What started as online satire has spiralled into a mass movement for India’s disaffected youth.
The parody Cockroach Janta Party launched earlier this month and quickly amassed more than 22 million followers on Instagram – more than twice that of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the world’s largest political party.
Rotten places
The Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, was created by Abhijeet Dipke, a public relations student at Boston University in the US. The 30-year-old launched the CJP via social media accounts and a website, inspired by comments from India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant, in which he compared unemployed young people to cockroaches.
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While Kant later clarified his remarks, saying they only referred to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees, his comments drew “considerable ire”, said Al Jazeera, “mainly from Gen Z internet users, as they battle large-scale unemployment, inflation and bitter religious divides” following 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
“Those in power think citizens are cockroaches and parasites,” Dipke told the news site. “They should know that cockroaches breed in rotten places. That’s what India is today.”
With a cockroach as its symbol, the CJP has exploded across social media fed by “memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction” that turned “absurdist humour into protest”, said The Associated Press. One million people have signed up to join the movement in the past week with “its tongue-in-cheek membership criteria” including “being unemployed, lazy, chronically online and capable of ranting professionally”.
“I don’t expect CJP to become a functioning political party, but its rapid growth sends a message to the ruling party that many, especially the youth, are unhappy with corruption and the economy”, 29-year-old digital marketer Oindrila Mohinta told The Telegraph India.
Neither side listening
After the CJP’s X account was blocked as a result of a “legal demand”, supporters flooded social media with claims the Indian government was behind the suspension, suggesting the movement had “rattled” the “establishment”, said The Times of India. Dipke has accused the government of trying to take down the movement’s official website, and claimed his personal Instagram account had also been hacked.
However, “the opposition should be careful before celebrating the CJP as a ready-made, anti-BJP youth wave”, said Rasheed Kidwai for NDTV. “Gen Z’s irritation with the ruling establishment is real” but “it does not automatically convert into faith in the opposition”.
“The viral success of the Cockroach Janata Party should not be seen only as a dissent against the ruling party but also a mirror to the opposition,” poll strategist Naresh Arora wrote on X. “India’s Gen Z youth feel neither side is listening to them.”
The CJP as an entity “may disappear within months”, said Vivek Surendran in The Indian Express. “Internet movements often burn intensely and collapse without consequence”. However, the message to the political establishment is that “inspirational” messaging is no longer cutting through with cynical younger voters: “what large sections of young Indians want is recognition of their exhaustion”.
