The Muscle India Forgot

A movement in India has chosen the cockroach as its emblem, and it did not choose the word. A judge did. In a Supreme Court hearing, the Chief Justice of India said there were youngsters like cockroaches who get no employment and have no place in any profession, who become media and social-media and activists and then start attacking everyone. He later said he had meant only those who reach the professions on fake degrees, but the first word was the one that travelled. The insult came from the bench that is meant to be the custodian of their rights, and a generation took the slur and made it a name. A cockroach, after all, is what survives. It is what outlasts the boot and the poison, what is still there in the morning after everything built to end it has been tried.¹

What followed was not a campaign anyone planned. A single satirical post asking what would happen if all the cockroaches came together became, within days, an account with more followers than either of the country’s largest parties, and then it moved off the phone and onto the ground at Jantar Mantar, the stretch of central Delhi the state keeps for the protests it allows, where young people in cockroach masks gathered to demand the education minister resign over an exam system that keeps failing them. The energy kept growing because the grievances behind it are real and specific. A degree that ends in no work, in a country where close to forty percent of graduates under twenty-five cannot find a job. Names vanishing from the electoral rolls before a vote, by the million. News channels that read the government’s lines back to the public as triumph. Elected representatives who switch sides the moment the price is right, until there is no one left worth voting for. And presiding over all of it, the same bench that supplied the insult, the judiciary whose impartiality the young no longer trust.²

I am sympathetic to this. I have spent the last while writing a series, soon to be published here, about what one of India’s states could be in 2040, and the hardest part of that work is not the imagining. It is getting anyone to believe the imagining is worth doing at all, in a public life organised almost entirely around grievance. So when a few hundred thousand young people organise themselves around the refusal to disappear, I pay attention. The question I keep coming back to is not whether the anger is justified. It plainly is. The question is what happens to it next. And the answer, I think, is something this country has done before, with extraordinary success, and has since let itself forget how to do: it imagined the India it wanted in detail, and then worked backward to build it. That older discipline is available again, to this movement and to anyone near it, and most of this essay is about how to pick it up.

Here is the uncomfortable thing history says about anger. On its own, it has a short half-life, and the people it is aimed at know this better than anyone. The settled craft of any entrenched establishment is patience. It does not need to win the argument. It needs to wait. Deflect, concede a symbol, change the subject, let a news cycle pass, and the heat dissipates on its own, because outrage is a finite tank and burning it down is exactly what it is built to do. Most movements do not lose. They cool. The boot does not have to come back down if the swarm scatters by itself.

So the real opponent is not a politician or a channel. It is time, and the way a finite supply of anger drains against an opponent who has more of it. Which means the decisive question for anyone in that Delhi street is a strange one to ask in the middle of a protest: what is the energy for? What does it compound into, instead of burning down?

The discipline the founders had

India has answered this question before, in a moment of genuine crisis.

Between December 1946 and November 1949, a few hundred people sat in a hall in Delhi and argued about a country that did not yet exist. They did this while the country they were imagining was being torn in half. Partition was not an abstraction to them. It was happening in the next room, in trains arriving full of the dead, in a million people killed and more than ten million moved. The Constituent Assembly had every reason to be a body consumed by emergency, by reaction, by the grievance of the moment, and the moment’s grievances were as large as any in the century.³

It did something else. It imagined forward. It asked what kind of republic should exist in twenty and fifty years, and then it reasoned backward into the institutions that would have to be built to get there. Universal adult franchise in a country that was overwhelmingly poor and unlettered, when no comparable society had dared it. A secular state in the immediate aftermath of religious slaughter. Fundamental rights, an independent judiciary, a federal structure designed to hold extraordinary diversity together. None of these were extrapolations from 1947. If you had extrapolated from 1947 you would have built a much smaller and more frightened country. They were backcasts from a future the framers chose to believe in and then worked to make reachable.⁴

