Cockroaches expose the elephant in the PMO. PM Modi needs a new team to address it.

0:04 I don't understand. What do you do with your salary increment? What are you thinking? Take a top up of your mutual funds. This is the right time. What? I don't understand. What are you thinking? Take a top up of your mutual funds. This is the right time. You understand? Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme related documents carefully. A 30 year old post graduate student, Abhijit Deepke has shaken up the entire political

0:50 establishment. His nine year old Kauklo Janata Party or CJP has got politicians of all hue scurrying around. Some in anger and panic and others in anticipation and hope. In the first category are the BJP leaders. They see a foreign conspiracy predictably. A minister suggests that the CJP's followers are from quote unquote Pakistan and George Soros gang Another BJP MP refers to Deepke's Ahmadi party background to warn the opposition quote Will you take help from foreign powers to break the country unquote The intelligence bureau sees the CJP as a threat to national security Promoting the government to get its X account blocked The opposition

1:37 falls in the second category Delirious in anticipation of the youth turning against Prime Minister Nayan Modi, finally The CGP's popularity, over 22 million Instagram followers within 9 days gives opposition leaders hope They are rushing to try to co-opt these cockroaches Self-styled cockroaches, I would say The Karnataka Youth Congress is distributing Aamie Cockroach T-shirts Samajwadi Party's Achillesh Yadav sees in it a seed of Revolution against the BJP? Indian national lockdown legislator Arjun Chautala has declared himself the first cockroach MLA His newly created email id is cockroachmla at gmail.com How realistic the hopes of these opposition leaders are is a

2:26 matter of debate Yes, the CGP's instant popularity shows the youth's disillusionment with the Modi government But is it going to benefit the opposition? Many believe it won't. After all, millions of young people endorsing a newly floated satirical platform is also a manifestation of their exasperation with mainstream parties and politicians, including the opposition. Many political observers attempted to look at the CGP phenomenon in the context of actor Vijay's success in the recent Tamil Nadu assembly elections and also what happened in Bangladesh and Nepal. The same instances however, sound a cautionary note about the CJP. Let us look at the Vijay phenomenon first.

3:14 Unlike the CJP that remains a social media phenomenon so far, Vijay's TVK drew its core strength from his cult status, assiduously built through decades of real life image making. The TVK had a well-built organisation in the form of thousands of fan clubs, They came in handy in the elections. While the youth did vote for Vijay overwhelmingly, it wasn't necessarily and completely a reflection of the disillusionment with established parties. It could very well be attributed primarily, if not fully, to Vijay's star power, with disillusionment probably playing the role of a catalyst. It's worth noting that while the

3:59 TVK secured 35% votes, The two major Dravidian parties, the DMK and the AIDMK together secured over 40% plus 13% that their allies got In the 1983 Andhra Pradesh elections, NT Rama Rao's TDP also got about 46% votes It was not a Gen Z revolution, it was NTAR's star appeal buttressed by his Telugu Wadi Atma Garvam, Telugu people's self respect slogan rooted in Rajiv Gandhi's insult to Andhra Chafinish T. Anjaya in the previous year. The Gen Z revolution in Nepal and Bangladesh is often brought up in the context of the CJP. First of all, there is no comparison between the fledgling

4:49 democracy in Nepal or the democracy turned autocracy in Bangladesh and the robust, vibrant democracy that is India. The revolutions in our neighborhood, however, provide a context to the CJP's likely relevance in the future The National Citizens Party founded by the leaders of the 2024 students and youth uprising flopped in the Bangladesh election securing only 5 of the 300 seats in parliament This was because the party entered into an alliance with the old discredited Jamaat-e-Islami defeating the very spirit of the uprising In contrast Why did Balendasa write the Gen Z protests to become the Prime Minister in Nepal?

5:39 He joined hands with the Rashtriya Swatandra Party , a 4-year-old outfit with an existing organizational structure with a nationwide network and resources. That's what Hungary's Peter Magyar did by joining a 4-year-old party, TISA, in 2024 to oust Viktor Orban from power. The RSP and the TISA were new parties with the semblance of an alternative to discredited mainstream parties Clearly the Kauklo Janta Party or CJP despite Indian Gen Z's ostensible craze for it on social media has a long way to go before it can challenge established parties in the electoral arena

6:28 It needs a credible alternative in the form of an existing party organisation to translate that craze into votes. BJP leaders may suspect that ARP could offer a potential political platform for that translation. But the ARP has become just another mainstream party today. Far from an alternative platform that can win the confidence of the self-styled cockroaches or self-proclaimed cockroaches. Without an organizational network on the ground, the CJP's potential electoral impact remains a matter of conjecture. There lies the hope of the opposition parties to tap into the ostensible grievances of Gen Z. That's why the Modi government's crackdown on the CGP is

