Arundhati Roy Says Cockroach Protest Movement Has Shattered Modi's Curated Image

Acclaimed Indian author Arundhati Roy has said that the youth-driven protests fronted by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) have done something years of criticism could not: strip Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the carefully manufactured public image that India's corporate-owned broadcast media and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have long sustained.

Speaking in a wide-ranging interview with Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, the Booker Prize-winning novelist said the country's political atmosphere now feels volatile in a way that suggests real change may be near. "I do feel that something is boiling just under the surface. Something is going to happen," she said, adding that the prime minister has been publicly called out and has lost his hold on power. "The emperor has been called out, and he has lost his power."

Roy, 64, whose debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, has built a second reputation as one of India's most prominent political essayists and activists. Asked whether she considers herself a novelist, a writer or a political activist, she declined to choose. She said she avoids labelling herself and prefers to leave such categorisation to others, questioning why anyone should define themselves in those terms.

She also rejected the suggestion that satire is a deliberate weapon in her fiction, though readers have long noted its devastating use in novels such as The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Roy said the question depends on how politics itself is defined. Even a fairy tale, she argued, carries political meaning. Her aim, she said, is not the hammer-on-the-head polemic or the display of a manifesto. Growing up as she did, and writing as she does, she sees no separation between the personal and the public.

The interview turned to the CJP movement, a grassroots campaign powered largely by young people who seized on an insult — being dismissed as cockroaches — and made it their own. Roy's essay on the movement opened with an image of young "roaches" riding through the rain at a moment when hope seemed lost. She described them as "the progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke," a line that has circulated widely.

Roy said the timing of the conversation was pointed: a major crisis is now unfolding, and the cockroaches are back. Activists say they will protest across the country within days over a scandal exposed by a newspaper, involving allegations that India's elections are compromised. Roy noted that the problem itself is not new, saying she and others have written about it for years. What has changed, in her view, is that concrete proof now exists.

What first drew her to the movement, she said, was its character: a youth campaign full of joy and unusual humour, using Instagram reels and other new forms of messaging. Its most significant achievement, she argued, was stripping away Modi's carefully confected image — a public persona she said has been propped up by news channels owned by corporate interests and by the BJP's command of social media.

Asked whether the prime minister simply miscalculated by failing to understand social media or how young people use technology, Roy disagreed. She pointed out that Modi and the BJP were the first to move into social media, ahead of everyone else. The problem, she suggested, was accumulation: too many grievances arriving one after another until the movement finally broke through. She called it the straw that broke the camel's back.

She listed the pressures that converged: in the 2024 election, Modi did not win a full majority. There have been scandals around elections, and scandals around leaked examination papers. Unemployment is massive. Together, she said, these forces produced an irreverent but serious explosion.

Roy was equally unsparing about how she views modern India, despite official portrayals of the country as an economic success story and a climate leader. She described it as a very rich country full of very, very poor people, and said few nations contain such deep poverty and such conditions of humiliation. It is a shame, she said, for anyone to boast of superpower status when the reality is super poverty. Extremely wealthy industrialists control much of the economy, she added, but very little of that wealth reaches the poor. Calling India an economic force, she said, is a scandal when its people are so disempowered.

She also pushed back on the tendency to blame all of India's problems on British colonialism. That argument, she said, may once have been true, but it no longer holds. The present government, in her view, is making everything worse, including the very idea of freedom. She recalled speaking with young people a day earlier and telling them that the things Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Jawaharlal Nehru said and wrote during British rule could not be said today without risking prison.

Roy said students, activists and lawyers are constantly moving in and out of jail, and that people live under the threat of anti-terrorism laws. She cited Modi's Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort, in which he described "dimaghi Naxal" — intellectual Maoists — as the most dangerous people, as evidence of how the space for dissent has narrowed.