On May 16, just days ago, a satirical political outfit called the Cockroach Janta Party was born in India. Its name was lifted straight from an insult. Its membership hit 2 million in four days. Its Instagram following crossed 9 million, overtaking the Insta following of one of the world’s largest political parties, the BJP. It is spreading, as its founders declared with cheerful self-awareness, “like cockroaches.”
The trigger was a remark made by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant during a Supreme Court hearing on May 15. He reportedly said there were youngsters “like cockroaches” who, failing to find employment or a foothold in law, turned to social media and RTI activism to “attack the system.” The CJI later clarified that he had been misrepresented, that his comments were aimed specifically at fake degree holders infiltrating noble professions, not at unemployed youth broadly—a reasonable enough clarification. But the clarification arrived too late to stop what had already been set in motion.
Because the young people of India did not wait for context. They recognised something in that word, cockroach, that landed with a specific and familiar sting. They had heard it before, not from this CJI specifically, but from the ambient noise of a system that consistently frames their unemployment as a character flaw rather than a structural failure. And so they did what this generation does: they turned the insult into an identity. They built a party around it.
Watching this unfold from afar as an Indian, I felt the peculiar doubled vision. One part of me laughed out loud. The name, the manifesto, the satirical admission of politicians like Mahua Moitra and Kirti Azad as members, and the sheer chaotic energy of it all were genuinely funny in the way that only the most desperate political creativity can be. Abhijeet Dipke, the 30-year-old PR student at Boston University and former Aam Aadmi Party social media producer, who founded The Cockroach Janta Party, is doing something that deserves to be taken seriously, even if the form it takes is a joke.
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But the other part of me felt the weight of what this moment reveals.
India’s youth unemployment is not a punchline. It is one of the most urgent crises facing the country’s future, and it has been treated, for too long, as background noise. The young people joining the Cockroach Janta Party in millions are not idiots playing on their phones. Many are educated, credentialed, capable, and locked out. They scroll job boards the way a previous generation scanned newspaper classifieds, with the same mixture of hope and dread. When a figure of the CJI’s stature, in a courtroom of that authority, reaches for the word “cockroach,” even if the intent was narrower, it tells you something about how the system perceives the surplus youth it has failed to absorb.
For Indians living overseas
This story carries a particular resonance. Most did not leave out of indifference to home but out of a quiet frustration with a system that kept promising and underdelivering. They studied hard, earned their degrees, did what was expected, and still found opportunity just out of reach. So they left, building lives in Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US while carrying India with them in their food, their festivals, and their homesickness.
Watching this generation face versions of the same wall, and now being labelled cockroaches for their trouble, is not easy to sit with. Because the country has grown. The GDP numbers are strong. The infrastructure is transforming. And yet here are millions of young Indians, rallying in six days behind an insect because it is the only symbol that feels honest.
The diaspora did not leave because they stopped believing in India. Many left because India could not find room for them at the time. That is the uncomfortable conversation the Cockroach Janata Party is quietly forcing, whether anyone in power is ready to have it or not.
What makes the Cockroach Janata Party interesting, beyond the memes, is that it is not nihilistic. Its manifesto reportedly includes constitutional values alongside the satire. Its mission statement talks about building a party for young people who keep getting called lazy, chronically online, and now, most recently, cockroaches. That is not a movement that has given up on India. That is a movement that is furious enough to fight for it, even if the only tools currently available are irony and Instagram.
Satire has always been the weapon of those who have no other. From theatrical provocations to the long tradition of political cartoons that said what newspapers would not, India has a proud lineage of using absurdity to speak truth. The CJP fits squarely within that tradition.
Whether it remains a joke or becomes something more, I genuinely do not know. Political satire movements have a habit of burning bright and fading fast. The millions of members may not translate into ballot boxes. The Instagram followers may drift towards the next trending moment. But the anger that created the CJP will not evaporate. It will look for another form.
Anyone tempted to dismiss the cockroaches: underestimating them is exactly what created them.
