Democracy Is a Transaction
Indian students were called cockroaches. Then they fired a cabinet minister.
This month in India, two million students learned that the national medical entrance exam — the single pathway to a middle-class life for millions of families — had been leaked. The rich had bought the answers. Everyone else was told to take the test again. In the weeks that followed, at least a dozen students died by suicide. One of them was Sheikh Sana, a 19-year-old aspiring doctor who died the day before the retest. And when Chief Justice Surya Kant dismissed unemployed young people as “cockroaches” and “parasites,” those young people took him at his word. A 30-year-old communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke put the insult on a flag and founded the Cockroach People’s Party. Within weeks, they filled Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and the streets of a dozen cities. On Saturday, the education minister resigned.
Here is what I want us to learn, and I want to be precise, because the easy version of this story is a little bit wrong. These students didn’t march for an ideology. They didn’t demand a revolution. They demanded that a test be administered honestly — and that the man who failed at his job lose it. That is one of the most sophisticated understandings of democracy I have seen articulated anywhere in years. Democracy is not a flag or a word in a fundraising email. It is a transaction: we grant the state enormous power to tax us, police us, grade us, and count us, and in exchange the state must exercise that power competently and honestly. When it fails, someone should lose their job.
I experienced the other side of that transaction in 1991, when I was a 17-year-old valedictorian invited to the Georgia governor’s mansion. My family took the bus. The guard at the gate watched it pull away and told us we didn’t belong — without ever checking his list. I passed the test. He failed. And he faced no accountability. So when a young man in New Delhi says the rich are paying for their children to pass, I know exactly what he’s describing. Every election is a mass-administered public test, and every tool of voter suppression I have ever fought is a version of that leaked exam.
And do not mistake the word “cockroach” for something exotic. In November 2023, on Veterans Day, Donald Trump promised to go after opponents who “live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Same vocabulary, same purpose: strip people of their humanity for making a reasonable demand on a system they helped create. India’s students took the mockery and made it a banner. They did not win because they were eloquent. They won because they would not go home, and because their demand was small enough to be undeniable.
So what are we prepared to demand? Joining me this week to talk about winning the power to demand better is Ben Wikler, former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and author of the new book This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy. We dig into why there is no magic bumper sticker, what Wisconsin’s comeback teaches every state, and how close we actually are to rendering the Electoral College a formality. Ben’s homework for you is simple: pick the friend you’d love to do this work with, and call them. Democracy works better in groups.
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This - "Democracy is not a flag or a word in a fundraising email. It is a transaction: we grant the state enormous power to tax us, police us, grade us, and count us, and in exchange the state must exercise that power competently and honestly. When it fails, someone should lose their job..."
Stacey, a heartfelt thank you for this. I haven't seen the crucial parallels discussed much by American media. We must answer the corruption, incompetence and injustice with mass mobilization.