A Nation Hears Its Own Name
On May 15, 2026, a Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant was hearing a contempt petition about fraudulent professional credentials. What followed was unremarkable in juridical terms but seismic in political ones. The chief justice, speaking from the highest bench in the land, reportedly compared unemployed youth who drift into activism, journalism and RTI-filing to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society”. He later insisted that his remarks were aimed specifically at those wielding fake degrees, not at unemployed youth broadly. But the damage, as they say in Delhi, was done.
In a nation of 1.4 billion people, where 40 per cent of graduates aged 25 and younger are currently unemployed, a figure cited by the Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2026 report, those three words landed not as a clarification, but as a confession. They confirmed what tens of millions of Indians had long suspected: that the powerful regard the struggling masses not as citizens deserving redress, but as inconvenient noise. Within 24 hours, that noise became a roar. “Those in power think citizens are cockroaches and parasites. They should know that cockroaches breed in rotten places. That’s what India is today,” says Abhijeet Dipke, Founding President, Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).
Dipke, a 30-year-old Boston University public relations student and former political communications strategist, posted a simple question on X (formerly Twitter) the following day: ‘What if all cockroaches came together?’ He launched the CJP, a satirical, unregistered digital movement, on May 16, 2026. The name was a pointed play on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Its eligibility criteria were stripped of all pretence: to join, one needed only to be unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and capable of “ranting professionally”. Within a week, the CJP amassed over 22 million Instagram followers, more than double the BJP’s official account, a party that has governed India for over a decade and describes itself as the world’s largest political organisation.
A Democracy Under Pressure
To understand why a mocking online platform exploded into a mass movement, one must first understand the pressure cooker from which it emerged. India’s democratic decline is no longer a matter of academic debate. The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2026 classifies India as an “electoral autocracy”, a status it has held since 2017. According to the report, the average global citizen’s experience of democracy has regressed to 1978 levels; in South and Central Asia, the decline is even steeper, reaching benchmarks last seen in 1976, a trajectory driven substantially by India’s democratic backsliding.
The term “electoral autocracy” requires unpacking. It does not describe a country without elections. India holds them with remarkable efficiency and scale. What it describes is a country where elections persist, but the ecosystem around them decays: where the press faces structural intimidation; where civil society organisations are regulated into submission or delegitimised as foreign agents; where opposition leaders face investigative agency raids timed to electoral cycles; where judicial independence is questioned; and where constitutional language is invoked even as its spirit is hollowed out. This is what scholars call “executive aggrandisement”: elected leaders slowly capturing the institutions designed to constrain them.
The casualties are not abstract. For India’s educated unemployed, the daily reality is an unemployment rate of 9.9 per cent among 15-29-year-olds nationally, rising to 13.6 per cent in urban areas, according to official 2025 data, and 40 per cent among graduates under 25, by independent estimates. For the labouring poor, gig-economy exploitation and the collapse of formal employment guarantees define survival. For women, persistent under-representation in Parliament, Cabinets and party leadership continues despite decades of constitutional promise. For Dalits and minorities, the intersection of economic exclusion and everyday humiliation, sharpened by a political climate in which majoritarian identity politics has become the dominant grammar of governance, renders citizenship itself precarious. For all of them, the traditional channels of democratic expression, the newsroom, the university, the courtroom and the street protest, have narrowed, been criminalised, or been captured.
In this landscape, a 2026 Draft IT Rules proposal seeking to extend regulatory oversight to independent digital content creators represents not merely a policy measure but the deliberate shrinking of the last relatively free space in Indian public life. When the street is watched, the university is cautious, the newsroom is pressured, and social media is next, the pressure cooker either explodes or finds strange release valves. The Cockroach Janta Party was one such valve.
Why Old Parties Cannot Hear Roach Beneath Floorboards
The rise of the CJP exposes a structural failure that both the ruling establishment and the principal opposition must confront, though neither appears inclined to do so. The BJP has, over its decade in power, mastered the art of converting public anxiety into electoral capital. Economic insecurity becomes nationalist pride. Unemployment becomes the enemy’s sabotage. Dissent becomes anti-nationalism. Critics become urban elites, toolkit operators or foreign-funded conspirators.
This grammar is remarkably effective at winning elections. It is, however, wholly incapable of addressing the grievance of a 24-year-old commerce graduate in Patna who has appeared for 14 competitive examinations, three of which were compromised by paper leaks, and has spent six years waiting for a government job that pays a living wage.
The opposition, primarily the INDIA Bloc alliance led by the Indian National Congress, has legitimate grievances, credible leaders, and occasional moments of potent parliamentary resistance. Yet it too has struggled to convert diffuse public anger into sustained organisational imagination. Opposition parties endorsed the CJP membership drive. Shashi Tharoor told The Indian Express that the CJP’s popularity revealed “the extent to which there is frustration and dissatisfaction among India’s youth”. Mahua Moitra and Kirti Azad enrolled as CJP members. But endorsing a meme is not the same as building the booth-level infrastructure through which the unemployed graduate, the contract labourer, the Dalit student, or the young woman demanding political agency can organise collectively and sustainably.
