Like many things these days, it began with someone saying something they probably shouldn’t have. Last Friday, while in open court, Chief Justice Surya Kant used a word that wasn’t meant to land the way it did. He referred to some young people without jobs as “cockroaches.” even parasites. The kind of casual comment that a senior judge might say and then forget about by lunch.
Within twenty-four hours, Abhijeet Dipke, a thirty-year-old PR graduate who was sitting somewhere between Boston and Chicago, posted a question on X that sounded like a half-dare, half-joke: what if all the cockroaches came together? With the aid of AI tools that he freely acknowledges using, he created a website, an Instagram account, and a manifesto over night. The Cockroach Janata Party was established by the time the majority of Indians awoke on Sunday morning. In a way.
Technically speaking, it is nothing. There isn’t an office. No Election Commission registration. No flag-bearers, no cadres, no dusty maidan rallies. Instead, there is a logo of a cockroach climbing across a smartphone screen and, depending on the day you check, between 15 and 19 million Instagram followers—a number that has, somewhat absurdly, surpassed the BJP’s official account. According to its own account, a joke that started five days ago is now dominating the platform of the biggest political party in the world.
On paper, the requirements for membership are absurd. You have to be unemployed. sluggish. online all the time. The founder maintains that they are also capable of “ranting professionally.” Over 400,000 people have registered using the Google form, and more than 70% of them are in the 19–25 age range. The numbers seem more like a confession than a joke.
It’s difficult to ignore what lies beneath all of this. Approximately one-third of India’s eight million graduates each year are unemployed. Urban youth between the ages of 15 and 29 have a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 13.6%, which has not significantly changed in years. The same week the CJP was introduced, a Deloitte survey revealed that over half of India’s Gen Z is postponing marriage, starting a family, and purchasing a home. Basically, delaying life. The cockroach is breeding in that soil.
The political elite soon became aware of this. The opposition MP, Mahua Moitra, registered. Kirti Azad did the same. Even Ashish Joshi, a sixty-year-old federal bureaucrat who recently retired, joined, telling reporters that the party was “a breath of fresh air” in a nation where people had become too scared to speak. The fact that a sixty-something civil servant finds comfort in a movement named after a kitchen pest is telling.
No one, not even Dipke, seems to be able to answer the question of whether any of this turns into a significant political force. When making comparisons to Bangladesh or Nepal, where Gen Z protests recently overthrew governments, he is cautious—almost cagey. He is adamant that the CJP will remain online, peaceful, and constitutional. However, he also told Reuters that the movement “has the potential to change the politics of India,” a statement that sounded staged only because it was likely accurate.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Indian satire has a tendency to shine brightly before quietly fading away and returning to the meme economy that gave rise to it. But as you watch this play out, you get the impression that something has changed a little. Years ago, Dipke briefly collaborated with the Aam Aadmi Party, which began as an outsider movement that no one took seriously. That didn’t go as planned.
The cockroaches are crawling for the time being. The chief justice has explained what he said. Notably, the BJP has remained silent. Even though the megaphone is shaped like a bug, a generation that was told it didn’t matter is being heard for the first time in a long time.