When the Gagged Speak as Cockroach!

By Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury

The Judge Speaks — and 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% 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."  — Abhijeet Dipke, Founding President, CJP

Abhijeet 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 come together?' He launched the Cockroach Janta Party (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.

The Anatomy of a Gagged Republic

To understand why a mocking online platform exploded into a mass movement, one must first understand the pressure cooker it emerged from. 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 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 judiciary independence is questioned, and where constitutional language is invoked while its spirit is hollowed out. This is what scholars call 'executive aggrandizement' — 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% among 15-29-year-olds nationally, rising to 13.6% in urban areas per official 2025 data — and 40% 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 persists despite decades of constitutional promise. For Dalits and minorities, the intersection of economic exclusion and everyday humiliation — sharpened under a political climate where 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, 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 elimination of the last relatively free space in Indian public life. When the street is watched, the university is cautious, the newsroom is pressured, and the social media handle is next — the pressure-cooker either explodes or finds strange release valves. The Cockroach Janta Party was one such valve.

Why the Old Parties Cannot Hear the Roach Underthe Floor

The rise of the CJP exposes a structural failure that both the ruling establishment and the main opposition parties must confront — though neither shows signs of doing so. The BJP has, over its decade in power, mastered the art of translating popular 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, entirely incapable of genuinely 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 main 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 mass anger into sustained organisational imagination. Opposition parties endorse viral outrage. They sign up to 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 act collectively and sustainably.

This is precisely the vacuum the CJP walked into. 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 voice of the helpless 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 is worth heeding.

Twenty-Two Million Cockroaches: The Digital Public Square

The numbers demand attention. In less than a week, the CJP amassed over 22 million Instagram followers, nearly 4 lakhGoogle Form sign-ups for 'membership,' and over 2 lakh X followers before that 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, 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 just a curiosity. They represent the aggregate of India's unexpressed political frustration finding a language — absurdist, mocking, self-deprecating, but unmistakably political. The hashtag #MainBhiCockroach ('I too am a cockroach') became a shorthand for a shared identity of exclusion. Students who had endured NEET paper leaks joined alongside informal workers invisible to policy, alongside women tired of being spoken about rather than heard, alongside Dalit youth who had faced casteist abuse online the moment they raised their voices, alongside minority citizens who felt the weight of majoritarian suspicion in every institutional encounter.

The CJP manifesto — even in its satirical register — made five serious demands: a ban on post-retirement rewards for judges, 50% reservation of Parliament and Cabinet seats for women, protection of voting rights, an independent press, and a 20-year ban on political party-switching. 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 state of India's democratic public sphere.

The State Blinks — and in Blinking, Reveals Everything

Nothing has validated the CJP's central thesis more powerfully than the Indian government's response to it. 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 been blocked. The Instagram account, with over 16 million followers at the time, was placed under surveillance. Impersonation accounts created to confuse supporters were reportedly linked to ruling-party digital operatives.

The intimidation did not stop at digital platforms. AbhijeetDipke, 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 face being 'killed in America.' Another implied the sender had knowledge of his parents' location in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra. His parents, alarmed, reportedly begged him to abandon the project. The Print reported messages suggesting they would find his address 'in no time.' Dipke posted publicly: 'Nobody's family should be hounded.' He declined to shut down. 'Cockroaches never die,' he wrote.

"You can hack and withhold the accounts but you cannot hack this movement. Every attack makes cockroaches stronger."  — Abhijeet Dipke, May 23, 2026

The political conspiracy theories arrived in rapid succession, each more implausible than the last. Because Dipke had volunteered for the Aam Aadmi Party between 2020 and 2023, the movement was branded an 'AAP venture' designed to stealth-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 and the American Deep State were invoked. Pakistan-based botaccounts were cited. Former civil servant Ashish Joshi quit the movement demanding transparency, while educationist Sandeep Manudhane publicly warned citizens to 'beware' of the enterprise. All of this, in response to a satirical Instagramaccount run by a PR student.

The paradox is worth dwelling on. A regime that routinely claims strength, mandate, and popular legitimacy treated a satirical movement — whose own manifesto was framed as absurdist comedy — as a national security threat severe enough to invoke intelligence bureau action, platform suppression, and the intimidation of a founder's elderly parents. As opposition legislator Shashi Tharoor noted, this response tells us far more about the government's anxieties than about the CJP's power. The overreaction is, as the CJP's supporters have correctly noted, not a refutation of the movement's diagnosis — it is its confirmation.

Broad Conclusions: Frustration Has Gone Subterranean

Several conclusions emerge from this episode with uncomfortable clarity. The first is that India's democraticfrustration is no longer episodic or single-issue. The CJP's traction cannot be explained by any one grievance — not exam paper leaks alone, not unemployment alone, not judicial insensitivity alone. What the movement crystallised is 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 single collective experience of being ungoverned rather than governed, of being managed rather than represented.

The second conclusion is that India's democratic crisis has both an institutional and a psychological dimension. Many citizens continue to vote enthusiastically. But the reduction of democratic participation to periodic voting — while everyday forms of protest are delegitimised, surveilled, or criminalised— produces what might be called thin democracy: the form without the substance, the ritual without the meaning. When constitutional rights must be exercised in cockroach costume to avoid suppression, the form of democracy has survived but its spirit has been evacuated.

Third: digital mobilisation is now the de facto public square for India's youth — and it is a dangerously fragile one. Accounts can be suspended, withheld, throttled, flooded with impersonators, or drowned in organised trolling. The CJP's rapid encounter with platform suppression, just days after its founding, illustrates that the digital sphere — though vast — is ultimately navigable by state power. Section 69(A) of the IT Act is a blunt instrument, but it is available, and the current establishment has demonstrated no reluctance to use it.

