NEARLY EIGHTY YEARS AGO, as the tricolour rose over an independent India, a nation dared to dream of what freedom might mean. Gandhi imagined a secular India where no religion could claim primacy over others. Ambedkar insisted that political democracy could not survive without liberty, equality and fraternity. They disagreed on many things, but both agreed that the Republic had to belong to all its citizens equally.
In the years since 2014, that idea has increasingly given way to another. We have watched a politics built on identities that divide us: Hindu v. Muslim, Majority v. Minority, Nationalist v. Anti-National. Before we are citizens, students, workers, farmers or even the unemployed, we are first defined through these divisions.
This is not simply the unfortunate excess of election rhetoric. It reflects a larger ideological goal. Hindutva, as developed by the RSS and the wider Sangh Parivar, imagines India through a Hindu civilisational identity. The BJP has transformed that ideological inheritance into an extraordinarily successful electoral politics by persuading Indians to see one another not first as citizens or fellow human beings, but as adversaries. The result is a political binary: an “us” to defend and a “them” to fear.
Against this politics stands one of the Constitution’s most fascinating ideas. Fraternity. It is perhaps the most neglected word in the Indian Constitution. We remember liberty, equality, and secularism. We argue about socialism. But fraternity? Fraternity sounds almost embarrassingly gentle in this age of political aggression. And yet it may be the most radical constitutional idea of them all.
The Preamble asks the Republic to promote “Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.” Article 51A, which goes further, posits it as a fundamental duty of every citizen to “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood” across religious, linguistic, regional and sectional differences. The constitutional demand could hardly be more at odds with a politics built on division. Fraternity cannot be built while teaching people to fear one another. A common brotherhood is impossible when citizens are constantly reminded that their neighbour belongs to another community, another tribe, maybe even another India. The loss of fraternity, therefore, was not accidental but a consequence of this politics.
Against this politics stands one of the Constitution’s most fascinating ideas. Fraternity.
But then, suddenly, the ‘cockroaches’ crawled out. What began as a joke, sparked by a careless remark from the Chief Justice of India, soon spilled out of the internet and onto the streets. They came protesting examination leaks and the wider failures of India’s competitive-exam system. They came wearing T-shirts and jeans, kurtas and topis, turbans, swords and the unmistakable blue of the Nihang tradition. They came young and old. They came from different religions, castes and regions. They arrived angry, but they also arrived carrying food and water. Muslims served food to fellow protesters. Sikh men appeared in greater numbers among the crowds as the State’s hand grew violent. Strangers sent food for people they had never met. Volunteers distributed it without asking who would eat it.
There is something almost cinematic about this. The Republic in miniature. No longer in monochrome, but in vivid colour. In a political culture that has spent years asking Indians to fear the person next to them, strangers were, inexplicably, feeding one another. After all, the cockroach is wonderfully egalitarian. Everybody can be one. This too is politics. It is fraternity.
It is what happens when the young Hindu preparing for NEET realises that the young Muslim preparing for NEET is simply a fellow victim. Or when the unemployed graduate from Bihar meets the unemployed graduate from Uttar Pradesh and discovers that neither of them needs to know the other’s religion to understand their frustration. Or when the Brahmin student and the Dalit student can disagree about almost everything but agree that an examination should not be compromised.
Student protests have shaped political generations
There is nothing unprecedented about this. India has a long history of students discovering their political power through fraternity with one another.
In Gujarat in 1973-74, anger over hostel and food prices spread from the campuses into a statewide revolt against corruption and inflation, becoming the Navnirman Andolan. The agitation became powerful enough to force Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel to resign and eventually brought down the Gujarat Assembly.
In Bihar, student protests over corruption, inflation and unemployment drew Jayaprakash Narayan— one of the great moral figures of India’s freedom struggle — into the movement. What began as a student protest became a much broader campaign for Sampoorna Kranti, or Total Revolution, a demand not simply for a change of government, but for a transformation of political and public life.
Swaraj rejects the idea that democracy is simply a mechanism for transferring power from one ruler to another.
Look at the political generation that emerged from those protests.
Narendra Modi, now Prime Minister, had participated in the Navnirman movement as an RSS pracharak associated with the ABVP. Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav, both young student leaders involved in the Bihar movement would go on to lead competing strands of socialist and social-justice politics. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee came through Congress student politics. Ram Vilas Paswan, active in Patna University student politics, emerged as one of India’s most prominent Dalit leaders. Sitaram Yechury and his JNU contemporary Prakash Karat would become leading figures of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
They would go on to represent radically different visions of India: Hindu nationalism, socialism, social justice and the Communist Left. Some would become allies, others bitter enemies. But for better or worse, many of the people who would occupy the highest offices in the Republic cut their teeth in politics by standing outside the gates of power, demanding accountability from those on the inside.
That is not a contradiction but democracy working. This is the tradition into which today’s students too have stepped. It is how a generation discovers it too is a citizen.
Revisiting swaraj
Gandhi had a particular articulation for this kind of citizenship: Swaraj. Swaraj is often translated as independence from British rule. That is inadequate. For Gandhi, Swaraj was ultimately about self-rule: the capacity of citizens to collectively govern themselves, to exercise freedom with discipline, and to accept responsibility for the society in which they live.
That makes Swaraj a fundamentally democratic idea. Swaraj rejects the idea that democracy is simply a mechanism for transferring power from one ruler to another. The citizen is not a subject, nor merely a voter who periodically chooses which ruler to obey. If democracy means self-governance, then the people cannot recede from politics after elections. They must continue to participate through questioning, constraining and holding power to account.
And Gandhian Swaraj imposes obligations on the protester too. It is not a licence for violence or destruction. Self-rule requires self-restraint. Dissent requires responsibility. The point of peaceful resistance is not simply to defeat one's opponent, but to demonstrate the moral capacity of citizens to regulate themselves.
Perhaps this is why the word “patriotism” needs rescuing from the recent vocabulary of hypernationalist, chest thumping jingoism. For too long, we have allowed patriotism to become synonymous with loyalty to the state, the government and politicians. But the State is not the nation. It is not a government or political party or even a prime minister that makes the nation. The people make the nation.
And perhaps, in today’s India, there is no act more patriotic than refusing to hate the person standing beside you.
And so, patriotism is something more demanding than obedience.
It is being willing to pay a personal cost for the love of the country. Sometimes that cost is comfort. Sometimes it is your daily bread. Sometimes it is a night in a police station. Sometimes it is being called troublesome, anti-national or, in the language of this particular movement, a cockroach. It is what generation after generation has done. Gandhi did it. The students of Gujarat did it. The students of Bihar did it. The students of Assam did it.
Perhaps this generation too has discovered that citizenship is not passive.
The Cockroach Janta Party may ultimately become a political party or remain a pressure movement. It may win further concessions or fade away. Its leaders may succeed or fail. We do not yet know. Nor does one protest prove that polarisation no longer works.
But for a brief moment, the political imagination of thousands of young Indians escaped the old binaries and glimpsed into an alternate possibility. An India in which a Hindu and a Muslim see more in common with each other as citizens than they see reasons to fear each other. Where a Sikh turban can stand casually beside a student’s rock ‘n’ roll t-shirt without either worrying about their Indian-ness. This is fraternity. And it is dangerous for any politics built on division. Because the moment citizens realise that they do not need to hate one another in order to love their country, the old divisions lose some of their power.
And when those people — Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, urban and rural, from different castes and different regions — stand together to say that they deserve a government that is accountable to them, they are doing something genuinely democratic. They are practising Swaraj.
And perhaps, in today’s India, there is no act more patriotic than refusing to hate the person standing beside you.