It is easy to let “the framers” stay an abstraction, so look at one of the people in that hall. Bhimrao Ambedkar had been born into a caste the country he was about to help design treated as untouchable. As a boy he was kept from the school water tap and allowed to drink only when a peon was free to pour for him, and on the days there was no peon there was no water.⁵ The man who grew out of that did something audacious. In 1947, before the constitution existed, he handed the Assembly a document called States and Minorities. He could have submitted a list of demands. Instead, in his own words, he drafted his ideas “in the form of Articles of the Constitution”: a full draft constitution in miniature, with a preamble and numbered articles spelling out the rights of citizens, written as though the republic were already real.⁶ He had imagined the whole thing forward. Then he worked it backward into the actual text, clause by clause, until the country that had once refused him a cup of water carried this sentence in its supreme law: untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden.

Or look at Dakshayani Velayudhan, the only Dalit woman in the Assembly, born into a Pulaya family in Cochin, a community Kerala’s own caste order had branded untouchable. She did not treat the work as legal drafting. On one of the Assembly’s earliest days, debating what the whole exercise was even for, she told the room that a constituent assembly does not only frame a constitution, it gives the people a new framework of life. And she warned that safeguards written on paper would mean nothing without the moral safeguard that actually protects the people at the bottom.⁷ She was describing, from the floor, the difference between a document and a future, and insisting the Assembly was there to build the second.

And they did not invent it all in three years. They were drawing on decades of prior imagining: the Nehru Report of 1928, the Karachi Resolution of 1931, the long argument of the freedom movement about what freedom was actually for. The Assembly was the synthesis stage of an imagination exercise that had been running, bottom up and contested, for a generation.⁸

This is a civic muscle, and India once had it in unusual strength. The country was, for a while, in the habit of imagining itself forward and then asking what the present would have to do to deserve that future. The muscle has atrophied. Public life now runs almost entirely the other way: it extrapolates from the present, or it reacts to it. The argument is always about what just happened, who is to blame, what the other side did. The horizon has shrunk to the next election and then to the next news cycle and then to the next post. A politics that can only react is a politics the patient will always outlast, because reaction is precisely the thing that burns itself out.

Why a horizon changes the physics

Put something larger than yourself in front of the energy and its physics change.

This is the part that matters for a movement worried, rightly, about burning out. Anger pointed only at what is wrong is a tank you drain. Anger harnessed to a vision of what could be right is something else, because every step toward the vision returns more than it costs. You can see the difference in how people behave. A person protesting a wrong shows up until they are tired or distracted or defeated. A person building something they can picture shows up because the thing is not finished, and the picture pulls. The first runs on a fixed supply. The second runs on a renewable one.

This is not a softening of the anger. It is its amplification. The grievance does not go away; it gets a destination, and a destination is what lets it survive contact with the establishment’s patience. You cannot wait out people who are building, because they are not waiting on you. They have stopped asking the people they are angry at for permission and started asking each other what to make.

The method that does this has three moves, and they are the same three the framers used. Imagine the future concretely. Synthesise the many private imaginings into a shared one. Then walk it backward into the present until it becomes a list of things to do this year.⁹

The method, for the people doing the imagining

The movement has already said its next step is to go back to its millions of members and ask them what they want, because the one thing every existing party stopped doing was listening to the young. That instinct is exactly right. What you get back, though, depends entirely on what you ask. Ask people what they are angry about and you will get a longer list of grievances, which is the fuel you already have. Ask them what they want the country to be, in enough detail that you could work backward from the answer, and you start building the thing the grievances are for. If you are in this movement, here is the exercise, stripped to what works.

Imagine concretely, and personally. Not a slogan, not a manifesto line. A morning. It is 2040 and you wake up in your own town. Walk through one ordinary day. What is school like for the children on your street, and what does it cost their parents? What work do people your age do, and does it leave them with dignity or with debt? What is in the river, what is in the air, how do neighbours of different faiths and castes treat each other at the bus stop? The specific beats the grand every time, because you cannot backcast from a slogan but you can backcast from a Tuesday.

Synthesise upward. A household’s vision joins a street’s, a street’s joins a ward’s, a ward’s joins a district’s. Somewhere in that aggregation the shared dreams surface: the ninety percent who want world-class schooling that does not bankrupt a family, the clean river that turns up in every third answer, the politics that has stopped sorting people by what they pray to. This stage does something else quietly. It reveals leaders. The people who can hold a hundred neighbours’ visions in their head and articulate one that all hundred recognise are exactly the people a movement needs, and this exercise finds them by what they can do rather than by who they know. The aggregation that would have taken the framers years of committee work can now be done in days, because we have tools that read ten thousand answers and find the pattern. That is the one place where the technology I work on earns its place in this story, and it earns it as a clerk, not as an author.

Walk it back. Take the 2040 you have synthesised and ask the only question that converts a dream into a plan. For that to be true in 2040, what had to be true in 2035? In 2030? What is the first thing that has to happen this year, and who has to do it? This is the move that the outrage cycle never reaches and the framers never skipped. It turns a vision into a roadmap, and a roadmap is something you can hold a representative accountable to, something you can organise a year around, something that does not evaporate when the news moves on.

A tool to start tonight

An essay that told you to imagine and then left you to it would be doing the easy half. So this one comes with the other half attached.

Below is a short imagination exercise you can run tonight, alone or around a kitchen table: a set of questions that take you through the three moves, from the ordinary morning in 2040 back to the first thing to do this year. There is also a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini that turns the model into an interviewer. It will ask you the questions one at a time, follow where your answers lead, and at the end write up your own Vision 2040 and the backcast that reaches it, in language you can share. You can download the questions as a page to print for a household or a chapter meeting where one phone is shared between many people.

And if you want your vision to count toward something larger than your own kitchen, you can send it in. The write-up the exercise produces can go to an inbox set up for exactly this. What arrives there will be read by a person, used only to find the dreams that recur across the country, and never sold or handed to anyone selling anything. The point is the synthesis: to do, at the scale of a movement, what the framers did at the scale of a hall.

I do not know whether this particular movement lasts. Movements built on an emblem and an algorithm are fragile in ways the framers’ was not, and the establishment’s patience is real and tested. But the choice in front of it is clear, and it is the same choice in front of anyone, anywhere, who is angry and right to be.

The creature on the flag

The movement chose its name as an insult, but as biology the choice is sharper than whoever threw it knew. Insects built on a cockroach-like body plan have scuttled across the earth for something close to three hundred million years, since the coal forests of the Carboniferous. Those earliest ancestors were not quite cockroaches. They were the common stock from which both the cockroach and the praying mantis would later come. The true cockroach, the kind that would be recognisable in a kitchen today, arrived later, in the age of the dinosaurs, perhaps a hundred and thirty million years ago. The lineage was already old, and already itself, when an asteroid struck the earth sixty-six million years ago and ended the dinosaurs. The roaches walked out of that catastrophe more or less unbothered.¹⁰

It is worth being precise about why, because the reasons are a catalogue of pure endurance. A cockroach will eat almost anything that was once alive: food, paper, glue, hair, the bindings of books. It can go a month without eating at all. Its body is flattened to slide into a crack the width of a coin, and its instinct is to keep as many surfaces as possible pressed against it, which is why it lives in the walls and not in the open. It seals its eggs inside hardened cases that shrug off drought and flood. And in the detail that has horrified schoolchildren for generations, it can live for up to two weeks with its head cut off. It breathes through holes along its body, its blood runs at too low a pressure to bleed out, and a knot of nerves in each segment keeps it upright and moving. Headless, it dies at last not of the wound but of thirst, because it has no mouth with which to drink.¹¹

