Tryst with hyperpolitics: CJP won’t determine Gen Z’s political future, how opposition parties harness its energy will

In 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith, then US ambassador to India, wrote to President Kennedy arguing that politics is not 'the art of the possible' but rather 'consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable'. With Lutyens' Delhi still emerging from a fortnight of protest-and-crackdown, the aftertaste is certainly bitter enough. Galbraith's definition, however, presupposes someone willing to choose, and options on a ballot to choose between.

Opposition parties now mobilising against EC, with a rally planned for Nov 1, fit the bill well enough. Whatever one thinks of them, theirs is the familiar case to make - we are the least bad option; pick us. It's not quite so with the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). It is amorphous, with its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, last week reiterating his insistence that it remains 'an independent pressure group'.

Indeed, CJP does not seem to have any form of legal existence as a body at all even as its social media handles boast millions of followers. Most of the reactions to the CJP phenomenon have eschewed an attempt to genuinely understand it, and have fallen, instead, into one of the familiar camps. Upon asking someone what they think of 'all this', one is usually met either with a jaundiced eye and vague grumblings about a foreign hand or a sort of gawping, wide-eyed celebration of the youthful, 'Bob Dylan' vitality of it all.


The key to a more nuanced understanding might lie in a phenomenon recently observed by Belgian historian and political theorist Anton Jager: hyperpolitics, that is, 'extreme politicisation without political consequences'. He contrasts this with the 'mass politics' of the greater part of the 20th c., an era during which grand political ideologies - communism, fascism, liberalism - battled it out for supremacy, each supported by a thick network of permanent institutions: clubs, associations, trades unions, church groups, and the like.

The present 'hyperpolitical' moment in the West, by contrast, though marked by the extreme polarisation of public life along political, racial and gender lines, and frequent outbursts of political rage, lacks the thick network of social institutions that marked the earlier age. Jager's examples range from the protests that followed George Floyd's killing in the US in 2020 to the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement in France, a 2018-20 mobilisation of remarkable scale that, in his words, 'explicitly refused all institutionalisation'.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that CJP marks the coming of 'hyperpolitics' to India. Anybody who has observed party organisational work at close quarters will tell you that it is deeply unglamorous. Voters must be canvassed, booth-level workers organised, and success ultimately tested by the brutally objective metrics of votes and seats.

CJP offers a different model. It does not see itself as a vehicle to reshape society on an ideological pattern, but appears to be a loose container and channel to direct fleeting moments of youth and student anger. When an issue gathers enough traction in the press or on social media, and if it appears to catch the fancy of the 'leadership', the word goes out online and the protest is organised.

Its victories are individual scalps, rather than political settlements. Education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned in July. But, by August, the movement was back on the streets complaining that GoI had not kept its other promises. With no permanent cadre or institutional base, there is little way to sustain pressure. It is precisely the sort of politics that Jager describes as 'low commitment, low cost' (that is, in the sense of low barriers to entering or exiting the movement - as opposed to joining or leaving the cadre of an established party - not in terms of personal costs to protesters).

For the actual turnout at protests, CJP owes a great deal to traditional political outfits, which many of its adherents love to disdain. Much of the staying power of the protests against EC comes from parties of the INDIA bloc. Any observer of the earlier protests following the NEET paper leak couldn't fail to note that much of the actual manpower and organisational backbone were supplied by the student wings of the Left parties - complete with almost charmingly quaint SFI posters decrying the 'nijikaran' and 'bazaarikaran' of education.

Ultimately, therefore, the political future of 'Gen Z' is likely to be determined not by Cockroach Janta 'Party' but by how the more traditional political formations harness its energy. Jager concludes that a greater degree of political institutionalisation is the only alternative to a permanent state of 'impotent volatility'. If Jager is right, then all parties to the standoff have homework.

CJP must decide whether it is anything more than a passing mood. Opposition parties must decide whether and how they can co-opt this anger. And, above all, the institutions of government - which, one might charitably say, have experienced what Tocqueville called 'the gradual extinction of the love and respect that used to attach to power' - must reflect on how they might win these back. Until then, Galbraith's choice is all that remains.