‘We Love You, Delhi Police’: An Inside View Of CJP’s Jantar Mantar Protest

Delhi has witnessed countless protests since Independence. As the capital of the world's largest democracy, it has long served as the stage where public anger, political ambition and popular movements converge under the gaze of both national and international media. At the heart of this tradition stands Jantar Mantar, just a few kilometres from Parliament, a site that has earned a reputation for unsettling governments and amplifying voices that might otherwise go unheard.

More than a decade ago, as a journalist, I stood here and watched activist Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement gather momentum. What began as a protest against graft soon evolved into a political force that reshaped India's electoral landscape. The movement not only gave birth to the Aam Aadmi Party under Arvind Kejriwal but also created a political climate that helped the BJP emerge as the principal beneficiary of the public anger against the incumbent Congress-led government. Within a few years, Congress had lost power in both Delhi and at the Centre.

Jantar Mantar is where ordinary protests come seeking extraordinary outcomes. Everyone who gathers here hopes to capture the public imagination and make those in power take notice.

This is why, a decade and a half after the Anna movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, founded by Abhijit Dipke, is attempting to tap a similar public mood against the incumbent BJP government, the political force that ultimately emerged as one of the key beneficiaries of the anti-corruption wave unleashed by Anna Hazare.

Dipke, however, is careful to avoid drawing comparisons with that earlier moment. The Anna movement brought together an unusual coalition of opposition leaders, retired bureaucrats, spiritual figures and civil society activists on a single platform. Their presence gave the agitation a legitimacy and moral weight that made the government of the day increasingly uneasy.

The context today is different. Unlike the Congress, which was politically weakened during the Anna movement and later collapsed under the weight of its own missteps, the BJP enters this phase with a strong cadre base and a sharper ability to turn the charge of corruption back on its opponents, while also framing them as aligned with narratives it sees as contrary to national interest.

The CJP’s follower base has been built almost overnight online, driven by a sharp digital strategy that has tapped into youth anger over alleged irregularities and paper leak accusations linked to the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET-UG), conducted on May 3 this year. Their demand for the Education Minister’s resignation is, however, overtly political.

Dissent, the Gen Z way

If Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement was driven largely by millennials, the Cockroach movement, as its members call themselves, appears to draw its energy from Generation Z, a cohort that is digital native, more rights-conscious, and often defined by its rejection of millennial workplace norms. Yet despite the generational gap, the tactics feel familiar. The emphasis on peaceful protest, including demonstrators offering flowers to police officers, evokes a sense of déjà vu from the Anna movement, which drew on Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. Many historians argue that this tradition has helped India avoid cycles of violent overthrow seen in parts of South Asia, where political transitions have at times descended into upheaval.

Saturday ( May 20) was the second day of the movement, and responding to feedback from protesters; the demonstration saw improved arrangements. A proper stage was set up, complete with speakers and a backdrop. Volunteers and security personnel with badges moved through the crowd, lending the gathering a more structured feel. Whatever the movement was becoming, it was clearly intent on looking more enduring than a fleeting online mobilisation.

There were transgender persons, elderly Hindus, Muslim students and Dalit rights activists standing shoulder to shoulder, listening as speakers took the stage. Conversations moved easily across subjects, from recent electoral outcomes in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam to broader debates on the US-Iran conflict and the state of the economy.

Delhi’s June heat can test even the most resilient. In over 40 degrees, a five-year-old holding a placard that read “I am a cockroach and I am keeping democracy alive” offered a striking, if unexpected, moment of resolve.

The Influencers in action

If there was one unmistakable feature of this protest, it was the creator economy in action. YouTubers and content creators were everywhere, weaving through the crowd with phones and tripods, livestreaming speeches and narrating events to their own audiences in real time. Nearly everyone seemed to be recording someone else, phones angled for a reel rather than a record, each hoping to capture the ten-second clip that might travel furthest. India’s influencer ecosystem is among the fastest growing globally, fuelled by more than 900 million internet users. Whether the CJP can convert this online visibility into sustained on-ground support remains to be seen.

Curiously, mainstream television was largely absent, even as creators documented the protest from every angle. TV crews were few and far between. Several protesters said they felt the movement was not receiving the attention it deserved from traditional news channels. Ironically, the Anna movement, according to many media critics, was itself a product of television’s news cycle, with most channels deploying crews first at Jantar Mantar and later at Ramlila Ground as the protests grew in scale.

Editors at television networks would likely view the complaint differently. For them, a movement that begins on social media still seeking validation from traditional media is less an irony and more a reminder of television’s continuing reach in shaping political narratives in India.