Even the legend overstates it. The folklore that the cockroach alone would inherit a world emptied by nuclear war is not quite true. It tolerates radiation better than we do, but not better than a flour beetle, and nowhere near a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans that endures a thousand times more. The cockroach is a genius of survival, but survival is the whole of its genius. For hundreds of millions of years it has done one thing with surpassing skill, which is to persist. It endures. It does not build.¹²

With one exception, and the exception is the entire point. Somewhere back in the age of dinosaurs, a single lineage of cockroaches stopped merely surviving. They began to live together, in colonies, and then to construct: mounds taller than a person, ventilated and cooled by design, with chambers where they farm fungus for food. We call them termites and file them under a separate name, but the biology is unambiguous. Termites are cockroaches. They are the one branch of the family that made the leap from enduring the world to building inside it, and it changed them so completely that we no longer recognise them as what they are.¹³

So the emblem holds both futures. A movement can do what the cockroach has always done, survive whatever is done to it, and wait. Or it can do the rarer thing that one branch of that family once did, and begin to build. You can spend the anger, or you can invest it. Spending it feels like action and changes little, and it is what you will be quietly encouraged to do, because it is what burns out. Investing it means deciding what you are actually for, in enough detail that you could walk backward from it to a thing to do on Monday. India has done that before, in one of its darkest hours, and the people who did it were not braver than the ones at Jantar Mantar. They had only remembered how to imagine. The cockroach already knows how to survive. The harder thing, the thing no boot can wait out, is to start building.

Sources

1. On the emblem’s origin: the remark by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, in a Supreme Court hearing on 15 May 2026, that “there are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession… they start attacking everyone,” and his use of the word “parasites”; and his clarification the following day that he had meant those who enter professions on “fake and bogus degrees.” See Al Jazeera, “Cockroach Janata Party: How a top Indian judge’s comment sparked satire and protest,” 20 May 2026 and The Quint on the clarification. On the movement that took the word — founded by Abhijeet Dipke from a single satirical post on 16 May 2026 (“What if all cockroaches come together?”), its Instagram following overtaking that of the country’s largest parties and reaching roughly 22 million within weeks, the blocking of its X account in India on 21 May 2026 (MeitY, under Section 69A of the IT Act, on an Intelligence Bureau input citing a threat to the sovereignty of India) and the takedown of its website on 23 May: see NBC News, CBS News, and Deccan Herald. On the Jantar Mantar gathering of 6 June 2026, where mostly young protesters in cockroach masks demanded the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over exam-system failures: Al Jazeera photo gallery, 6 June 2026.

2. On the grievances the movement runs on: youth unemployment of nearly 40% among graduates under 25 (and roughly 20% for ages 25–29), per Azim Premji University, State of Working India 2026, reported in The Wire; the deletion of voters from West Bengal’s electoral rolls under the Special Intensive Revision, totalling some 9.1 million since October 2025 (with the characterisation that legitimate voters were wrongly purged being a serious and widely reported allegation rather than a settled finding), see The Diplomat and Special Intensive Revision; and the movement’s five-point manifesto (ending post-retirement posts for judges; treating vote deletion as a grave offence; 50% representation for women in Parliament; an independent media free of broadcaster–government capture; and a 20-year ban on political defection), summarised in NBC News. The alignment of mainstream broadcast media with the ruling party and the hollowing-out of the opposition through induced defections are longstanding and widely documented features of the present Indian political landscape.

3. On Partition’s human toll and its concurrence with the Constituent Assembly’s work, and the Assembly’s sittings from 9 December 1946 to 26 November 1949: Constituent Assembly of India and the framing timeline, constitutionofindia.net [citation pending: specific debate-volume references].

4. On the Objectives Resolution (moved by Nehru, December 1946), universal adult franchise, the secular and federal design, and fundamental rights as forward commitments rather than extrapolations: constitutionofindia.net, the Objectives Resolution and the framing of Parts III–IV [citation pending: specific references].

