After nearly 50 days of protests, a 23-day hunger strike and weeks away from their families, the leaders of the movement that forced Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation have a surprisingly simple immediate plan: go home and sleep.
But the rest of their answer is more complicated.
“The only thing we have planned for now is to go home and sleep, meet our families,” said Ashutosh Ranka, spokesperson of the Cockroach Janta Party, after Pradhan’s resignation.
Ranka said the core team had spent nearly two months away from their families and was now dealing with infections and fever after the prolonged protest.
But the break, he made clear, is not the end of the movement.
“Stay rest assured, the cockroaches are just getting started,” Ranka said.
The nearly 50-day protest may have achieved its immediate demand – Pradhan’s resignation – but the leaders of the movement say they now want to push for accountability and structural reforms in India’s education system.
“This has not ended. This is just getting started. We will not stop till the education system of this country is fixed, and that’s a promise,” Ranka said.
He said the movement had already submitted a five-point demand charter to the government and that another round of discussions with ministers had been agreed for a month later.
“The idea is not agitation. The idea is to bring back accountability in the system. The idea is to push structural reforms in the system, and whatever it takes, we’ll do,” Ranka said.
AISA president Neha Bora, who spent 23 days on hunger strike during the protest, also said the movement had achieved more than it had initially set out to do.
“We had set out to take Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, and instead what we also achieved, along with Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, was a young people, a young nation, that has learnt to fight its battles,” she said.
Bora said the movement had brought together anger over paper leaks, unemployment, the National Education Policy, the National Testing Agency and what she described as the wider “bulldozing” of India’s education system.
“This is a country of unemployed people, where even if you have a degree, even if you complete your higher education, it is almost impossible for us to get a job,” she said.
The leaders also rejected the idea that the movement had ended with Pradhan’s resignation or that the Education Minister was merely “collateral damage” in a wider anti-BJP campaign.
“I wouldn’t make the mistake of calling Dharmendra Pradhan collateral damage,” Bora said.
Ranka described the protest as a movement for accountability rather than simply an anti-BJP agitation.
“It is a movement for accountability in the system, which has gone missing in the last few years in this country,” he said.
The next phase could also take the movement beyond street protests. Asked whether the Cockroach Janta Party could become a political party, Ranka did not rule it out.
“The only thing I’ve learnt in my short career in public life and politics is never say no. Never say no,” he said.
So, for now, the protesters are going home to sleep.
But if their own leaders are to be believed, the “cockroaches are just getting started.”
– Ends
Published By:
Sonali Verma
Published On:
Jul 25, 2026 21:49 IST
