Mainstream WeeklyIt is a strange coincidence that in July 2026, when an essentially secular-liberal youth rally at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar ground was in full steam, another set of youth in some other parts of north India, all of them Hindu, was preparing itself for its annual Kanwar Yatra. The event is held every Shravan of the Hindu calendar which this year corresponded to July 30-August 11.
We are prefacing our essay with this event to tell the larger story about the Gen Z of the Hindu right. If recent history is any guide the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) and its ilk will be poised in due course for a confrontation with these forces.
Kanwar Yatra is an annual ritual of the Shiva devotees mostly consisting of young men. Called Kanwariyas, they walk long distances to collect water from the Ganga river to be offered to the deity. The most revered water collecting points are Haridwar, Gangotri and Gaumukh in Uttarakhand, and Sultanganj in Bihar’s Bhagalpur district. I still remember watching thousands of these Kanwariyas thronging at our local Budhanath (Shiva) temple in Bhagalpur.
Those days the Kanwar ritual had no political overtone like today. The Uttar Pradesh government now goes out of the way to identify itself with the event as if it is a government programme. But the Bihar government those days managed only the law and order, sanitation and traffic. The Muslim traders were not threatened, nor was meat sale banned or vegetarianism enforced. Please note that I am talking of a time so close to the dreaded Hindu-Muslim Partition riots in which our neighbouring Tarapur was a prominent actor. It had engineered a massive massacre of Muslims, locally remembered as Noakhali ka badla (revenge).
The Kanwar and CJP agendas have completely different thrusts. While the former emphasises on ritualistic Hinduism, namely, (1) the Jalabhishek (pouring the Ganga water on the Shiva Linga), (2) maintaining a pure lifestyle during the pilgrimage by strictly avoiding meat, alcohol, and tobacco, and (3) ensuring that the water-carrying pole does not touch the ground, the CJP’s agenda is purely education-centric that comprises: (1) Enact a New Public Examinations (Transparency, Accountability and Candidates’ Rights) Act, (2) Fix NTA, SSC and National Examination Bodies, (3) A Students’ Rights Charter, (4) Create a National Aspirant Welfare Fund, and (5) Permanent Parliamentary Oversight.
But the real difference between them is about their contrasting political outlook, pro- and anti-RSS-BJP. Since CJP is a new phenomenon let us understand its challenge from the monolithic RSS-BJP duo which has mustered a massive youth base over the decades primarily since the early days of the Ram Temple movement in the late 1980s, if not much earlier. The political face of the Kanwar Yatra is of recent vintage particularly after the ascendancy of the Modi Phenomenon.
In the forefront of the RSS-BJP’s Gen Z army are mainly three RSS organizations: the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, established in 1949), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, established in 1964), and the Bajrang Dal (established in 1984). Ever since BJP has emerged on the centre stage of Indian politics their membership has grown exponentially.
The ABVP claims to have 5-7 million members, the VHP, which has 29 foreign branches, claims to have 7-10 million members, and the Bajrang Dal claims to have 4-5.5 million members. Two points, however, may be kept in mind. One, most of these memberships overlap, and two, presumably, most members are fair weather freshers who may not renew their membership once BJP is out of power. It happened to the Congress support base also when it was in power in most of India for long years.
In the early decades of the Congress rule the party used to boast that even a lamppost would win an election with a Congress ticket. Now the BJP suffers from the same syndrome. In the recently held assembly election in Patna’s Bankipur constituency, a seat held by BJP for three decades, it was reported that the party boasted that even a cat would win the seat if it is given a BJP ticket. The party, however, lost the seat by 19,324 votes to Prashant Kishor of the Jan Suraaj Party.
In the fast-changing political climate of India today marked by Narendra Modi’s political climbdown reflected in his reluctant nod to Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation in the teeth of massive youth pressure articulated by the CJP it will be intructive to watch how the ABVP-VHP-Bajrang Dal trio, which has a past record of violence and hooliganism, responds to the CJP challenge.
At the student level ABVP has been violently opposing its ideological rivals like AISA, SFI, AISF, and even the NSUI, the youth wing of the Congress though it itself is poised against the Left. We may recall the ABVP vandalism in JNU of January 2020 which was ignited by incessant RSS-BJP propaganda against the so-called ‘urban Naxals,’ ‘tukde-tukde gang’, ‘anti-national,’ etc. I had personally visited JNU in the immediate aftermath of the ABVP-organised hooliganism and wrote about it in the Hindi edition of the Outlook (9 January 2020).
Against this background it would be instructive to see how the RSS-BJP-affiliated youth would respond to the rise of the CJP which is as yet not an ideology-oriented crowd. But the massive support it has drawn from the Left student organisations, particularly AISA (the most notable face of which is Neha Bora of JNU), it may expose itself to the RSS-BJP youth wrath. In this context Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2026 Independence Day speech is ominous.
Here is its relevant passage: ‘We have succeeded in eliminating armed Naxals from the forests and liberating the country from that menace. However, while the armed Naxals are gone, the cerebral (deemagi) Naxals remain, and these cerebral Naxals are on the lookout for an opportunity. They are looking for ways of violence and anarchy. They are resorting to various tactics to drag society onto the wrong path. We must identify these cerebral Naxals, isolate them, and steer the nation’s youth toward the mainstream effort of transforming India into a developed nation.’ (Emphasis added.)
Given Modi’s record of using such innuendos in the past which gave fodder for right-wing violence, particularly in the Cow Belt, this statement has the same potential for campus violence. But in this battle royale the CJP variety of youth probably have an inherent advantage. Unlike the RSS-BJP their agenda is strictly issue based—improve education system.
If one watches the interviews of the CJP triumvirate Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka one would have to be impressed by their clear-headedness. In response to the allegation that Dipke and Ranka have the Aam Admi Party pedigree Ranka admits that, yes he was drawn to the party because it was the only party which prominently included education and public health in its political agenda. But the CJP has emerged as an independent force and their prime agenda now is to set the school system to order to which the Gen Alpha is also joining in a big way.
Postscript: As an octogenarian, who has been helplessly watching the systematic erosion of India’s democratic institutions, the CJP phenomenon has rekindled my optimism. Here let me express myself through the last scene of Garam Hawa (1973).
Exasperated by the ever-growing Hindu-Muslim conflict that engulfed his town (Agra), Salim Mirza decides to migrate to Pakistan with his family. On the way to the railway station they are stopped by a rally which was protesting injustice. Mirza joins the rally and decides to stay back to fight for communal harmony and social justice.
(Author: Partha S. Ghosh, retired from JNU as Professor)