5. On Ambedkar’s boyhood exclusion from the school water supply: B.R. Ambedkar, Waiting for a Visa (autobiographical notes, c. 1935–36; published posthumously 1990, People’s Education Society), full text at franpritchett.com. Verified against the primary text: “If the peon was not available I had to go without water. The situation can be summed up in the statement—no peon, no water.”

6. On States and Minorities (1947), Ambedkar’s draft constitution-in-miniature submitted to the Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Working Committee of the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation: States and Minorities, Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1947), constitutionofindia.net; reprinted in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1. Verified against the primary text: Ambedkar writes that “Instead of setting out my ideas in general terms, I have drafted the Memorandum in the form of Articles of the Constitution,” with a “Proposed Preamble” and numbered Articles, Sections and Clauses. On the abolition of untouchability, the wording quoted is Article 17 of the Constitution of India (adopted as Draft Article 11, 29 November 1948), verified verbatim: “‘Untouchability’ is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden.”

7. On Dakshayani Velayudhan — the only Dalit woman in the Constituent Assembly, from a Pulaya family in Cochin: Constituent Assembly Debates, 19 December 1946, constitutionofindia.net. Verified verbatim against the official transcript: “I submit that a Constituent Assembly not only frames a constitution, but also gives the people a new framework of life,” and “It is the moral safeguard that gives real protection to the underdogs of this country.” [Optional, pending sourcing if added back: biographical specifics such as a dress-restriction or “first to wear an upper cloth” detail — not yet sourced, deliberately omitted from the body.]

8. On the prior decades of imagining the Assembly synthesised — the Nehru Report (1928) and the Karachi Resolution on Fundamental Rights and Economic Policy (1931): [citation pending: primary and standard secondary sources].

9. On backcasting as a method (defining a desirable future and reasoning backward to the steps required), as distinct from forecasting or extrapolation, and on its use in citizen-led visioning: [citation pending: a standard backcasting reference, e.g. Robinson (1990) or a citizen-visioning case]. This essay’s three-move framing (imagine, synthesise, backcast) draws on the same approach the author takes in a series on Kerala in 2040, forthcoming on this site.

10. On the antiquity of cockroaches: cockroach-like “roachoids” appear in the Carboniferous (~300–320 million years ago) but are a stem group ancestral to both cockroaches and mantises, not true cockroaches; crown-group (modern) cockroaches date to the Early Cretaceous, roughly 125–140 million years ago, and survived the end-Cretaceous (K-Pg) extinction that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. See Entomological Society of America / Entomology Today, “Old, But Not That Old: Debunking the Myth of Ancient Cockroaches” and The Conversation, “How did cockroaches survive the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs?”.

11. On the survival traits — generalist diet, survival for roughly a month without food, flattened body and thigmotaxis (crevice-seeking), drought- and flood-resistant egg cases (oothecae), and survival for up to two weeks after decapitation via an open circulatory system, spiracle-based breathing, and segmental nerve ganglia (death following from dehydration): Cockroach, Wikipedia and Scientific American, “Fact or Fiction?: A Cockroach Can Live without Its Head”.

12. On radiation tolerance: cockroaches withstand roughly 6 to 15 times the radiation dose lethal to humans, but are not exceptional among insects (flour beetles tolerate more), and far below the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which survives on the order of a thousand times more; the “sole survivor of nuclear war” image is folklore. See University of Florida Entomology, “Can Cockroaches Survive a Nuclear Bomb?” and Deinococcus radiodurans, Wikipedia.

13. On termites being nested within cockroaches (Blattodea) — eusocial cockroaches descended from a wood-feeding cockroach ancestor related to the genus Cryptocercus, with the former order Isoptera demoted to an epifamily within Blattodea: Inward, Beccaloni & Eggleton (2007), “Death of an order: a comprehensive molecular phylogenetic study confirms that termites are eusocial cockroaches,” Biology Letters; confirmed by Bourguignon et al. (2018), Proceedings of the Royal Society B.