Fourth and 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 hearing produced solidarity at scale, across class, caste, gender and regional lines, with remarkable speed. When the powerful call the powerless parasites, they sometimes inadvertently create the very mass identity they sought to dismiss.

Three Futures: Dissipation, Civic Pressure, or Political Formation

The CJP now stands at a crossroads with three plausible trajectories. The first and most likely, absent deliberate strategy, is dissipation. Many online movements burn bright and briefly — a viral event, a few petitions, some international coverage, and then gradual fade under the twin pressures of state intimidation and audience fatigue. The platform suppressions have already begun. Dipke has expressed intent to continue, but the movement's leadership remains concentrated in one person, operating from abroad, without formal structure or legal infrastructure in India.

The second route is becoming a sustained civic pressure platform — and this is the most strategically viable path. The CJP need not contest elections to matter. It can 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 can build issue papers, coordinate legal challenges, and link its digitally native base with the offline struggles of farmers' movements, trade unions, women's groups and Dalit rights organisations. This is the 'societal engine' that the V-Dem Institute's research identifies as essential to democratic defence — and democratic recovery.

The third route is political formation — the riskiest and most complex path. A transition to formal party status would expose the CJP to legal scrutiny, resource constraints, ideological incoherence, infiltration, and the perennial risk of personality cult. If it moves too fast, it fractures. If it delays too long, it loses momentum. The challenge, if this path is chosen, is building organisation without being captured — by partisan interests, by state surveillance, or by the very electoral arithmetic it seeks to disrupt.

What Must Be Done: From Digital Catharsis to Democratic Architecture

If CJP's founders and supporters intend something more than a cathartic meme, specific institutional discipline is required. Transparent funding — crowdsourced, publicly audited, with no corporate or partisan dependencies — is non-negotiable if conspiracy allegations are to be pre-empted rather than merely rebutted. Decentralised leadership is equally essential: a movement that lives or dies with Dipke's personal safety and freedom of movement is a movement with a single point of failure that the state has already demonstrated willingness to target.

A legal defence team and digital security infrastructure are urgent necessities, not optional add-ons. The CJP must also build a moderation and fact-checking unit — not only to repel state-directed trolling, but to ensure the movement does not itself become a vehicle 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 needed to define what the CJP stands for, not merely what it stands against.

Most critically, the CJP must migrate from anger to agenda. Sonam Wangchuk, who declared himself an 'honorary cockroach,' understood instinctively that the movement'sresonance comes from its emotional authenticity — but emotional authenticity without programmatic clarity cannot generate lasting policy change. The isolated acts of symbolic protest — volunteers dressed as cockroaches cleaning the Yamuna riverbank, local rallies in Rohtak, the Bengaluruhuman chain that was pre-emptively denied permission by police citing a High Court order — must evolve into a coordinated national strategy of non-violent civic resistance rooted in specific, achievable demands.

What This Means for Indian Democracy: The Elected Autocracy Looks into the Mirror

The CJP experiment is the most vivid commentary on the state of Indian democracy in the 21st century precisely because it was not designed to be commentary at all. It began as absurdist humour and became political diagnosis. And what it has diagnosed — corroborated by V-Dem data, by independent economic research, by the plain evidence of the government's response — is a democracy that continues to hold elections while systematically eliminating the conditions that make elections meaningful.

V-Dem's classification of India as an 'electoral autocracy' is contested by the ruling establishment, which regards the label as foreign interference or opposition propaganda. But the CJP episode gives that classification a lived texture that no dataset alone can supply. Elections continue — but fear spreads. Citizens speak — but often through parody, because direct speech has been made costly. Youth organise — but accounts are withheld by intelligence directive. A founder's family is threatened because a satirical Instagram account became inconveniently popular. Constitutional language is invoked — 'peaceful, democratic, within the Constitution,' as Dipkehimself repeatedly and deliberately emphasised — and the response is blocking, surveillance, conspiracy theories, and WhatsApp death threats.

This is precisely what democratic erosion looks like in its 21st-century form. Not tanks. Not midnight arrests of all opposition leaders. Not the abolition of elections. Instead: the incremental normalisation of intimidation, the weaponisationof digital infrastructure against citizen expression, the deployment of conspiracy theories to delegitimise dissent before it can crystallise into organisation, and the cultivation of a climate in which the rational response to public engagement is private fear.

The task before India — before its citizens, its opposition, its institutions, and its civil society — is not to crush the cockroach metaphor but to listen to why 22 million people sought shelter in it. India's democracy has survived worse crises, including the Emergency of 1975-77, when the comparison with today is not merely rhetorical but is being made by serious constitutional scholars who lived through both. It survived because citizens acted — in courts, in newspapers, in elections, in streets, in cultural resistance. The question is whether the current generation of citizens, faced with a more sophisticated and digitally equipped form of democratic erosion, will find equivalent resolve.

"Democracy survives not when power is protected from citizens, but when citizens are protected from power.

Whether the Cockroach Janta Party fades into internet memory or evolves into a catalyst for democratic renewal remains genuinely open. But its legacy is already secure: it has revealed the depth of a nation's frustration, the fragility of a regime's confidence, and the endurance — even in the most suffocating political conditions — of the human impulse to mock the oppressor and insist on dignity. Cockroaches, as Abhijeet Dipke noted, never die. In the context of India's receding democracy, one can only hope the same holds true for the voice of youth.

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