On the morning of 10 October 2026, New Delhi woke to a city under siege. Trains bound for the capital had been cancelled, metro stations were shuttered, and mobile internet was switched off across parts of the city. By nightfall, more than 2,000 protesters had been detained and the movement's founder, Abhijeet Dipke, had been picked up the moment his flight from Mumbai touched down. The state had mobilised all of this against a group of young Indians whose chosen emblem is the cockroach, and in doing so it confirmed what the past three months had already made plain. India's youngest voters have joined a protest wave now rolling from Paris to Rio de Janeiro. The Cockroach Janta Party began as a joke. In May, after India's chief justice was reported to have likened unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites, a satirical online campaign seized on the insult and wore it as armour. A cockroach, its founders pointed out, is almost impossible to kill. Within weeks, the joke had found a cause. The NEET undergraduate medical entrance examination was cancelled that month over paper-leak allegations, and lakhs of students who had given years of their lives to a single test saw that sacrifice wiped away. Through June and July, young protesters camped at Jantar Mantar, the traditional home of dissent in the capital, demanding accountability for repeated leaks in the NEET and CBSE examinations. On 25 July, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. The government followed with a bill to tighten the public examinations law. For a movement barely two months old, it was an astonishing scalp. Emboldened, the movement turned to a far larger target. In late September, the Indian Express reported that two election commissioners had raised concerns with Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at least fourteen times in ten months, largely over the revision of voter lists. The Associated Press reports that more than 130 million names have been removed from the rolls since last year. Opposition parties allege the lists were manipulated in favour of the ruling BJP, which defends the exercise as a cleaning out of duplicate and ineligible entries. The Election Commission denies any wrongdoing and insists its actions were lawful. The Cockroach Janta Party demanded Kumar's resignation within 48 hours, launched protests in Mumbai on 2 October and carried them to Delhi, where the crackdown awaited. Dipke and two fellow leaders were released the following day on condition of "no breach of peace for one year", and promptly vowed to keep going. The movement has already split into rival factions, a reminder that leaderless anger is easier to ignite than to steer. Across the Line of Control, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which Islamabad calls Azad Jammu and Kashmir, has been in revolt all summer. The trigger came on 7 June, when the region's Supreme Court ruled that 12 of the 45 seats in its legislature, reserved for refugees living elsewhere in Pakistan, were constitutionally protected. Protesters see the seats as a back door for Islamabad to control local politics. Clashes in Rawalakot that same day left at least eleven dead, among them police officers, and by July protesters were marching on Muzaffarabad and boycotting the regional election. Authorities banned the Joint Awami Action Committee, leading it under anti-terrorism law. The committee grew out of earlier anger over electricity bills and wheat shortages, and it is a coalition of traders and civil groups rather than a Gen Z brand, yet its grievances of an unaccountable elite and a voice denied are the same ones echoing through every other square in this story. In France, the revolt began not in universities but in high schools. From late September, pupils blockaded lycées across the country over teacher shortages, classes of 32 to 35 pupils, crumbling buildings and the relentless stress of Parcoursup, the national university admissions platform. At the peak, more than a thousand schools were disrupted on a single day. The response was severe. By 6 October the Justice Ministry counted over 5,000 arrests, 87 per cent of them minors, and several teenagers suffered life-changing injuries. The government blamed the hard left, yet a Le Figaro poll found 62 per cent of the French considered the movement justified. Within days, the blockades leapt the border. On 1 October, secondary pupils in Liège walked out of class, and the protests soon spread to Mons, Charleroi and Brussels. Their complaints echoed those of their French neighbours almost word for word: overcrowded classrooms, too few teachers and too little access to basic study materials. University students added a grievance of their own, a rise in annual fees across French-speaking Belgium from €835 to €1,194, which had already sparked angry demonstrations in Brussels over the summer. One student admitted that the French protests "did influence us a little", a modest phrase for a contagion that crossed a frontier in un