THE COCKROACH JANATA PARTY’S march toward the Parliament on July 20 resulted in the Delhi Police cracking down on protestors with lathi charges, tear gas, and pellet guns. After the resignation of Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, on July 25, the repression became nationwide, leading to mass arrests and detentions of student protestors. Many police cases were filed against protestors in Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, and Delhi — all states ruled by the BJP. The CJP leadership accused the government of backtracking on its promise not to take action against protestors and warned that it would compel them to restart the protest.
The BJP’s modus operandi of labelling any dissent as ‘anti-national’ was followed religiously here too. Before resigning, Pradhan himself described the protestors as the B team of terrorists. The RSS leader Atul Limaye even termed the CJP protest as “anti-constitutional”. Citing B.R. Ambedkar’s “Grammar of Anarchy” formulation in his last speech in the Constituent Assembly, Limaye said, “Ambedkar had warned about the anarchists long ago. Now is the time to decode this, understand it, and take precautions against such anarchist forces, which are detrimental to the nation.” Such fabricated narratives act as ideological justifications for punitive measures against protestors. This echoes colonial rule’s attitude towards nationalists — a badge of honour the RSS could never claim. Hence, the BJP’s discomfort with protestors invoking Ambedkar and Gandhi is historically rooted. Unlike the BJP-RSS ideologues, Ambedkar and Gandhi saw resistance as a lighthouse guiding democracy’s ship to shore.
Amid this crackdown, it is worth revisiting what Gandhi and Ambedkar said about the legitimacy of protest in a democracy. This piece frames the government’s actions against students as an antithesis of Gandhi’s Swaraj and shows how the CJP protest reflected some elements of Gandhian Satyagraha. Briefly, it debunks the RSS’s appropriation of Ambedkar’s warning about “Grammar of Anarchy” through historical explanation.
Gandhi’s Swaraj, the Public Life, and the Role of ‘Cockroaches’
Gandhi's vision of Swaraj, a motor force behind his leadership, went beyond the narrower idea of independence from foreign rule and represented an ideal for both the individual and the nation. Historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee in his article, stated that Swaraj according Gandhi meant, “each person will become his own ruler”, culminating in the Swaraj for India . In this sense Swaraj represented the freedom of individuals to regulate their own lives without harming one another.
The BJP’s majoritarian tendencies, its attack on the Constitution—which represents and actualises the will of the people—and the brutal repression of dissent and protesters stand directly opposed to the primacy that Gandhi assigns to the individual in his Swaraj. The labelling of any meaningful dissent as ‘anti-national’ is not only against Gandhi’s idea of Swaraj, but also challenges his fundamental idea of public life. Speaking of the importance of diversity of thought in public life, Gandhi wrote in April 1924:
“In a vast country like this, there must be room for all schools of honest thought. And the least, therefore, that we owe to ourselves, as to others, is to try to understand the opponent's viewpoint and, if we cannot accept it, respect it as fully as we expect him to respect ours. It is one of the indispensable tests of a healthy public life and, therefore, fitness for Swaraj.”
It becomes crucial to revisit Gandhi’s Swaraj in relation to the CJP's protest, as Swaraj is a vision of greater individual freedom and a protest against corrupt and incompetent authorities. According to Gandhi, the “freedom of speech and pen” constituted “the foundation of Swaraj” and must be protected in all circumstances. Exercising their freedom of speech, the CJP disagreed with the government's view that the educational system is operating properly. Additionally, amid the student suicides after the paper leak in May this year, the CJP’s demand for Pradhan’s resignation marked a perfect reminder to the government that the people may regulate and hold authorities accountable if they are abusing power or not performing duties according to the will of the people. This aspect of the CJP, amid police brutality, echoed Gandhi's rejection of Swaraj as “the acquisition of authority by a few” in 1925. Instead, he defined it as “the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused.” He remarked that Swaraj is to be attained by educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority.
In fact, the CJP met the expectations Gandhi assigned to the students to achieve his vision of Swaraj. In 1928, many students wrote letters to Gandhi asking how they could serve the nation during the Bardoli Satyagraha, to which Gandhi responded that “students should learn to shed such fears. They should learn to put forward their views before elders with boldness and determination”. Many students walked this path as they defied their parents, including children of the BJP loyalists and even MLAs, and joined the CJP movement at Jantar Mantar.
According to Gandhi, this defiance of parents for progressive causes was equivalent to “taking part in national service.” Despite differences in context, Gandhi's appeal to students in his 1930 speech at Borsad in Gujarat, after launching the Civil Disobedience Movement, echoes the sense of urgency and anxiety guiding students for spontaneously joining CJP movement. Gandhi asked the crowd, “What student is he who will continue to study at such a time?” and implored them to “leave the schools and come out on the battlefield [and] become mendicants for the sake of the country.” The CJP protesters’ decision to hold their ground despite a massive police crackdown on their march to Parliament reflected this sense of urgency to initiate a discussion on the national examination system.
