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A generation raised on cell phones has learned to bring down governments without holding a single rally that anyone planned months in advance. In the past few years, young people in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, and Madagascar have used little more than a hashtag and a shared sense of betrayal to force out presidents and prime ministers who had spent decades building the machinery to survive exactly this kind of challenge.

None of these uprisings had a known leader when they began. None of them ran on a party manifesto. They ran on rage at a tax bill, a hiring quota, a blackout, an internet ban, each one a specific grievance that opened onto a much larger one – a generation convinced that the people running their countries had stopped listening. What these movements share is a method, and what they leave behind, once the streets empty, is the far tougher question of who actually inherits the power that a leaderless crowd cannot hold onto for long.

India’s turn came this summer. In mid-May, a Supreme Court hearing on fake law degrees produced a stray comparison between unemployed youth and cockroaches, a line the Chief Justice later said was aimed at fraudulent degree-holders rather than the country’s youth. The clarification changed nothing on the street. Within a day, strategist Abhijeet Dipke had turned the insult into a banner, and the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was born. It grew the way its global cousins had, through volunteers rather than cadres, around a single wound – a leaked medical entrance exam that had already been linked to the suicides of grieving students.

Five weeks of marches, tear gas, and a 26-day hunger strike by environmental activist Sonam Wangchuk later, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25. CJP spokesperson Saurav Das told the crowd at Jantar Mantar, “we have done it.” CJP folded its tents and apparently chose to remain a watchdog with a manifesto, rather than register as a political party.

The peace did not hold. Within days, police in Assam, West Bengal, and Bihar had opened cases against protest organisers, some of whom stayed in custody even as the movement declared victory. CJP called it a breach of the government’s own word and demanded the cases be dropped. That reversal raises a question that outlasts India’s own summer of protest – whether a movement built to avoid leaders and........

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