India's "Cockroach" Protest: Women and Queers Reject Being Cast Only as Victims Amid Blockades and Sexualized Humiliation

According to Deutsche Welle (DW), on the morning of October 10, activist Navkiran Natt left her home and made her way through a blockaded Delhi in search of a protest she could join. She had been deeply involved in the farmers' protests of 2020 and 2021. In an interview with DW, she separated the measure of the movement's success from the number of people who turned up: "Success is not about how many people make it to Jantar Mantar, but about whether people are still willing to step outside their homes after going through barricades and state violence."

The "Cockroach People's Party" (CJP) began as a satirical online campaign. India's Chief Justice Surya Kant had once referred to unemployed young people as "cockroaches," and the organization's name also served as a pointed allusion to the Bharatiya Janata Party led by Modi. On July 20, CJP marchers headed to Parliament to demand the resignation of then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. DW said security forces used batons, tear gas and guns that fired pellets, resulting in injuries and mass detentions. After Pradhan stepped down at the end of July, CJP shifted its demand to the resignation of India's Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, against the backdrop of more than 130 million names being removed from the draft national electoral rolls. DW's report did not explain the basis for the removals, the procedure or any official response.

By October, some CJP leaders were in judicial custody or facing the threat of detention. In footage documented by DW, barricades, police and weapons were not merely the backdrop to sporadic confrontations, but part of the state's way of responding to political demands: the authorities could decide who was allowed through a street intersection and who would be taken away, while activists relied on one another, lawyers and repeatedly taking to the streets to rebuild a public life that had been obstructed.

Women and gender-queer people were not bystanders in this movement. Student leader Neha Bora, who uses they/them pronouns, is president of the All India Students Association, the student wing of the Liberation faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist). DW reported that Bora had dodged police on the streets, climbed over barricades and shouted from inside a detention vehicle. The 29-year-old writer Gurmehar Kaur is also a member of the Indian Youth Congress, the youth wing of the Indian National Congress. She said resources within the party could provide legal assistance and a safety network for protesters with different political leanings. Her day often began with exercise or yoga and often ended with Indian Youth Congress lawyers securing her release from police detention.

For them, appearing on camera and taking to the streets carried different risks. Kaur said male colleagues were often "rather flattered" when photos of them appeared in the media, while for her, attracting attention "amounted to death threats, rape threats, humiliation and abuse." Natt put it this way: "If a woman leads a protest, her sexuality is the first thing to be attacked."

This sexualized humiliation appeared both on the streets and online. Social media circulated photos of female protesters with their clothing disheveled during clashes with police, as well as AI-generated sexualized images that spliced photos of women protesters into protest scenes. DW did not attribute the images to government organizations, but they surfaced alongside arrests and street confrontations, highlighting the cost women pay for acting in public.

Delhi officials denied having used brute force against women protesters and said they had been treated with "dignity." Bora countered that there were very few female officers able to handle women protesters even though they were facing large numbers of them; she also said: "Several women protesters came to protect me and stop me from being detained." The material described by DW did not include findings from an independent investigation, so the allegations cannot be presented as a confirmed systemic problem; nor can an official denial substitute for an independent, verifiable investigation. The parties to the dispute had unequal access to information: the side controlling police and institutional resources was able to issue an official denial directly, while those bearing the consequences of detention, image manipulation and having their bodies become objects of public debate struggled to verify the claims independently.

Activist Kavita Krishnan publicly challenged the positioning of women solely as "victims." She said the "protect daughters" formula was no longer sufficient to respond to this generation's demands; this was a very specific demand: to see women as "political and free people." "Save Daughters, Educate Daughters" (Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao) was the flagship program launched by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2015. Her criticism targeted a political framework in which, once women were first placed in the protected position of "daughters," it was difficult to recognize them at the same time as political actors capable of assessing risks, organizing their peers and challenging policy.

After a 17-year-old girl was gang-raped in New Delhi in late September, women and LGBTQ+ communities demanded greater autonomy, putting gender safety back in the spotlight. Citing data from India's National Crime Records Bureau, DW said 441,534 crimes against women were registered in 2024, an average of 1,210 a day; experts said official statistics capture only part of gender-based violence. These figures are not statistics on cases arising from the CJP protests, but they constitute part of the broader social context for this struggle.

Krishnan also placed the CJP protests within a broader wave of opposition to "civilizational nationalism," or "cultural nationalism." She argued that this kind of politics uses protective language such as "daughters, family and tradition" to fuel hostility toward minority groups, migrants and transgender people; she specifically cited Trump, Orban and Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) as using similar rhetoric. This was her own political judgment and does not mean that different national systems can be equated, but it raises a question that needs to be asked: how can protective language serve at once as a threshold of belonging and a political tool for excluding minority groups.

The day after detention, people continued to take to the streets. Bora shouted from a detention vehicle, while Kaur moved back and forth between everyday life and police detention. Kaur said: "Show up, put your body at risk."