Cockroaches, rats and termites

Three unlikely teachers

Cockroaches, rats and termites are not creatures anyone invites into their home. Biologically, though, they have a lot in common. All three live close to us, mostly unseen, active at night, and multiply quickly once conditions favor them. Cockroaches and termites even share a common ancestry, both belonging to the insect order Blattodea.

But it isn’t their biology that has made them part of everyday language. It’s the role each has come to symbolize. The cockroach stands for resilience — something that survives almost anything thrown at it. The rat stands for opportunism — quick to sense danger and quicker to leave. The termite stands for quiet, structural damage — weakening something from the inside, often before anyone notices.

I want to borrow these three ideas — resilience, opportunism and internal decay — not to describe people, but to describe what I observed at the protest site in Delhi last weekend, and what it might mean for how India’s political landscape shifts over the next few years.

Resilience: a movement that keeps showing up

I visited the student protest site at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi over the weekend. The immediate trigger was the NEET paper leak controversy, but what struck me was how the grievance has broadened. It no longer reads as anger about one exam. It reads as a wider demand for accountability — a demand that keeps resurfacing, gathering more voices each time it does.

That resilience is the interesting part. Protest movements in India have a habit of losing steam once the original trigger fades from headlines. This one hasn’t, at least not yet. What it currently lacks is a clear ideology or political vehicle — it is closer to a demand for competent governance than a platform with a defined manifesto. Whether it can convert that energy into something more durable, the way the anti-corruption movement of 2011 briefly did before losing momentum, remains an open question. The Tamil Nadu assembly election result is one template worth watching, since it showed how anti-incumbency sentiment can be organized into an electoral outcome rather than staying confined to a protest site.

Opportunism: how firm is the base, really?

At the protest site, I met several people who described themselves as long-standing supporters of the ruling government, and of the prime minister in particular. A few admitted, candidly, that their support isn’t unconditional — that a credible alternative could make them reconsider. That kind of honesty is more common in private conversation than in public commentary, but it points to something real: political loyalty, even where it looks solid from the outside, often has more give in it than the visible numbers suggest.

The journalists at the site were speculating on a related question — which coalition partners within the ruling NDA alliance might reposition themselves if public sentiment shifts further. This is ordinary political calculation, not disloyalty; coalition partners across the spectrum, in every country, recalibrate when the wind changes. It’s worth remembering that the government has its own counter-narrative here — pointing to welfare delivery, infrastructure execution and macro stability as reasons this loyalty should hold. Which reading proves correct will only be visible in hindsight.

Internal decay: the part that worries me most

The third theme is harder to pin to a single event. It’s the slower, less visible erosion of institutional trust caused by (i) the unholy nexus of corrupt public servant, unscrupulous businessmen and opportunist politician, and (ii) the perception, fair or not, that enforcement agencies and the judiciary are not always able to move quickly or independently against wrongdoing, whichever side of the political spectrum it comes from. I want to be careful here: I’m not asserting guilt against any individual or institution, only noting a pattern of public perception that shows up repeatedly in survey data and in conversations like the ones I had this weekend. Perception gaps like this matter for investors too — they show up eventually in governance risk premiums and in how foreign capital prices India relative to peers.

What this means going forward

·         A protest movement that refuses to fade (resilience).

·         A political base that looks firmer than it may actually be (opportunism).

·         A slow erosion of institutional trust that no single election result fixes (internal decay).

None of these three, on their own, changes an investment thesis overnight. But together, they are worth tracking as a governance risk indicator — the kind that eventually shows up in currency stability, policy continuity and how comfortable foreign capital feels holding Indian assets through an election cycle.