Image credit: Photo taken by Shaheen Abdulla, July 2026. Photo used with permission.

Since 2014, India has been governed by Hindutva ethnonationalism, intensifying decades of structural marginalization of Muslims through state-sanctioned impunity and systematic victimization. This trajectory found its mass expression in 2019, when Muslim students led protests, including months-long roadblocks, against the Citizenship Amendment Act until state brutality and the pandemic dismantled the protests, a crackdown that resulted in a pogrom in the national capital and continues to incarcerate those who stood at its forefront. This history of erasure and survival makes the recent emergence of the “Cockroach Janta Party”, initially considered a satirical response and now dubbed as a change-making youth-led movement, all the more revealing. What quickly garnered widespread appeal as a harmless nuisance has also manufactured ‘the ideal dissenter’: one who contests certain grievances while remaining comfortably embedded within the dominant discourse, and is thus perfectly compatible with the Hindutva ethnonationalist racial order. This dynamic exposes the mechanics of enabler culture, in which dissent is sanctioned so long as it does not threaten the foundational hierarchies of power.

Ever since the current wave of protests began last month at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, in what has been called the “cockroach movement”, I have been thinking of the average Indian Muslim. I wanted to say *Muslim youth* because this moment is being packaged as a Gen Z phenomenon. But does the normative public discourse, which racialises the Muslim community, allow for such a pretence of a pedantic distinction?

Before I proceed further, I will say that in this brief piece I’m not speaking to the oppressor, nor is my purpose to evoke humility or empathy in their enabler mass, or offer an ‘objective analysis’ of the moment. In fact, I swing between being well-agitated and consciously, painfully grounding myself in patience. My critique is not that objectivity is a privilege, it well is, but that what is deemed objective is determined by the oppressor and their enablers; the latter adorning themselves with this privilege as long as its sanctified language of resistance does not threaten the former’s basic footing. I am speaking of those who are never permitted to remain merely a nuisance, never merely “cockroaches”, but who are rendered “grievable puppies” (Modi’s reference to the 2002 Gujarat riots in a 2013 Reuters interview). Should the reader move to dismiss this write-up because of its assertive subjectivity, it is worth noting the substantial scholarship that has dismantled the myth of objectivity and its presumed epistemic superiority. Equally important is the decolonial literature that theorises anger not as a flaw to be overcome, but as a political and epistemic resource of the marginalised. Audre Lorde remains one of the best places to begin.

My concern lies with the collective and individual affect of being an Indian Muslim in contemporary times. More specifically, those who have lived long enough to know this experience in their bones, recognising it immediately when it is about to play out: the feeling of desolation and betrayal; the erasure from key political demands despite being structurally marginalised for decades and systematically killed in the last decade alone; the unrelenting reiteration that if only the Othered learned how to fight from the non-Othered, one might finally be permitted to assert oneself without apology. Yet this illusory permission is predicated on enforcing a dynamic in which one’s safety depends on ensuring that their existence, and its unforgiving truth, do not inconvenience the enabler.

Then come the many demands, including celebrating breadcrumbs as though they were meaningful concessions and quietly accepting selectively targeted repercussions, because calling a spade a spade inconveniences the enabler. Such truths are unsettling because they expose the comfort afforded by systems from which many benefit, even as those same systems oppress, maim and kill the racialised Other. For them, vocalising this equation breaks the façade that the Muslim question is peripheral, reorienting it to an indispensable and central position within any movement of dissent in modern India. The purpose here is therefore to critically interrogate the sanctification of the “ideal dissenter,” unsettling the discursive framework that presents what we are witnessing as, at best, a revolution and, at the very least, a movement.

Let’s use one small example as a case of how the collective enabler dynamic operates. Soon after the minister’s resignation, Anant Patwardhan posted on social media that no matter how powerful the system, the student, the farmer, the oppressed must never commit suicide, and that all it has to do is “just unite and fight!” Imagine a prominent social rights activist saying that in a country with a continually racialised and dehumanised mass. Imagine telling this to Radhika Vemula, a decade after her son’s brutal institutional murder, a tragedy reduced by such statements to mere ‘suicide’—after he endured discrimination and social boycott within the university. Imagine saying it to Saira Banu, a mother who lives with the torturous pain of seeing her teenage son fatally brutalised and living with no justice, but impunity, enacted nine years later. Imagine addressing Afreen Fathima, whose house was razed to the ground to make an example out of her political clarity and courage. Last, but alas not least, imagine saying that to two brilliant PhD scholars, Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, who did, in fact, unite and resist, yet continue to endure unjust incarceration for challenging the very assumption that there exists a level playing field between the Indian state and those it governs. Consider the hollowness of such a claim, its profound irresponsibility, and, above all, its audacity.

But, can all the dissenters of the current mo(ve)ment be categorised as enablers? The erasure of irreducibly political questions marked this moment. Dissent was recast within a nationalist grammar, with Azadi slogans rejected in favour of “Bharat Mata ki Jai,” while the police were treated as though they were a neutral institution. It also reproduced the familiar cycle of seasonal activism and the disproportionate targeting of the unprivileged. Yet amid these continuities, something new emerged: a “new generation” encountering the protest site for the first time. This cohort became widely lauded for its relatability, characterised by convenient dissent: filming reels, waiting to get back to ‘normal life’. This is the mass being referenced as the ‘ideal dissenter’. The depoliticised and temporary character of this dissent must therefore be read against the enduring affective continuity of the Muslim other, whose political reality has remained an enduring inconvenience from the very point at which this piece began. There was also an Instagram reel posted by one of the protesters after the minister’s resignation, declaring that they could now return to a Zara haul. Zara is an international BDS target.

So, where does this leave us and, crucially, what would it mean to step outside the enabler dynamics that currently structure this “cockroach movement”? Such a departure begins with an honest encounter with the accounts of those who bore the cost, mirroring transnational struggles where political prisoners serve as the anticolonial movement’s moral compass rather than footnotes. It has to be marked by a continual reckoning with one’s structural and historical privileges, and understanding this moment as a continual culmination of centuries of colonial and communal erasure. At its bare minimum, it requires cultivating the political and historical understanding to direct one’s anger towards sustained disruptive efforts with an acknowledgement of one’s privilege. When Rhiya Yadav risked herself to let her body become an obstacle to oppression rather than a spectator of it, that act was amongst this moment’s genuine wins. The call here is not to romanticise this sacrifice but to consider what made the state concede, and through which we may understand this moment’s win. The perceived win, the minister’s resignation, was the state’s desperate attempt to curb that actual win, rare moments of enabler zone disruption through risk rather than rhetoric. In doing so, it hoped to contain the catalysing sacrificial solidarity that genuinely threatened its footing.

The political embodiment of sacrifice is not universal or abstract, but differential and physical depending on where one stands in the racial caste order. Each category of people has a threshold before which they are deemed a threat within such an order, and it is in relation to that threshold that one can understand what makes a meaningful sacrifice. The question, then, is whether those afforded greater safety are willing to convert that safety into risk, without leaving the inevitability of the struggle to those positioned at the lowest rungs of the hierarchy. It is precisely this redistribution of risk that transforms what is, at present, merely an elongated mo(ve)ment.