NEW DELHI: On August 22, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi took ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj’ to Pune for an event exclusively for young women. On the surface, it was a small scheduling decision, yet it reflected the outcome of a two-month debate within the Congress.
The format was significant too. Students spoke about violence, restricted mobility, unequal household responsibilities, lack of economic independence, and social controls imposed in the name of safety. Rahul linked these grievances to the Jantar Mantar protests, attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for expressing “cultural shock” specifically at young women using abusive language while saying nothing similar about male protesters.
Invoking the Gen Z idiom of “smash patriarchy”, he sought to position the Congress alongside young women challenging what he described as the BJP-RSS view that they should remain confined and controlled.
Read together with the Instagram ‘Ask Me Anything’ that Rahul held for students on August 6, the Pune event reveals what the Congress has concluded about the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP): it cannot beat the CJP at its own game, will not join it, and has instead decided to borrow from the communication strategy that made the fledgling organisation an instant success.
Chhatron Ki Goonj is being shaped less like a conventional political rally and more like an interactive platform where Rahul listens, uses presentations and data, lets young participants narrate their experiences and adapts his language to the audience. The Congress is also beginning to segment Gen Z, building conversations around specific constituencies, such as young women, rather than treating the youth as one political bloc.
There is no war-room plan to destroy or discredit the CJP. The Congress strategy is more subtle and took shape in stages between June and August—support the grievances the CJP raises, claim a share of the political victory, maintain organisational distance, build a parallel Rahul-led youth platform, and gradually move the Congress’s language closer to the everyday concerns that made the CJP successful.
The Congress also insists that this strategy did not begin as a response to the CJP. Rahul launched Chhatron Ki Goonj in Kota on June 17, three days before CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke began his sustained mobilisation at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has made this point publicly, and it has become the party’s central defence: the Congress did not discover student politics after watching the CJP trend. Rahul was already talking about examination paper leaks and a broken examination system.
Yet, for the first month of the CJP movement, the Congress deliberately stayed away from Jantar Mantar. Two anxieties shaped that decision. The first, openly expressed by party functionaries at the time, was that the CJP might be a BJP-sponsored distraction intended to weaken the Congress’s own campaigns on paper leaks and allegations surrounding donations made to the Ayodhya Ram temple.
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