The Billionaire Raj’s reckoning

Abhijeet Dipke appeared tired but content earlier this week as he addressed supporters in a video celebrating the blow his viral ‘Cockroach’ movement had dealt to India’s establishment. A day earlier, education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, fulfilling a central demand of the youth protesters who had thronged central Delhi and a dozen other cities. Their demonstrations represented one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during 12 years in power. ‘This is just the beginning,’ Dipke said. ‘The Cockroach Janta Party has a long way to go.’

As victory statements go, its modesty was apposite. The Cockroach protests are certainly significant. The largest political protests since COVID, they are also one of only a handful of sustained anti-government campaigns Modi has faced since winning power in 2014. A stubborn leader, he is also loyal, rarely changing his ministerial team. Pradhan’s resignation therefore represents a rare moment of weakness. For those anxious about the state of Indian democracy, recent weeks provide a cause for quiet optimism, showing that sustained public pressure can still force concessions from a ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government that otherwise seems impervious to it.

The limits of that optimism should be obvious, too, however. Modi remains a skilled and popular leader, as a string of recent state-level election victories attest. The Cockroach movement of students and educated urban young professionals is clearly different from the country at large. A vocal, tech-savvy Gen Z campaign forcing out a minister is far from a broader crisis of legitimacy for the government as a whole. In truth, the challenge Modi faces is less this movement and more the worsening structural environment illuminated by the Cockroach protests. Even as he remains dominant politically, Modi’s underlying economic and geopolitical position is growing far more difficult.

The recent uprising traces back to the middle of May, and a remark by India’s Chief Justice, who compared unemployed young people to ‘cockroaches’, in a comment he later claimed was misquoted. Dipke, a political activist, seized on the insult, launching the Cockroach Janta Party, basically as a joke. The movement took off even so, first online, then on the streets. Initial anger focused on allegations that corruption led to the cancellation of national civil service and university entrance tests, affecting millions of young Indians. That scandal was then exacerbated by the older and more intractable issue of jobs and India’s inability to create good work for its vast and growing youth population of 370m. Along the way, the marchers’ complaints became broader still, encompassing unhappiness over rising inequality and weak government accountability.

India’s underlying employment problem is getting worse. Its youth population is the world’s largest: according to the World Bank, one million young people spill into the labour market each month. School and university systems remain deeply flawed, leading to legions of underemployed graduates. Paths to advancement are few and precarious, especially for those at the bottom of the social heap. Some avenues that once promised entry to the middle class are now under pressure, too. Artificial Intelligence is hollowing out entry-level IT work, which once absorbed hundreds of thousands of educated graduates a year. Shares in Infosys, a well known IT services company, have fallen by roughly a third over the past year.

None of this is made easier by a worsening geopolitical context. Both of India’s principal rivals, China and Pakistan, have become more threatening. Ties with the US, its most important partner, have worsened under President Donald Trump. The war in Iran and associated rising inflation and energy costs caused economic hardship, forcing Modi to introduce a range of emergency measures to save fuel. Weakening economic globalisation in general makes it harder for India to grow by exporting services and integrating with Western supply chains.

India is still led by its most powerful government in living memory, and arguably its most politically dominant leader since Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who governed the country following independence in 1947. Eventually the laws of political gravity must take hold. So far, though, Modi appears impervious, not least given he faces a rabble of divided opposition parties. Only a brave pundit would bet against him winning a fourth term in 2029, equalling Nehru’s record.

For all that, Modi’s government is clearly struggling to make headway on the domestic and international challenges that will determine the country’s trajectory over the next decade. India’s problems of worklessness show no signs of improving, just as its foreign policy position grows more complex. Even while the Cockroach protests are unlikely to shake his grip on power, they do illustrate Modi’s powerlessness in getting to grips with the challenges India faces.

There is a curious symmetry to all this, too, given it was a previous set of public protests that first helped propel Modi to power. I moved to Mumbai back in 2011 and began working as a foreign correspondent. Around that time India witnessed a wave of anti-corruption protests led by the Gandhi-like figure called Anna Hazare. Like today’s demonstrations, those featured hunger strikes and mass sit-ins at the same Jantar Mantar site in Delhi. Eventually, these protests crystallised into a movement known as India Against Corruption. Public anger back then focused on rampant graft and the rising power of a new industrial business elite. There were huge scandals in areas from telecoms spectrum auctions to land allocations, under a government widely seen as both corrupt and incompetent. Public fury at these failures eventually helped propel Modi’s rise, as a leader who promised to clean up India’s problems.

In 2018, I published a book entitled The Billionaire Raj, coining a term now widely used to describe the inequalities baked into India’s system. The phrase echoed two earlier eras: the British ‘Raj’, when a distant extractive elite ruled the subcontinent, and the subsequent ‘Licence Raj’ of suffocating socialist bureaucracy. The term ‘Billionaire Raj’ captures how, in the decades after India’s 1991 liberalisation, a new and vibrant tycoon class worked with political friends in Delhi, accumulating vast fortunes through proximity to power.

To give Modi credit, he did put a stop to the very worst of the freewheeling graft that once flowed around India’s cabinet table, angering a previous generation of protesters. Yet while the sprawling outrages that defined India a decade ago have become less common, plenty of scandals still remain, of which the recent examination debacle is just one. Meanwhile, the underlying issues of entrenched inequality and an ever-more powerful super-rich have, if anything, got worse.

The result is a conundrum. For all his tightening hold on power, Modi is struggling to find answers to the new set of broader challenges India faces, from youth unemployment to political fairness and state competence. Today’s problems are if anything harder to control too, from AI hollowing out jobs to a hostile Trump administration and an assertive China.

More to the point, the protests that once helped take him to power are now being replayed against him, not as an existential threat to his rule, but as a signal that the public frustration with inequality and unaccountable power persists. He made progress subduing the most blatant crony-capitalism of India’s old system, but the basic problem of a small elite capturing the gains of growth remains, while the mass of younger Indians look on. For the Cockroach protesters, at least, the suspicion is that no one in India’s governing class, Modi included, has the answers.