Michael Stott
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So this party appeared almost out of nowhere.
It was the brainchild of an Indian doing postgrad studies at Boston in the US.
His name is Abhijit Dipka.
And he said he had the idea for this movement after he had read in the papers of India's chief justice calling unemployed young people cockroaches.
And he was so outraged by this that he decided to start
a satirical online protest movement called the Cockroach Janitor Party.
Now, that's a play on the name of Prime Minister Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janitor Party.
And that's where this thing began.
Well, he told me that he'd finished his master's degree in public relations in Boston, and his plan was just to apply for jobs in the States and stay there.
And then this whole movement has changed his life.
He's got 22 million followers on Instagram, and they've been telling him they want him to turn this satirical online protest movement into a proper political movement in India.
So he's decided to respond to that by coming back to India.
He plans to lead protests demanding the resignation of the education minister.
who's been implicated in some scandals over public examination problems.
These exams are crucial for millions of Indians who take them every year, who spend years of their life and sometimes borrowed money studying to pass them because it's their big chance to gain a decent job.
And some of these exams have had to be cancelled after people have taken them because it's emerged that the question papers haven't been secure or that mark sheets have been leaked or that papers have been marked wrongly.
So Dipka, he says the first thing he does after getting back to India from the US will be to go to a police station in central Delhi and ask permission to hold a big rally in the government quarter there.
of his supporters to demand the education minister's resignation.
That's one of their main demands.
One of the others, of course, is young people should no longer be treated as cockroaches, but should get proper support from the government and that the government needs to take seriously the crisis of youth unemployment in India.