Andolan Apna Apna: Time BJP, Congress fund their own CJP

India's political parties are living through a credibility crisis, and they have mostly brought it on themselves. Some of it is social media, which forgets nothing and forgives little. Most of it is their own doing. That is not doing the right thing. This inertia and convenient protesting has left them looking petty, partisan and permanently motivated by something other than the public good.Politics has always been a Turkish bathhouse, and hammam mein sabhi nange hain, so the pointing finger fools nobody. The real damage is this: even when a party raises a genuine issue of national interest, everyone assumes a narrow political game behind it. That is the true cost of crying wolf. On the day a real wolf turns up, the village stays indoors.The student wings of AAP, Congress, and the Left parties did protest against the NEET paper leak. They did not protest against the UGC guidelines earlier because they kept their parent parties' interests primary. The protest and the absence both went unnoticed because the student wings of the political parties are worse, behaving exactly like their mother-party seniors. Cavalcade on cue. The last DU election rally arrived in a convoy of Bentleys, Rolls Royces and Ferraris. Even the mighty Thar rode in that convoy as a hoi-polloi wagon.The Delhi High Court once, watching the videos, said it had not even heard of some of these cars and could not work out where students found the money. And this goes on when the ordinary middle-class motorist is crying about fuel injectors and engine erosion from E20 petrol, only to be told the mileage he was losing was negligible, nothing to fuss over. The lesson that one gets is that the boys in the Rolls-Royces are the serious people. You and your fuel injector are not serious. The ruling party activists can't protest for civil society because their party is in charge. The opposition activists can, but the ruling party can dismiss it as cheap politics and label them easily. The public sees the reasoning and accepts its fate to fight on, on its own. You saw that in the ethanol enforcement. Nearly every objection was rubbished as anti-national. So how do political parties push their political projects and achieve their objectives? After all, in the dance of democracy, the next act on the stage depends on the last act to step down. But how do you command the applause from an audience when your act has been exposed before? Well, get those on stage booed. But then your call will be labelled catcalling and disruption for petty politics. Well, get your own crowd you can disown.That's the point. Every party needs a protest wing of its own. Not in its own name, obviously. It needs a special purpose vehicle, a plausibly deniable little outfit that it can drive to an agitation, leave at the barricade and walk away from, whistling. Limited liability, benami bois. A shell company for the conscience. Indian politics is a flourishing business which has brought the good times for many. And as they say, good times make soft men and soft men make hard times. The hard times are here. Somewhere along the way, the parties began believing that building a movement was too much like hard work, and that it was far easier to let the public build one and then turn up on the spot with a flag and a photographer. So now, when they march, nobody sees a cause. They see a conspiracy. The rage looks hired (the crowds are), the tears look timed, and the whole thing carries the whiff of a fixed match, the result known before the toss.Which is why the new movements go out of their way to keep them off the stage. At the farmers' protests, at Shaheen Bagh, at Jantar Mantar, at the Jaipal Singh Stadium in Ranchi, the organisers guard the platform and are blunt about it: leaders may come, party flags may not. Do not cross the line. When a movement treats your backing as contamination, consider that your performance review, not an insult.The student wings are the saddest exhibit. They were meant to be the cradle of the next generation of leaders. They have quietly become the waiting room for the next generation of government tender contractors. Hungry, in a hurry, and cheerfully for sale. Hence, a rally by NSUI, ABVP, even ASAP looks increasingly like their parent parties' march.Hence, the CJP. Aren't you tired of the insinuation that it is nothing but an AAP wing in fancy dress, an idea floated mostly because its founder once did a stint with the AAP? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Even if it is, jealousy is not a strategy, and standing in the cold blowing on your own dead coals while demanding to inspect your neighbour's matchbox is just being cold and calling it principle. Well, parties have no principles, they have principals.Remember what this movement actually pulled off. It took a judge's jibe, wore the insult as a name, called itself the voice of the lazy and unemployed, and then drew millions behind it on Instagram, more than the BJP or the Congress can manage, over a single leaked exam paper. A joke out-organised the pros of politics.So appo deepo bhava! Create your own. Fund it softly, run it at arm's length, keep it fuelled for the day a particular job needs doing and fingerprints would be awkward. Instead of forever asking where the other fellow's money comes from, spend a little of your own for once. Feed a few young people who still think the work matters more than the cut. What is all that amassed wealth for, if not to put some of it back into the society that handed it to you? The youth are society. They can jump the barricades and outshout your sloganeers. There are things worth funding beyond the obscene cost of the next election. By the way, this investment, if carefully curated, will save a lot of election expense.Let us not pretend any of this is principle. In our political theatre, the ethics have always been shabbier than the optics, and performance is the one thing that reliably wins, so performative concern wins along with it. It is the art of buying trouble for the enemy at the lowest possible price. Because if you did the same, you would be dismissed as politically motivated. Your outrage has a political flag and a partisan tinge.So, go ahead and rent the outrage because you are mainstream but yours has ceased to be authentic. Only know that people can still tell a party that turns up to fix the problem from one that turns up to be photographed beside it. They have simply stopped saying so aloud, which is the worse news, because a voter who no longer bothers to complain about you has usually stopped expecting anything from you at all.(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)- Ends(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)Published By: Avinash KateelPublished On: Aug 18, 2026 14:38 IST