Now God, Stand Up for Cockroaches
Satire, Dissent and India’s Growing Intolerance for Protest
Why this appeal to god, you will ask, and that too from an unredeemed sceptic. Because there are indeed times in history when a God must be imagined.
This is such a time.
The honourable Supreme Court having expressed displeasure at cockroaches—characterised in after thought as a reference only to inauthentic protesters—who may one appeal but to a God whom even the top court now and then refers to as the court of last resort?
One must, in passing, be appreciative of an Indian Express editorial which seeks to put the matter into sane and harmless perspective: it points out that the real national problem may not be the cockroaches but our increasing intolerance of some charming satire and humour.
Even God cannot fail to note that the cockroaches seem well organised, although the Cockroach Janta Party which has garnered a phenomenal 22.9 million followers on Instagram—surpassing the strength of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the platform—has expressly been blown away from the internet by official fiat, with its X account, which has over 2 lakh (200,000) followers, being withheld in India.
This excision from existence, one notes with comfort, has prompted the outstanding Shashi Tharoor, a politician never drawn into any instinctual aversion to the right-wing, to critique the move as “disastrous for democracy.”
And here is the difficulty: had these millions of cockroaches been AI generated, the monarchs of the day might have scoffed at the trick from below, even rewarded a fool or two for the ingenuity, and drafted the same into some governmental project to secure the nation against real cockroaches.
But, alas, these entities that are on Instagram and X are flesh and blood creatures of the humanoid kind, proliferating in their need as cockroaches do.
Thus, imagine, as if in a movie by Eisenstein, some 22.9 million or more humanoid cockroaches crawling in unison across the Gangetic plain, bent on reaching the house of capital in a business-like cussedness of resolve, uncaring of their lives—what government would not be fearfully askance at the happening.
And removed from the internet, have they simultaneously also been removed from life—a poser that must worry the guardians of the nation.
The disturbing biological fact about cockroaches is that science has deemed them to be the hardiest of species on earth, guaranteed to outlast even a nuclear blast. And that makes them so akin to the hoi polloi who never cease to proliferate even as great men and great rulers come and go, and bombs fall on little children in schools.
As Walt Whitman, the inveterate democrat, might have said, the people in any shape or colour are like the grass: you can trample all you want but they grow back, even through the crevices of cobbled stones in protected princely estates.
And be it 22.9 million cockroaches or their human counterparts on the march, how may the precious provisions and all other forms of national wealth be secured from such a deluge?
Because when hunger and destitution march in such numbers, neither religion nor gun powder may quite do the trick of quelling the avalanche.
And to think of the folly that we, the well-to-do ones, never learnt to look beyond an isolated cockroach or two in our so kosher kitchens.
Grapevine has it that them cockroaches have now as much as drawn up a charter of demands too, perish the seditious thought. For the greater good of the realm, it were now best to enter into parleys with cockroaches, before the contagion overwhelms the spaces we have.
After all, the cockroaches seem to want to be counted equal denizens of the republic, without regard to the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the songs they hum, the gods they pray to, the language they speak or the men or women they come to love.
And if God be ultimate guarantor of the Constitution, surely the almighty must come to the aid of the cockroaches who have but few patrons of any consequence.
A new report in Indian express of 24 May says that both “voices within” the BJP and ” allies” are suggesting that the government should “listen to the young” in view of their grievances about economic issues and the Neet fiasco.
Good advice indeed.
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