Late last month, a small group gathered on O'Connell Street to support the "cockroaches" movement that had taken to the streets in their country of birth.
On O’Connell Street on 26 July, a tiny crowd clustered around a small memorial, two posters flanked by white candles.
Priyanka Borpujari leant against the cream stone of the General Post Office, and read from her phone, leading the chants.
"Chhattisgarh mein bhi," she said, her intonation rising. In Chhattisgarh, too.
"Azaadi," came the reply. Freedom.
"Manipur mein bhi," she said. She moved slightly to the beat of the call-and-response.
"Azaadi."
Not everybody agreed with or joined in the call-and-response, said Borpujari later. There are fissions within how Indians view the call "azaadi", she said, which shows how complicated and overlapping the issues in the air.
But the group had come together, anyway.
They were there to show support to a protest movement which had jumped from city to city in their country of birth, India – but had resonated beyond, too.
Here in Dublin, it has brought together, and closer, Indian Dubliners from all kinds of backgrounds, kindling hope for greater solidarity, some members of the protest group said.
Back in May, the Indian government annulled the results of a medical school entrance exam held across the country, because the questions had been leaked.
Two million students must retake it, said then-Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
The exams are competitive in the extreme. The preparation is gruelling, with private tuition pushing families into debt. The anxiety, and the high stakes, can push students to suicide.
A repeat meant re-living that anxiety, said Rish Arora, sitting at a café inside the CHQ building in Dublin's Docklands, recently.
For many, conquering the test is a ticket to upward social mobility in a society where caste disparity and stigma still linger, even if erased on paper, said Arora, who had been at the O'Connell Street protest.
“That’s why it was so important to them, the dream of becoming a doctor, the dream of giving their family a good life,” he said.
The national students' union in India organised a rally in protest, and some of its members were detained.
Around the same time, India's Chief Justice Surya Kant called unemployed young people “cockroaches” who spent their days ranting and raving on social media. He later said he was talking about those with "fake degrees".
But, in response, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old public relations graduate at Boston University, posted online: “What if all cockroaches come together?”
It drew an outsized reaction, with thousands of likes and reposts.
Dipke followed up with an invitation to join a made-up party, the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a play on the name of the right-wing party that leads India's government, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
The CJP's AI-generated logo is an enormous cockroach, rocking sunglasses, looming over a podium.
Dipke later said he was goofing around. But the cockroach post grew into something far bigger than a viral joke. Just days after, the CJP’s account on Instagram had more followers than the BJP’s.
The party has its own website now, too. “Voice of the lazy and unemployed,” a tagline says on the website. It has one million members and counting, it says.
The CJP rallies – which have been met with police violence and arrests – brought about the resignation of the country’s education minister, which was a first for Modi’s cabinet.
The cockroaches’ movement at first centred on education reform, but it now embodies the nation’s demands for accountability in other big and small ways, said Arora, the Indian man in Dublin.
“A lot of people joined the protests for their own reasons. Like someone doesn’t like the road system, someone doesn’t like the corruption that’s been happening,” said Arora.
Sana Diwan’s dad used to pick her up from maths tuition that ran past midnight, she said recently, sitting in Mooz Café in Stoneybatter.
In India, studying hard is many people's only path to social mobility, she said. "Including myself.”
For many young women especially, education is a lifeboat, said Diwan. It can save them from unwanted marriages and the loss of independence, she said.
She understands the anger that students in India have been feeling, said Diwan. “It resonates.”
Diwan joined the second protest – held on 26 July at the GPO –that was organised in Dublin in support of the youth uprising in her country of birth, she said.
She has lived in Ireland for more than a decade but hadn’t linked up much with the wider Indian communities, she said. She wasn’t in WhatsApp groups or anything, Diwan said.
Now, she has been added to the groups that took shape after the protests. “Group chats for me have been amazing; you just get to learn from people who have experienced life in a different way than yourself,” said Diwan.
Srimoyee Biswas, who has also joined these groups, said she was hoping the new connections mean that people can see each other through shared struggles here too, like experiences of racism.
“There is a conversation that is starting post these protests,” said Biswas.
But it has also bared people who have been unable to get past deeply held beliefs to show camaraderie, she said.
“There is a huge section of Indian population that’s upper caste, Hindu, male, and all of the things that sort of defines them,” said Biswas.
That identity doesn’t mean all that much here, but the feeling of comfort that it used to bring follows some people halfway across the world, she said. So, “they have this nostalgic view of back home”, said Biswas, sitting at Mind the Step Café recently.
So there are people who would not get behind the protest, who would heap scorn on others who did, she said. “I think this movement was a litmus test of sorts on who are your friends, who are your uncles and your aunties, who you can fall back on.”
Diwan, the woman in Stoneybatter, said the current unity doesn’t mean people “underestimate the impact that caste has on all of us”. But she’s hopeful that it has sparked a dialogue, she said.
Arora, the man in CHQ, said he used to be one of those Hindu guys who supported the BJP-led government because he was younger and believed everything it said.
What makes the rise of the CJP and its origin story so salient and close to his heart, said Arora, is that it was about education reform.
Getting educated is what prompted him to take a critical look at what the party was presenting and mine the details for himself, he said.
He began to think that maybe BJP supporters were being a little cultish, said Arora. And that the party weaponised Hindu nationalism and let democracy take the back seat.
“What they do is use religion to influence people,” said Arora. And the party didn't really reform things as it had promised, he said.
The BJP-led national and state governments have directly, and indirectly, fueled greater hostility towards marginalised groups in India, most notably Muslims.
In 2024, the national government enacted a new citizenship law excluding Muslim refugees from qualifying for citizenship.
At the protest in Dublin on 26 July, a few people held white flowers, mirroring the young protestors thousands of miles away in cities across India who held them up – in the face of police tear gas and batons – as a sign of peace and non-violence.
Arora said some of his friends were supportive of the protests in Dublin but didn’t tag along because they were afraid it would somehow impact their student status here.
That’s partly why he wanted to talk. To show them it’s okay, he said. “They use your fear, they exploit that and then you stay silent,” said Arora.
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