III. Gandhi’s Satyagraha, the State Repression and the Student Protestors as “Enlightened Anarchy”
Gandhi’s Satyagraha for actualising Swaraj got embodied in his remark, “the beauty and efficacy of Satyagraha are so great, and the doctrine so simple, that it can be preached even to children” (68). The CJP protestors understood this “simple” doctrine and peacefully demanded Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation for about a month. It is not to say that they understood or practised the doctrine of Satyagraha the way Gandhi envisioned. But the fact that they attempted to replicate some core parts of it merits an evaluation of the CJP movement from a Gandhian lens. Amid the 1928 Bardoli Satyagraha, as the colonial authorities confiscated farmers’ land for resisting the tax hike, Gandhi reassured farmers, “You have one invaluable thing which they cannot attach, and that is your soul, your self-respect…Satyagraha is the mantra for safeguarding it.” In the NEET paper leak, the government’s callous attitude betrayed the Constitutional promise of dignity and compromised this very self-respect. Seen beyond the headlines, the student suicides incriminate the government in a direct attack on individual dignity. Eventually, this denial of self-respect to the youth charged the CJP movement. As Gandhi envisioned, students practised Satyagraha to restore the dignity denied to India’s students. No wonder that Mohammed Irfan, the viral hawker who never went to school, and his emphasis on the denial of garima (dignity) resonated with the nation.
Once the Delhi Police brutally lathi-charged students, fired tear gas, and used pellet guns, the cockroaches’ critique of Pradhan’s incompetency soon became a critique of PM Modi. After Pradhan’s resignation, the crackdown continued with selective targeting of students who mocked or criticised PM Modi. Gandhi would have found it extremely unacceptable, as he saw the “rule of one over many” as “intolerable” and asserted that “the government of the people, by the people and for the people cannot be conducted at the bidding of one man, however great he may be.” The government’s priority of protecting Modi’s image during the decade’s largest student protest sits uncomfortably with Gandhi’s vision of representative democracy, considering he treated criticism as the “ozone of public life”. So, the repression undermines Gandhi’s ideals of dissent-friendly government. Yet, for Gandhi, it also intensifies people’s struggles. In his 1924 presidential address, the only Congress session he ever chaired, he argued that “repression does for a true man or a nation what fire does for gold.” Reflecting this, the July 20 police attack moved students beyond seeking Pradhan’s resignation to subjecting Modi to unforeseen scrutiny. While denying Swaraj to students, the repression simultaneously supplied their cause with a moral force — an inherent paradox of the State repression.
RSS leader Atul Limaye referred to the CJP protestors as those spreading “anarchy”. But in Gandhi’s Swaraj, power must decentralise to the point where every person becomes her own ruler and institutions thriving on centralised control wither away through localisation. Gandhi called this replacement state “enlightened anarchy”, where “anarchy” suggests almost an absence of a state and “enlightened” refers to a disciplined and self-governing society. The NEET exam, by contrast, is a distinctly centralised national exam. In 2021, Tamil Nadu’s DMK government formed a panel, led by retired Madras High Court Justice A.K. Rajan’s leadership, to study NEET’s impact. In 2024, the panel recommended that the government eliminate NEET through legislative and legal means. Some critics also called for the abolition of the National Testing Agency itself. Read this way, the CJP protest’s demand for educational reform was a step towards Gandhi’s “enlightened anarchy” rather than the chaotic and terrorism-oriented ‘anarchy’ the RSS and BJP invoked. The protest reflected that spirit as it pushed not just for reforms but for a much-needed conversation on decentralising India’s exam system.
The RSS’s Misrepresentation of Ambedkar’s “Grammar of Anarchy” Warning
RSS leader Atul Limaye’s reference to Ambedkar’s speech to label the CJP protesters as practising the “Grammar of Anarchy” is not surprising, given the Sangh and BJP’s history of misrepresenting and appropriating Ambedkar. Limaye claimed that Ambedkar advocated constitutional methods in independent India and termed protests as the “Grammar of Anarchy”. In 2025, the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat deployed the phrase to warn against a Bangladesh-or Nepal-style Gen Z uprising in India. Besides his fiercest criticism of Hindu nationalism, Ambedkar’s recent emergence as the face of protests explains the Sangh’s anxious appropriation.
Ambedkar himself believed in satyagraha as a tool for the rights of Dalits. In 1927, he led the Mahad Satyagraha for access to public water and declared at Chavdar Lake, “We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others.” In 1930, he and B.K. Gaikwad led the Nasik Satyagraha for temple entry. One might challenge that these predate his 1949 warning and occurred during the colonial period. Three historical explanations address this properly. First, Ambedkar’s warning must be read alongside his criticism of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress for overlooking the Dalit question. Gandhi’s 1932 epic fast, a ‘satyagraha’, against separate electorates for untouchables stripped Dalits of their “constitutional” political autonomy. Read this way, Ambedkar’s warning against satyagrahas as “unconstitutional” was doing things with words rather than issuing a timeless principle. This becomes clearer with his second warning against hero-worship in politics, conveniently ignored by the Sangh as it equally challenges Modi’s idolisation. Second, Ambedkar’s appeal to “abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation, and satyagraha” was visibly contingent on the availability of constitutional methods — a condition that gains currency given the RSS’s legal front’s increasing hold over the judiciary and concerns about its independence. Ambedkar’s warning thus effectively legitimises civil disobedience under the current regime. Third, Ambedkar’s warning was never his final word. In 1953, upon learning the government was reclaiming inami lands from Dalits in Marathwada, he prompted B.S. More, a leader of the Scheduled Caste Federation, to organise a land satyagraha. In 1952, he urged Kolhapur women desiring the Hindu Code Bill to find two “fat women” to fast for it. In Belgaum, addressing nearly 50,000 people, he warned the government that unimproved conditions for Scheduled Castes could force him toward “stern measures” and anarchy. It shows that Ambedkar’s words were shaped by political context and the RSS’s appropriation of his warnings must be countered with those contextual facts.