7:14 dismaying. India is not Nepal or Bangladesh. These so-called cockroaches on social media are not national security threats. They are not even a threat to the BJP so far. With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche for distorting his apocryphal court, You do not become a hero if you kill a cockroach PM Modi should however get their message that all is not well I am quoting Warren Buffett here, the billionaire investor There is seldom just one cockroach in the kitchen You know you turn on the light and all of a sudden they all start scurrying around That was Buffett These cockroaches of the CJP are a sounding board

8:02 PM Modi must get his house in order. To say that his international trips, about 100 visits to 80 countries in the past 12 years, are structured to get employment and global exposure is not good enough for his young critics. Nor is the distribution of 51,000 employment letters to the youth as the Prime Minister did on Saturday through the 19th Rosegarh Mela. Since October 2023, 12 lakh youth supposedly got employment letters through 18 Rojgar Melas. The optic is obviously not working for the cockroaches. As Modi prepares to enter his 13th year in the PMO, it's probably time for a reboot as the government seems

8:51 to be suffering from a lack of imagination. The same old Rojgar Mela, the much hyped Prime Minister internship scheme has turned out to be a flop. As my colleague Udit Bhubna reported, during the first pilot round that began in October 2024, companies made 60,866 internship offers. Only 8760 candidates eventually joined and 53% of them left the program midway through the 12 month tenure. Only 3417 candidates from the first pilot round completed the entire internship.

9:41 I am trying to give you a bigger picture of that program. In the second pilot round, over 300 companies made over 71,000 offers. Only 7300 candidates physically joined and one third of them dropped out before completing the full internship period The third pilot round with an increased stipend and tweaked criteria was launched in April The outcome is awaited The PM internship scheme was followed by an employment linked incentive scheme We have not heard much of it either Does anyone remember the Skill India mission? The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship was created in 2014 In the next decade,

10:29 there were four ministers. Rajiv Patavrodi who headed the ministry from November 2014 to August 2017 before being dropped. Dharmind Pradhan held the charge for the next 21 months before it was given to Mahindranath Pandey. Pandey held the charge for 2 years and 37 days before the ministry was handed back to Dharmind Pradhan who headed for close to 3 years before PM Modi decided to give that ministry to an alliance partner. Jayant Chaudhary in June 2024 PM Modi seldom talks about the Skilled India mission now Neat UG paper leak has come as another painful blow to cockroaches Almost as hurtful as the wound caused by the apple that the cockroach protagonist's father threw at him

11:17 in Kafka's Metamorphosis Education Minister Dharmad Pradhan is fending of the opposition attack on his own There are things he can't say in his defence. For instance, after the 2024 NEET-UG paper leak controversy, a committee headed by K. Radhakrishnan had recommended a transition from the paper and pen format to computer-based test to remove the possibility of leaks. Its implementation was stalled due to opposition from the Health Ministry headed by J.P. Nader. Dharmendra Pradhan must take all the flak because he can't talk about the role of his former party chief. I would rather not talk much about big key ministries.

12:06 PM Modi no longer talking about India being Vishguru tells us something about our diplomatic triumphs. The worsening situation in Manipur strikes a discordant note with the government's triumphalism in internal security discussions. Economists, including those who have been associated with the Modi government, are talking about the risk of India joining Turkey as fragile two economies. What has gone wrong with the India growth story that both foreign and domestic investors are hesitant? West Asia crisis is three month old. If capital inflows consistently slowed down since 2023, as economists point out, what

12:51 were our policy makers doing? PM Modi asked his ministers last week to carry out reforms. Who or what stopped them until now? All I am driving at is that a 30-year-old student in the US has turned on the light in the kitchen. PM Modi can now see what Warren Buffet meant. There is seldom just one cockroach. The PM needs to clean up the house. He needs to start from the PMO. As Gujarat chief minister, he would not waste his time reading the files. In an old video clip of his interview, which is circulating on social media again, he said that his inner voice told him that he could not run the government by doing, what he said, academic studies of his files of

13:41 course. Reading something called a file is not in my nature at all. Moody has said that. That should explain why he tasked his trusted civil servants to run the entire government from the PMO. It's too much to expect retired IS officers to reimagine governance. It's evident from the return to Manmohan Singh E. Ra's austerity measures. The same goes for ministers who see opposition bashing and Modi chanting as their principal portfolios. Unless PM Modi drastically revamps his team, to clean up his house, cockroaches will continue to scurry around in the kitchen.