcha chiefs. Meanwhile, another durable performer, Tarun Chugh, has been made central office in-charge, the position Arun Singh held before him. The latter has been handed the party's prize state, Gujarat. Tawde takes on Uttar Pradesh, Satish Poonia takes up the vacancy in Punjab, which has had no state in-charge since former Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani died in the Ahmedabad plane crash in June 2025. The churn, it seems, runs in a specific direction. The posts filled with new names are the ones that face the electorate. The posts reinforced are the ones that build the cadre.LEARNING THE LESSONS The BJP won 240 Lok Sabha seats in 2024 and lost its majority. It drew three lessons from its diminution, and all three are evident in this list. The first concerns mending ties with the Sangh. What broke in May 2024, at the height of the LS campaign when Nadda told an interviewer the party was self-sufficient and no longer needed the RSS, has largely been repaired, but the Sangh is not fully on board. The state assembly campaigns since, the organisational overhaul, they all show that the Sangh outfits are being consulted and taken onboard in most of the decision-making. Yet, gaps still exist. The BJP leadership is