What India’s ‘Cockroach’ protests reveal about digital authoritarianism

A youth movement that began as a joke about a Chief Justice comparing unemployed graduates to cockroaches grew into months of protest against India's education system, exam corruption, and unemployment under Narendra Modi's government. The Cockroach Janata Party notched a win in July when the education minister resigned after a 36-day sit-in, and in September the Supreme Court ordered more than 100 FIRs from the protests closed, with the government also promising compensation to families of exam aspirants who died by suicide.

But alongside the water cannons and tear gas at the July 20 march came something quieter: Delhi Police deployed facial-recognition software called Ikshana that flagged 2,873 people as having criminal records. A follow-up investigation found at least 25 of those flagged, including people accused of murder and rape, were already sitting in jail when the system claimed to have spotted them at the protest.

The government still reserved the right to file fresh cases against nearly 2,900 people with existing records who attended, even as the mass FIRs were withdrawn. A petition challenging the use of that surveillance technology, built originally to find missing children, is now before the Supreme Court.

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