Top Stories 26/05/25 Cockroaches bug India’s Narendra Modi and his court

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The satirical political movement still in the ether of social media has made the ruler look small, and a little naked

The Cockroach Janta Party (Cockroach People's Party), or CJP is a parody of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014. The CJP is not a formal political party but an online movement built around political satire. (Photo: Facebook)

By John Dayal

Published: May 25, 2026 02:34 AM GMT

Updated: May 25, 2026 02:40 AM GMT

India’s Chief Justice has become, unwittingly, the father of a universe of cockroaches which have come to bug the Narendra Modi government as no one, man or insect, could do since it came to power in May 2014.

The word Justice Surya Kant used in contempt has returned as a parody, slogan, badge, song, meme, and a mock party — the insult multiplying faster than the system expected.

The newly christened Cockroach Janta Party (CJP or Cockroach People’s Party) is now laughing at the court, mocking the regime, demanding accountability from the education establishment, and challenging the smugness of Modi’s culture that has perfected spectacle, ignoring education, employment, science, health and public welfare.

The CJP was born after the Chief Justice referred to some unemployed youth as “cockroaches and parasites of society.”

Reuters reported that Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Boston-based political communications strategist who once worked for the Aam Admi Party (AAP or Common Man’s Party), founded the group soon after the Chief Justice made the remark. Within days, it had nearly 15 million Instagram followers and more than 400,000 sign-ups, with about 70 percent of members aged 19 to 25 years.

The group calls itself the “Voice of the lazy and unemployed,” a satire that seeks to become the voice of the unemployed graduate, the failed exam candidate, contract and gig workers, the Kota city coaching-center survivor, the young woman harassed beyond belief, and the middle-aged family man crushed by rising prices.

Modi can face power, as he has shown in a hundred elections in 12 years, but being the butt of a joke, or a meme ridiculing his regime, gets under his skin — much as his friend and US President Donald Trump uses all his might to try to crush Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert of the late-night shows.

The CJP is still in the ether of social media, with no footprints, but it has made the ruler look small and a little naked.

Its early demands, including anger over education failures and calls for accountability, are not yet a program, but they mark the pain of unemployment, exam scams, institutional arrogance, media capture, inflation, and the feeling that the state sees young citizens not as human beings but as a nuisance.

For Modi, education has rarely been the moral center of politics, appearing mostly as a slogan, skilling, branding, digital promise, or ideological correction, spending only 2.4-2.6 percent of the budget in the last two years.

Science, too, has been narrowed in public imagination, with its political focus narrowed to missiles, satellites, drones, border technology, and military hardware with theatrical celebration, especially when Pakistan is the implied enemy.

Public health science, climate science, nutrition, school laboratories, university autonomy, social science, and independent research do not receive the same political affection.

The economy follows the same pattern, and though in reality tycoons and crony capitalists like Adani and Ambani may not yet be the mythical gods of wealth, the proximity between state power and a few giant conglomerates has become a defining feature of the Modi era.

Reuters also reported this month that the Gautam Adani Group is restructuring internally to accelerate growth across its businesses, which include a large chunk of its print, electronic, and digital media, apart from oil and gas, ports and airports, and mining minerals in the Indigenous tribal belt.

The economy appears organized around the already powerful, while small traders, farmers, informal workers, and job-seeking youth are told to wait.

This is why the cockroach metaphor has stuck — the insect survives living in cracks, kitchens, drains, and darkness, despised but difficult to kill.

The CJP has taken that metaphor and made it political. The joke says: you called us pests; we will now swarm your imagination.

Yet, for the moment, Modi has little to fear.

The CJP has no boots on the ground — it has anger in the chest and Wi-Fi in the mobile phone with Instagram, X, reels, screenshots, parody songs, digital forms, and young people laughing in private while fearing public action.

It does not yet have ward committees, campus cells, trade union links, Dalit slum organizers, women’s collectives, minority networks, farmer alliances, legal aid desks, or booth-level discipline — great screen visibility, but no structure.

Modi, by contrast, commands the hard state — the world’s largest armed forces, with roughly 1.45 million active military personnel, a million para-military troops, and another million or so cops with the state governments.

He and his federal home minister, the dour Amit Shah, have repeatedly shown they will not hesitate to use all this power; the most recent was in the recent State assembly elections, particularly in West Bengal, where they muffled or suffocated voices and political noise with equal professionalism.

Citizens know how the coercive arm of the state is experienced on the ground, as students, farmers, minorities, Dalits, tribal people, journalists, workers, and protestors have often encountered the police not as neutral guardians of liberty but as agents of discipline.

The government’s response to the CJP already shows the reflex; its X account was withheld in India, and more may follow.

Modi has survived serious pressure from mass movements, the farmers’ protests, civil society, Muslim resistance to the Citizenship Amendment Act, unemployment demonstrations, student agitations, criticism of Manipur, attempts at opposition unity, and international scrutiny.

Between him and Amit Shah, they know how to outwait dissent, brand and delegitimize protestors as anti-national, foreign-funded, Khalistani, Islamist, missionary, toolkit conspirators, urban Naxals, casteist, separatist, Pakistani, or Western agents.

That’s a shortlist — the jails are full of young men and women, many with a PhD or more in their bag, jailed without the benefit of the bail that was their right.

CJP, whose birth reminds old journalists of the students’ agitation against reservation or affirmative action programs in 1985 and 1990, and the India Against Corruption movement in 2011, appears yet an amateur bubble with a suspected pedigree and a predicted short life.

The “Party” has no agenda for the poor of this vast land — the Dalits and tribal people, the landless poor, religious minorities, and other marginalized sections of society. CJP’s weakness becomes clear when one asks what it says about minorities and the very poor.

A movement that does not speak of the very poor and the marginalized will remain a lower-middle-class complaint.

This was AAP’s limitation, which emerged from anti-corruption anger, not from a deep theory of caste, labor, minority rights, or economic justice. It turned moral disgust into electoral success in Delhi and Punjab, but its ideological vacuity remains.

CJP risks repeating that path faster as its vocabulary is singularly bereft of Marx, Gandhi, Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar, Lohia, constitutional secularism, feminist politics, labor, or serious economics.

At this stage, there are no worries if the “movement” takes the rather controlled path of the Gen Z uprising in Nepal, which led to the installation of a young government without much bloodshed or anxiety in the international sphere, or if it emerges as a clone of Bangladesh, with right-wing fundamentalists wresting control.

The CJP is perhaps best understood as a pressure signal, not a revolution, of the digitally connected class, which can laugh but cannot march on the roads of New Delhi.

Political observers describe CJP as a rally inside a phone, the fury of people who know something is wrong but have not built the courage, alliances, or leadership to confront it in the street.

Modi’s smugness rests on this, for the intelligence bureau tells him that anger exists, but it is scattered, the youth is divided by caste, the poor by religion.

It is a moot question if the alacrity of the internet and the anonymity of social media can overcome the truth that Western governments weigh democracy against market access and defense deals.

But the CJP has done one thing of value: it has made contempt visible, the seed of mock citizenship.