This is precisely the vacuum into which the CJP stepped. It was not born in a party office. It was born in the gulf between institutional politics and citizen desperation in the space where formal democracy says “vote every five years” but offers no mechanism for the helpless to be heard between elections. As YouTuber Meghnad S observed, the popularity of a satirical non-existent party is “a giant commentary on Indian political parties in general”. That commentary deserves attention.
22 Million ‘Cockroaches’ and Digital Public Square
The numbers demand attention. In less than a week, the CJP amassed over 22 million Instagram followers, nearly 4 lakh Google Form sign-ups for “membership”, and over 2 lakh X followers before the account was withheld in India. By contrast, the BJP, the self-described world’s largest political party, in power for over a decade with the resources of the state and its IT cell, had 8.8 million Instagram followers. The Indian National Congress, the principal opposition party, had 13 million. A satirical movement run by one sleep-deprived 30-year-old from a Chicago apartment had outstripped them both.
These numbers are not merely a curiosity. They represent the aggregation of India’s unexpressed political frustration into a recognisable language: absurdist, mocking, self-deprecating, but unmistakably political. The hashtag #MainBhiCockroach (‘I too am a cockroach’) became shorthand for a shared identity of exclusion. Students affected by NEET paper leaks joined alongside informal workers invisible to policy, women tired of being spoken about rather than heard, Dalit youth subjected to casteist abuse online, and minority citizens weighed down by majoritarian suspicion in everyday institutional life.
The CJP manifesto, even in its satirical register, made five serious demands: a ban on post-retirement rewards for judges, 50% reservation in Parliament and Cabinets for women, protection of voting rights, an independent press, and a 20-year ban on political defections. These are not fringe demands. They are cornerstones of democratic accountability. That they had to be wrapped in cockroach imagery to be heard at scale tells us something profound about the condition of India’s democratic public sphere.
State Blinks, and Reveals Its Anxiety
Nothing validated the CJP’s central thesis more powerfully than the Indian government’s response. Within days of the movement’s launch, the CJP’s official X account, which had gathered over 2 lakh followers, was withheld in India following a directive from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under Section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The stated justification, according to reports citing Intelligence Bureau inputs, was that the account’s content posed risks to “national security and sovereignty”. By May 23, the CJP website itself had reportedly been blocked. The Instagram account, with over 16 million followers at the time, was placed under surveillance. Impersonation accounts allegedly created to confuse supporters were reportedly linked to ruling-party digital operatives.
The intimidation did not stop online. Abhijeet Dipke, physically located in the United States, began sharing WhatsApp screenshots of death threats received from unknown numbers. One message warned him to delete the CJP account and join the BJP, or risk being “killed in America”. Another implied that the sender knew his parents’ location in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra. Alarmed, his parents reportedly begged him to abandon the project. The Print reported messages claiming the senders would find his address “in no time”. Dipke posted publicly: “Nobody’s family should be hounded”. He refused to shut down the movement. “Cockroaches never die”, he wrote.
Political conspiracy theories followed in rapid succession. Because Dipke had volunteered for the Aam Aadmi Party between 2020 and 2023, the movement was branded an “AAP venture” designed to stealthily destroy democratic opposition space. Former minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar described the CJP as a “cross-border influence operation targeting Prime Minister Modi”. Union minister Sukanta Majumdar alleged suspicious patterns in the movement’s overseas follower base. The CIA, the American Deep State and Pakistan-based bot accounts were all invoked. Former civil servant Ashish Joshi quit the movement demanding transparency, while educationist Sandeep Manudhane publicly warned citizens to “beware” of the enterprise.
All this in response to a satirical Instagram account run by a PR student.
The paradox is striking. A regime that routinely projects strength, mandate and overwhelming popular legitimacy treated a satirical movement whose own manifesto was framed as absurdist comedy, as a national security threat severe enough to justify intelligence intervention, platform suppression and the intimidation of a founder’s elderly parents. As opposition MP Shashi Tharoor observed, the response revealed far more about the government’s anxieties than about the CJP’s actual power.
Frustration Has Gone Underground
Several uncomfortable conclusions emerge from this episode.
First, India’s democratic frustration is no longer episodic or single-issue. The CJP’s traction cannot be explained solely by unemployment, paper leaks or judicial insensitivity. What the movement crystallised was a cumulative emotional economy of resentment, in which joblessness, inflation, caste humiliation, communal anxiety, institutional distrust, gender exclusion and media capture have fused into a shared experience of being managed rather than represented.
