The cockroaches won. Their women participants did not.

THE COCKROACH Janta Party, a satirical student movement, achieved what few Indian protest movements have managed in the past two decades: it forced a union minister to resign. On July 25th 2026, Dharmendra Pradhan stepped down as education minister after weeks of agitation over leaked examination papers, cancelled tests and the deaths of more than 20 students by suicide. The government gave in. The protests ended.

The online harassment did not.

In the weeks that followed, women who had posted videos, memes and protest coverage from the Jantar Mantar sit-in became targets of rape threats, death warnings, doxxing and doctored images. The pattern was systematic, not scattered. It was gendered, not incidental. And it occurred in a country where the same government that was slow to act on threats against protesters has shown itself perfectly capable of ordering the deletion of social-media posts it finds objectionable. The asymmetry is the real story.

The protests themselves were a case study in how modern mobilisation works. The movement began in May 2026, when India's chief justice was quoted as referring to unemployed critics as "cockroaches" and "parasites"—a description later claimed to be misquoted, but one that took on a life of its own. Abhijeet Dipke, a digital communications strategist, founded the Cockroach Janta Party as a satirical reclaiming of the insult. The movement's demands were modest in form but serious in substance: the resignation of Mr Pradhan, compensation for families of students who had killed themselves, and legal protection for peaceful demonstrators. It was amplified by Instagram reels, by the hunger strike of Sonam Wangchuk, a well-known engineer-activist, and by the anger of India's generation Z, the world's largest.

The government's response followed a familiar script. It first ignored the movement, then vilified it—Mr Pradhan himself labelled protest leaders "the B team of terrorists"—then, when the march on Parliament Street on July 20th shut down central Delhi and drew condemnation from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for police use of tear gas and baton charges, it offered concessions. Mr Wangchuk ended his 26-day fast after receiving government assurances. Mr Modi posted a video saying he had forgiven the "children who had abused him". Mr Pradhan resigned the next day. The CJP called it a victory and told protesters to go home.

It is tempting to think the online harassment of women protesters was a spontaneous eruption of populist fury. In practice, it was something closer to a campaign. The women BBC journalists spoke to—whose identities were protected for safety—reported receiving rape threats, sexually explicit messages, doctored images and pressure from relatives who had seen their videos shared online. The Hindu newspaper, a broadsheet, documented a similar pattern. Shradha Singh, a 23-year-old M.Sc. student, posted a seven-second Instagram reel showing RAF personnel on July 25th; within an hour it had crossed one million views. She deleted it and issued two apology videos. The threats did not stop. Her phone number and address were circulated via her bike registration number. Her mother's Instagram account had to be removed after she began receiving abusive messages. Ms Singh lost clients as a content creator.

The harassment was coordinated by accounts with large followings. The Jaipur Dialogues and Hindutva Vigilant, Instagram accounts that share content framed as patriotic vigilance, amplified doxxing material and urged followers to "teach them a lesson". One protester was labelled "most wanted" in online posts seeking her whereabouts; by July 30th, her name, city and the details of a criminal complaint registered in Noida had been published. An Instagram user with 1.6m followers shared claims that the woman had been identified and was subject to multiple police complaints. These accounts denied holding personal information. But the damage was done by the amplification, not by its source.

A Muslim student activist faced an additional layer of targeted abuse. Her father, a journalist, told the BBC that once her Muslim name became visible in shared posts, "nothing else would matter"—citing his fear that she would face the same investigations and arrests that other Muslim activists have endured in recent years. Doctored images were used to brand her a terrorist and an "anti-national". A student in West Bengal who had organised a fundraiser for diabetic biscuits and masks for protesters changed her name on social media and locked her account after being called a prostitute in private messages. Male protesters who expressed the same political views, the women said, were not subjected to sexualised abuse.

The deeper problem is not merely the harassment itself, which is repugnant but familiar in a country with one of the world's worst records of online abuse against women. The deeper problem is the structure that enabled it—and the asymmetry in how state power was deployed on each side of the conflict.

India's amended IT Rules, tightened in February 2026, require social-media platforms to remove unlawful content within three hours of a government complaint. The rules were sold as a measure to curb harmful content. In practice, they have functioned as a one-way instrument of control. During the protests, mobile internet was shut down in parts of central Delhi. Meta deleted a post at the direction of the Modi government. The state could reach into the digital public square and pull down what it did not like.

But when women protesters were threatened with rape, doxxed, and targeted by accounts with millions of followers, the same regulatory machinery did not turn. No reported arrests of those issuing death threats made headlines. No government agency was cited as acting under the IT Rules to protect the women. The rules exist. They were not applied.

To be sure, the government can argue that it is not responsible for private citizens' online behaviour. It did, after all, concede the protesters' main demand. Mr Pradhan is gone. Mr Modi offered forgiveness. In a democracy, the end of a political conflict should not carry an implied licence for harassment. The government's failure to act against online threats is not a feature of the system; it is a bug that reveals how the system actually works.

It is also worth examining the incentive behind Mr Modi's "forgiveness" video. The PM urged society to forgive the protesters who had questioned him. But forgiveness from a powerful person is not neutral: it signals who holds the moral high ground, and by extension, who may be held to account. The effect on the ground was the opposite of reconciliation. Several Instagram users interpreted the harassment as a deliberate outcome of the video. Whether or not the government orchestrated the campaign, its rhetoric lowered the perceived cost of attacking the protesters. The state can offer forgiveness while tacitly permitting vigilantes to deliver punishment.

The broader lesson for democracies is not hard to see. Digital platforms have given ordinary citizens unprecedented tools for mobilisation. But they have also given organised bad actors unprecedented tools for retribution. India's IT Rules are not the answer because they are applied selectively, not because they lack power. The better answer would be platform transparency: requiring Meta, Google and X to publish data on how many reports of threats, doxxing and coordinated harassment are received, acted upon, and dismissed—and to whom government complaints are routed. If the rules are truly neutral, the data should demonstrate it.

The Cockroach Janta Party achieved a political victory. Its women participants achieved nothing of the sort. They won a minister's resignation and lost their online safety. That is not the bargain that democracies should offer their citizens.