4 min readAug 21, 2026 06:19 AM IST First published on: Aug 21, 2026 at 06:19 AM ISTAfter 36 days at Jantar Mantar, the students wound down, leaving behind a dazed government, its leadership confused, and a police machinery exposed as brutal, lacking the sensitivity the moment required. Watching the boys and girls pack up their belongings and fold their cotton sheets, I thought of Iqbal’s couplet: maana ki teri diid ke qabil nahin huun main/tu mera shauq dekh mira intizar dekh (Granted that I am not worthy of your sight / Look instead at my deep zeal and my endless waiting). As they moved out of Jantar Mantar, their resolve was palpable. This was not the end. They would be back.Every major mass movement in India over the last century has organised itself around a moral authority: Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Anna Hazare. The Cockroach movement inverted this template. Its founder is a young man skilled at communications, not a moral authority. Its closest thing to a unifying figure, Sonam Wangchuk, was an ally who lent his hunger strike to a cause he did not create. What emerged instead is a distributed structure — social-media accounts, campus unions, Left student federations — moving in loose, non-hierarchical coordination. Its organisational logic makes a singular leader almost unnecessary for mobilisation. Having said that, one may eventually be necessary for consolidation.AdvertisementA leaderless structure is hard for the state to decapitate. But diffusion has a cost. Coalitions without a centre struggle to negotiate coherently, to discipline internal tactical disagreement, and to convert a moment of mobilisation into an institution. India Against Corruption, unlike the Aam Aadmi Party it produced, never built that institutional layer. Whether anyone is building an equivalent beneath the Cockroach movement’s surface is the most important open question.The state fields cadre strength, a police and paramilitary apparatus, and financial resources no youth movement funded by small donations can match. When protestors tried to march on Parliament, the police response left over 100 injured and dozens arrested, with the record showing violence running in one direction only. But this did not produce the outcome coercive dominance is supposed to guarantee. Within days, the government conceded the central demand. This separates two things routinely conflated: The state’s capacity to repress and its capacity to prevail. That should disprove any simple story in which coercive machinery automatically wins.A single resignation is a low-cost concession. Systemic exam reform, large-scale job creation, or accountability for the crackdown are much harder fiscally and politically. The distinction that matters most for durability is between a movement fuelled by scandal and one fuelled by structural condition. The NEET leak was a trigger, not a cause. Underneath it sits a labour market that cannot absorb the graduates it produces, an examination and recruitment system widely perceived as corruptible, and a rural unemployment crisis that draws less media attention than its urban counterpart but is arguably deeper and more intractable.AdvertisementThe insult that named the movement landed because it confirmed what a generation already suspected: That the system discounts merit in favour of proximity to power and capital. On this reading, the Cockroach movement is less a single episode than a recurring condition that has, for now, found a name and a shared vocabulary. That gives it a resilience no single leader could provide.you may likeTwo conclusions follow. First, the movement has already outperformed what its lack of centralised leadership would predict. Second, extracting one concession through a low-cost demand is a different task from sustaining pressure on a structural condition with no single remediable trigger. The latter tests whether a leaderless coalition can maintain coherence and pressure over years, a capacity the movement has not yet had occasion to demonstrate.For now, the odds favour the young. The government has shown no evident plan for handling this beyond force: A ham-handed approach paired with the hope that overwhelming pressure will deter the youth is likely to misfire, and appointing a committee whose composition is unpalatable to the protestors solves nothing. What is needed is a return to the drawing board. The alternative is a Union entering a long, dark winter of discontent with a generation it has not learned how to answer.The writer is chairman, Advanced Study Institute of Asia, former Lt Governor, Delhi, and former vice chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia