The new language of youth outrage in West Bengal

The first signs emerged hundreds of kilometres away from Kolkata. Thousands of young Indians began calling themselves cockroaches this summer—not as an insult, but as a political identity.

What began as a careless, disparaging remark by the CJI, Justice Surya Kant, quickly evolved into a digital expression of frustration over unemployment, competitive examinations and shrinking opportunities—the Cockroach Janata Party. Whether the movement survives beyond its viral moment remains beside the point. The reality is, it has reignited an old question with a new urgency: how does India’s youth choose to express its anger today?

However, this question becomes particularly intriguing in West Bengal itself.

For decades, Bengal has cultivated an image of being India’s political conscience and intellectual nerve centre. Student movements have shaped governments, challenged authority and often redefined public discourse. From the nationalist movement during colonial rule to the Food Movement of the 1960s, from the Naxalite uprising to Singur, Nandigram and the Hok Kolorob protests, young people have repeatedly occupied the centre of Bengal’s political imagination and all the theatrics surrounding it.

Yet, as digitally driven youth movements emerge elsewhere in the country, one question quietly comes to the spotlight—

Has the political language of Bengali youth changed?

Or are we asking the wrong question altogether?

The temptation is to compare Bengal with the rest of India, but perhaps the comparison itself would melt down into an oversimplification of a much bigger issue.

Unlike many contemporary youth movements that emerge around a single cause before gathering political support, Bengal has culturally (now more than ever) witnessed a different trajectory. Student politics has been intertwined with organised political parties, campus unions and ideological traditions and their legacies. Participation has often arrived through institutions rather than spontaneous collective responses. That history, however, tells us only about its positioning.

It tells us little about where young people stand today. Recent reporting from campuses across the state suggests that students increasingly speak about unemployment, delayed recruitment, migration, the brain drain, mental health and a paralysed academic infrastructure alongside questions of politics.

This brings us to look at how earlier generations are often remembered through ideological movements that were triggered by a lack of opportunities. Today’s students appear equally concerned, but somehow coupled with a sense of economic uncertainty and the disillusioned search for opportunity. The disillusionment and varied strands of reaction are reflected in the loud applause for comedian Samay Raina’s ''every revolution is a tiny joke'', a line in contradiction to George Orwell’s “every joke is a tiny revolution, and the revolution must never stop”. He owns up to his stance on stage, saying that it is wise enough to fight only when the fight is fair, or else it is better to leave for survival. The applause in and outside the media from among his followers signifies a different trend. However, another strand of the same Gen Z seems to stay awake through nights of hunger strike at Jantar Mantar under an open sky, in search of answers. Answers to questions of the same survival Raina seems to point to. The fight does not seem fair here either, nor was it back in the times of the Naxalite Revolution of the 1960s. However, the youth do not seem to completely erase their stand and run away.

West Bengal in recent times, however, has seen similar kinds of political concerns, and whether these concerns have simply replaced political mobilisation or reshaped political practice is precisely the question this report seeks to examine.

It is not targeted at examining whether Bengal’s youth have become apolitical; they never were, and culturally are not in a position to be so anytime soon. Instead, this report asks whether the forms, priorities and expressions of youth politics in Bengal are undergoing a transition—one that may not be immediately visible through conventional measures of political participation and associations. The question is not about political awareness; it is about how that awareness exactly translates into politically independent thought among the Bengal Gen Z population.

History offers reasons to ask these questions.

Few regions have produced as many defining moments of youth-led mobilisation as Bengal.

Students stood at the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle, participated in the Food Movement demanding equitable distribution during periods of scarcity, and later became central actors in the Naxalite movement that fundamentally altered the state's political landscape, again an exemplary memory of independent thought and action. Decades later, students and young citizens once again became visible during the Singur and Nandigram land acquisition protests and then the Hok Kolorob movement. The R.G. Kar rape incident and, more recently, the protests against attempts to uproot hawkers from railway premises demonstrated how university campuses could still become sites of collective resistance around questions of governance and institutional accountability.

However, each of these moments reflected different political contexts. Yet they shared one common feature. Young people did not merely respond to politics; they shaped it.

in the context of youth activism across Bangladesh in recent times. He also highlights that coming from a family with a legacy of freedom fighters has given him the privilege of developing a keen eye to understand what revolution truly means. He believes “it neither has a single starting point nor a well-defined end”; rather, it is the most untainted, innocent act and the most profound experience of human life.

The question, then, is whether today’s generation continues to experience politics in similar ways.

Or whether the concerns that dominate youth conversations have shifted elsewhere, guarded by some invisible force?

That shift—if it exists—may not necessarily indicate political disengagement, but instead reflect changing aspirations, economic pressures, digital forms of participation or altered relationships with traditional political organisations and affiliation politics. We live in times when campus politics has reduced itself to earning a reputation for alleged back-door admissions in lieu of money. A time when most regular college unions intimidate rather than engage in meaningful discussions that open doors for independent thought among students. This itself raises multiple questions on both ends: when does a young fresher in an educational institution learn to think freely, without any fear? And finally, does he know whom to fear?

A state economically suffering and socially trapped between contradictions of right and wrong, with media under heavy scrutiny, shall struggle to gather confidence. But when this itself melts down into a sense of fear against thinking and expressing freely, it is, somewhere, a fracture that has yet not seen any prominent cracks.

Conclusion

History remembers Bengal for the movements its youth independently led. The more pressing question today is not whether young people are still angry—but whether history will recognise the language in which that anger is now being spoken. The comparison with movements elsewhere in India, including the Cockroach Janata Party, is therefore about how a generation chooses to express dissent through a transition in its political grammar.