Second, India’s democratic crisis is both institutional and psychological. Citizens still vote enthusiastically. But reducing democratic participation to periodic voting while everyday dissent is delegitimised, surveilled or criminalised produces what may be called a thin democracy: form without substance, ritual without meaning.
Third, digital mobilisation has become the de facto public square for India’s youth, and an alarmingly fragile one. Accounts can be suspended, throttled, flooded with impersonators or buried beneath organised trolling. The CJP’s encounter with platform suppression illustrates that the digital sphere, however vast, remains vulnerable to state power.
Finally, contempt can become combustible. The chief justice’s remarks, whatever their intended target, were heard by millions as elite disdain for the structurally excluded. That perception produced solidarity across class, caste, gender and regional lines with remarkable speed. When the powerful call the powerless parasites, they sometimes end up forging the very collective identity they sought to dismiss.
Futures for CJP
The CJP now stands at a crossroads with three plausible trajectories.
The first, and perhaps most likely, is dissipation. Many online movements flare brightly and then fade under the combined pressures of state intimidation and audience fatigue. Platform suppression has already begun. Dipke remains determined, but the movement’s leadership is still heavily concentrated in one individual operating from abroad, without formal structure or legal infrastructure inside India.
The second possibility is evolution into a sustained civic pressure platform — arguably the most strategically viable route. The CJP need not contest elections to matter. It could become a constitutional youth accountability forum focused on employment, exam integrity, women’s political representation, RTI campaigns, anti-caste protections, minority rights, judicial accountability and media independence. It could link its digitally native support base with farmers’ movements, trade unions, women’s organisations and Dalit-rights groups.
The third route is formal political transformation, by far the riskiest path. A transition into a registered political party would expose the CJP to legal scrutiny, resource shortages, ideological incoherence and infiltration. Move too quickly, and it fractures. Move too slowly, and it loses momentum.
From Digital Catharsis to Democratic Architecture
If the CJP intends to become more than a cathartic meme, institutional discipline will be indispensable. Transparent funding, crowdsourced, publicly audited and free from corporate or partisan dependence, is essential if conspiracy theories are to be pre-empted rather than merely rebutted. Decentralised leadership is equally important: a movement dependent entirely on Dipke’s personal safety and mobility possesses an obvious vulnerability.
A legal defence team and digital security infrastructure are urgent necessities, not optional additions. The movement also requires moderation and fact-checking mechanisms to prevent itself from degenerating into a platform for misinformation, hate speech or mob behaviour. A clear constitutional charter, explicitly committed to non-violence, anti-caste equality, gender justice, secular citizenship, labour dignity and institutional accountability, is necessary to define what the CJP stands for, not merely what it opposes.
Most importantly, the movement must evolve from anger to agenda. Sonam Wangchuk, who declared himself an ‘honorary cockroach’, instinctively understood that emotional authenticity alone cannot produce enduring policy change. Symbolic protests, volunteers dressed as cockroaches cleaning the Yamuna riverbank, rallies in Rohtak, or the Bengaluru human chain, reportedly denied police permission, must eventually develop into a coordinated strategy of non-violent civic resistance anchored in specific demands.
When an ‘Electoral Autocracy’ Looks in the Mirror
The CJP experiment may be the sharpest commentary yet on the state of Indian democracy precisely because it was never designed to become commentary. It began as absurdist humour and evolved into political diagnosis.
And what it diagnosed, reinforced by V-Dem data, independent economic research and the government’s own response, is a democracy that still conducts elections while steadily eroding the conditions that make elections meaningful.
V-Dem’s classification of India as an “electoral autocracy” is fiercely contested by the ruling establishment, which dismisses the label as foreign interference or opposition propaganda. Yet the CJP episode lends that classification a lived texture that statistics alone cannot provide. Elections continue, but fear deepens. Citizens speak, but often through parody, because direct speech has become costly. Youth organise, but accounts are withheld under intelligence directives. Families are threatened because a satirical Instagram account became inconveniently popular.
This is what democratic erosion looks like in the 21st century. Not tanks. Not mass midnight arrests. Not the formal abolition of elections. Instead, the gradual normalisation of intimidation, the weaponisation of digital infrastructure against dissent, and the cultivation of a climate in which public engagement increasingly produces private fear.
The task before India, before its citizens, opposition parties, institutions and civil society, is not to suppress the cockroach metaphor, but to understand why 22 million people embraced it.
Whether the CJP fades into internet memory or evolves into a catalyst for democratic renewal remains uncertain. But its legacy is already secure. It has exposed the depth of public frustration, the fragility of political confidence, and the enduring human impulse to mock power and insist upon dignity even under suffocating political conditions.
Cockroaches, as Dipke remarked, never die. In the context of India’s receding democracy, one can only hope the same remains true of the voice of its people.
(Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury is an academic and a political commentator)
