How to Avoid More Cockroaches

A Field Manual in Pest Control, Written for the State That Has Mistaken the Symptom for the Species

A Field Manual in Pest Control: Written for the State That Mistook the Symptom for the Species.

Somewhere in a government building, a memo is being written. It has a serious tone and a clean font, and its subject line is some version of a single question: how do we make sure this never happens again?

"This" is the Cockroach Janta Party — ten million followers, a name chosen by the powerful as an insult and reclaimed by the powerless as a flag, ten thousand people on Parliament, and one leaked examination at the bottom of it all. In our earlier diagnosis, we asked why the movement could capture the country and still not move the State. This piece answers the mirror question, the one the State is actually asking: how do you make sure fewer of them appear next time?

The honest answer is uncomfortable, so we will arrive at it slowly, the way the memo-writers will. We will first do it their way; as a pest-control manual, because that is the register in which power instinctively thinks about dissent. And then we will explain why every method in the manual fails, and why the only one that works is the one no committee wants to recommend.

You cannot exterminate a cockroach movement. You can only stop leaving the food out.

1. Know the Organism

Before you reach for a method, you must respect the animal, because underestimating it is how the infestation started.

The cockroach is not impressive. It is not fast in the open, not strong, not clever in any way a human would flatter. What it is, is hard to kill for reasons that have nothing to do with the cockroach and everything to do with the building. It survives because the building offers it warmth, damp, darkness, and — above all — something left uneaten. Remove the cockroach and leave the crumbs, and the building manufactures a new cockroach on its own. The pest is downstream of the conditions. This is the single fact the whole manual is built to avoid.

A protest movement is the same organism with the same property. It is downstream of a leaked paper, an office no one can hold to account, a promise made on a podium and quietly starved before it reached anyone. The people who marched did not invent their grievance; they found it lying on the floor, where the State left it. Which means the State's first instinct — get rid of the marchers — is aimed at exactly the wrong layer of the problem.

But the memo will not say that. So let us give the memo what it wants.

2. The Field Manual (as the memo would write it)

Protocol 1 — Cut the lights

Roaches scatter when exposed. Control what can be seen and you control where they can gather.

In practice: throttle the transmission. Slow the connectivity around the gathering, discourage the cameras, let the coverage go dark for a news cycle.

Why it fails: Cockroaches do not need light. They breed in the dark — it is their preferred condition. A movement deprived of visibility does not die; it decentralises, goes quiet, and reappears in places you were not watching. You did not remove the infestation. You removed your own ability to see it. The manual has just blinded the exterminator and called it progress.

Protocol 2 — Fumigate

The direct method. Overwhelming force applied at the site of concentration. Fast, visible, satisfying to the client.

In practice: the crackdown. Clear the square. Detentions, barricades, a hard perimeter.

Why it fails: Fumigation kills the roaches you can see and hardens the ones you cannot. The survivors are, by definition, the resistant ones — and they now carry a story. Worse, everyone in the building can smell the chemical. The fumigation is itself the announcement that there was an infestation serious enough to fumigate. You have converted a local nuisance into a building-wide event, and you have done it with your own hands.

Protocol 3 — Bait and redirect

The sophisticated method. Do not fight the organism; give it something to consume elsewhere. A committee. A commission. A concession small enough to cost nothing.

In practice: the enquiry that will report after the news has moved on. The token reform. The photographed handshake.

Why it fails: Bait works exactly once, and only on the naïve colony. The organism learns. A movement that has been baited before recognises the bait, and the second offering is read not as generosity but as evidence — proof that pressure produces motion, that the State moves only when squeezed. You have taught the very lesson you were trying to suppress: this works.

Protocol 4 — Deny the infestation

The cheapest method. There are no cockroaches. There has never been a cockroach. The person who reported one is unwell.

In practice: it did not happen, the numbers are exaggerated, the footage is old, the country has moved on.

Why it fails: The cockroaches do not read the press release. Denial manages the perception of the people who were not in the room and enrages the people who were. It widens the gap between the official account and the lived one — and that gap is the exact medium a movement grows in. You have not removed the pest. You have fed it a grievance about being told it does not exist.

Protocol 5 — Blame the tenant

The last method, reached when the others fail. The infestation is the tenant's fault. Their habits. Their character. Their foreign influence. Clean tenants do not get roaches.

In practice: delegitimise. They are misguided, they are funded, they are anti-something, they are not really from here.

Why it fails: The crumbs are still on the floor. You may successfully convince a portion of the building that the neighbours are dirty people — but the damp is real, the food is real, and roaches are famously indifferent to your opinion of the tenant. Character assassination is the one pest-control method that changes nothing about the actual kitchen. It only changes who the building is angry at, and that number rarely moves in your favour for long.

3. The method not in the manual

Notice what every protocol shares. Each one operates on the cockroach and none of them operates on the conditions. Each treats the visible animal as the problem to be solved, when the animal is only the building's honest report on itself.

There is a sixth method. It is slow, it photographs badly, it cannot be executed before a news cycle turns, and it gives no one a satisfying moment of force. It is this:

Clean the kitchen.

Fix the exam so it cannot be leaked. Build the office that can be held to account before the crowd has to assemble to demand it. Close the intent-to-outcome gap — the distance between the promise on the podium and the delivery at the door — because that gap is the damp, dark, unswept corner where every movement in history has bred. A building with a clean kitchen does not need an exterminator on retainer. It simply stops producing the thing the exterminator was hired to chase.

This is unwelcome advice for a specific reason: it reassigns the blame. The manual exists to keep the problem external — the roaches came from outside, the roaches are the enemy, deal with the roaches. The sixth method says the infestation was an inside job. Not sabotage — worse. Neglect. The building bred its own pests by leaving out exactly what pests eat, and no amount of spraying will fix a habit of leaving food on the floor.

4. What to tell the memo-writers

So, to the serious document with the clean font, and its serious question — how do we make sure this never happens again? — here is the field answer, in the only two lines the manual actually supports:

You will not spray your way out of this. You will not deny, redirect, or delegitimise your way out of it either, because none of those methods touch the thing that made the cockroach in the first place.

There is exactly one durable way to have fewer cockroaches in future. Stop running a kitchen that breeds them.

The Cockroach Janta Party did not name itself. It was called a cockroach, by people who assumed the word was an ending. They should have remembered what everyone who has ever owned a home already knows: you never see just one. And you never solve the problem by hating the insect. You solve it by cleaning the room — or you accept that you have simply agreed, as a matter of policy, to live with the infestation you keep feeding.

The memo will not say this. It is, nonetheless, the only sentence in it that is true.

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Pritiraj Brahma is the Founder & Managing Editor of The Pritiraj Review and an IIM Bangalore alumnus. He has served as a political strategist on winning election campaigns across several Indian states.