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When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.

On July 24, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union education minister – the first such casualty a citizens’ movement has extracted from Narendra Modi’s government in more than a decade in power. It is worth asking why this movement, of all the movements this government has faced down and outlasted, actually worked. Part of the answer lies in something India’s commentariat has been strangely reluctant to say out loud: the “Cockroaches” won partly because they were rude.

Every generation invents its own tongue, and Gen Z’s happens to be foul-mouthed, sarcastic, and entirely uninterested in asking permission to speak that way. The posters at Jantar Mantar, the Instagram reels, the placards outside the education minister’s residence did not read like the earnest, morally solemn banners of an older Indian protest tradition.

They read like group chats – abusive, vulgar, absurd, gleefully profane – and this offended precisely the people it was designed to offend: the self-styled sanskari faithful of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ecosystem, and the Bhakts for whom reverence toward the leader is close to a civic religion. That offence was not a design flaw. It was the whole point, and it deserves to be recognised as one of the reasons this movement won – because vulgarity, deployed with intent against sacred power, has a much older and much more successful political career than most respectable commentary is willing to admit.

An insult that would not stay an insult

The movement’s very name records the strategy in miniature. On May 15, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant, hearing a case about fraudulent legal credentials, remarked from the bench that unemployed young people were “like cockroaches” who, having “no place in the profession,” turned to social media and activism to “attack everyone.” It was meant as a dismissal – the kind of casual contempt from an institution of state that Indians have simply learned to absorb without complaint.

Within a day, Abhijeet Dipke, a student at Boston, had launched a platform for “all the cockroaches out there,” with eligibility criteria listed, only half in jest, as being “unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to rant professionally.” Within seventy-eight hours it had three million followers. Within five days, ten million – more than the ruling party’s own official accounts. An insult meant to shame an entire generation into silence had been converted, in under a week, into a badge nobody could take back.

This is a classic political strategy of reappropriation: a movement seizes an insult coined by those in authority and transforms it into a badge of collective identity. We have seen this historically with terms such as “sans-culottes” during the French Revolution, “Black” in the Black Power movement, “queer” in LGBTQ politics, and, in a different context, the Dalit movement’s reclamation of “Dalit” itself. The slogan “What if all the cockroaches came together?” was powerful not because it was vulgar, but because it converted humiliation into collective agency; the irreverent language surrounding it was part of the same political inversion. This reclamation is, in fact, an even stronger argument than a simple defence of profanity for its own sake – it shows why the crude and the strategic are so often the same thing.

Everything that followed extended the same instinct. Diapers mailed to the education minister’s office to “plug the leaks.” Placards no newspaper could print in full. A slogan announcing itself, without a trace of embarrassment, as the “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.” Older commentators – and no small number of well-meaning liberals – winced at all of it and called it juvenile. They were not wrong that it was crude. They were wrong to think crudeness and political seriousness are incompatible.

The hidden transcript enters the square

Every hegemonic order establishes not only acceptable political opinions but also an acceptable political language. Civility, respectability and decorum become part of the discipline through which power regulates dissent: protesters are expected to be polite even while protesting injustice. But history suggests that ruptures typically begin by breaking this linguistic convention. The language of revolt is seldom........

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