Rebels need a cause and funding

Sustaining a sit-in like this, night after night, costs money that nobody at the protest could clearly account for. Past movements at this scale survived as long as they did partly because someone, somewhere, was paying for the food, the tents, the water tankers, the loudspeakers. Whether the CJP has the funds to keep that going for weeks together remains an open question.

Throughout the day, volunteers moved through the crowd distributing water bottles and bananas. Among them was a Delhi University professor recognisable from the first protest on June 6, who had shown up again with bottles of water and packets of biscuits, quietly handing them to protesters who had been standing for hours.

Ashwameet Gautam, a 14-year-old student and political content creator from Lucknow who has built a following speaking on caste and related issues, was part of the protest. Gautam held a copy of Jyotirao Phule’s Gulamgiri, a nineteenth-century text on caste and emancipation. “I want to tell NEET students, you just study, we are here for you,” he said. “Unless we don’t protest, how will things change for better?” he asked. For him, and for many in that crowd, this had stopped being about just one minister or one exam.

That ambiguity sits at the heart of CJP’s challenge: is this a protest about NEET, about institutional corruption, about one minister’s resignation, or, as some opposition voices have quietly suggested, a proxy fight against the ruling BJP's brand of politics? Rather than answer it directly, Dipke has at times turned that question back on the audience.

“Has Hindu-Muslim politics helped you?” he asked the crowd at one point, going on to argue that communal politics had done nothing to stop paper leaks.

The 2019 anti-CAA sit-ins, the years-long farm-law protests, the outrage cycles after Hathras and protests in the wake of countless paper leaks before this one, all drew large crowds at their peak. However, most of them eventually lost momentum without denting the BJP’s popularity with the electorate. Whether the CJP becomes an exception or simply the latest entry on that list is the real subtext of every chant at Jantar Mantar.

The presence of climate activist Sonam Wangchuk from the first day of the protest has, however, added a political charge to the narrative. For supporters of the BJP, it has become grounds to allege that Dipke is acting as a proxy for opposition parties, and that it may only be a matter of time before formal alliances emerge. Wangchuk himself has been at odds with the Centre, having previously demanded statehood for Ladakh and the inclusion of the region under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.

On Saturday, Wangchuk laid flowers before photographs of examination aspirants who had died by suicide, before turning to the crowd with a politically charged remark. “Simply banging plates will not solve anything,” he said, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal during the Covid-19 pandemic for citizens to show solidarity with health workers by clapping and banging utensils from their balconies.

Wangchuk used the stage to set a deadline for an indefinite hunger strike beginning June 27, if the government continued to refuse accountability for what he called the failures of the education system. 

Discreet Policing Control

Governments dealing with protests often walk a narrow line, weighing the constitutional right to dissent against the risk of allowing a mobilisation to grow into something harder to contain. Permissions for the gathering had been granted until 5 pm, after which authorities were expected to enforce the agreed terms.

As the deadline neared, Dipke announced that the movement was ready for a 'jail bharo andolan', signalling a willingness to court arrest rather than step down. Police soon asked him to vacate the site, citing violation of the permission conditions as well as the framework laid down by the Supreme Court’s 2018 guidelines governing demonstrations at Jantar Mantar.

As evening set in, the crowd began to thin, though the police presence only increased. Cameras continued to track the site throughout. Rather than moving in, officers relied on repeated public address announcements declaring the gathering unlawful once the deadline had passed.

The approach was widely read as calibrated, aimed at establishing illegality on record without escalating into a lathi charge or mass arrests that many onlookers had anticipated. Such a move, critics noted, could have handed the CJP’s youth-driven mobilisation an immediate political boost.

The CJP alleged that access to drinking water was restricted after the 5 pm deadline and that lighting around the site was briefly switched off. Dipke appealed through microphones for the lights to be restored, but the crowd’s response was not one of anger. Instead, chants of “Delhi Police, paani do” filled the air. When water supplies and electricity were later restored, the mood shifted again, this time to “We love you Delhi Police.”

By nightfall, there was still no sign of dispersal. Protesters unrolled dupattas and shawls directly on the road, preparing for a long sit-in.

At a nearby chai stall, the conversation drifted to a couplet painted on one of the hand-written hoardings near the barricades: har shaakh pe ullu baitha hai, anjaam-e-gulistan kya hoga (Owl upon every branch — what fate awaits the garden?).

It soon turned to a more practical question: how long can such protests sustain themselves on little more than resolve and water bottles. Some drew comparisons with the farmers’ agitation at Delhi’s borders, which stretched beyond a year.

As the protest entered its third day, it remained, for now, an open-ended sit-in, with organisers seeking an alternative venue to continue the agitation.