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We Are the
Cockroaches
India's Youth, Digital Dissent, and the Democracy That Forgot Them
The Insult That Backfired
Imagine finding a cockroach under your pillow. You leap out of bed. Your skin crawls. Now imagine — the very next morning — you wake up, look in the mirror, and call yourself the cockroach. Proudly. With a party manifesto.
That is what happened in India. India's Chief Justice — in remarks reported by the media, later "clarified" as misquoted — allegedly used the word parasite to describe those with fake degrees sneaking into law and journalism. The word cockroach, as reported, referred to those who had crawled into respectable institutions through dishonest means.
The Chief Justice offered a clarification the very next day. He said the media had misrepresented him. He had not called the public cockroaches. He was speaking about fraudsters in the legal profession.
The forest, however, was already on fire.
The youth of India did not wait for the clarification to settle. They took the word, they wrapped it in a coat and tie, they put a Gandhi cap on it — and they built a party. Welcome to the Cockroach Janata Party.
A Bug Goes Viral: The Numbers
In five days, the Cockroach Janata Party's Instagram account accumulated 15 million followers. Not in an election cycle. Not after years of grinding street protests. In five days — on a platform built for recipe videos and vacation photos.
Rap songs were written about the cockroach. Posters appeared: "Vote for me, I am the CJP candidate." Young Indians did not mourn being called a cockroach. They embraced it — because when the drains of democracy are clogged, cockroaches are precisely who survives.
| Event | Date / Context | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| CJ's reported "cockroach/parasite" remark | Bar Association event, 2024 | Viral outrage on social media |
| Chief Justice's clarification | Next day | Largely ignored; movement already live |
| CJP Instagram account launched | Within days of the remark | 15 million followers in 5 days |
| CJP Twitter handle banned in India | Shortly after launch | Government-directed account suspension |
| Congress protest over NEET paper leak | Rajasthan, concurrent period | Invisible in mainstream media |
Who Is Abhijit Deepke — and What Must He Clarify?
The founder of the Cockroach Janata Party is Abhijit Deepke, a student at Boston University, previously associated with the Aam Aadmi Party. The movement's origin story invites legitimate scrutiny.
Those who remember the India Against Corruption movement — and how the RSS allegedly used it as a runway for AAP's launch, and how many supporters felt cheated afterwards — are now watching CJP with the same suspicious squint. The question being asked aloud: Is BJP behind this? Is the public's anger being rerouted from opposition parties into an Instagram reel?
These are not paranoid questions. They are necessary questions in a democracy where artificial public support has been manufactured before — through EVMs, through blocked votes, through WhatsApp University. When public opinion can be fabricated, a political party too can be fabricated.
Deepke owes his growing constituency a direct answer: Does AAP have any organizational role in CJP's formation? Transparency is not optional when you are positioning yourself as a democratic alternative.
That said — dismissing CJP entirely because of unanswered questions is also unfair. In a democracy where all institutional machinery has been captured, the mere act of imagining a party is itself an act of resistance. Tamil Nadu's TVK party never marched on the streets. It went from a social media presence straight to electoral power. The route has changed. The map is being redrawn.
The Democracy That Is Being Dismantled, Quietly
Why does the cockroach resonate so deeply? Because young Indians are living inside a country where democratic imagination is dying — and they know it, even if they cannot name it.
Look at what happened in West Bengal: 27 lakh people were reportedly prevented from casting their votes. Serious questions arose about vote counting. Central forces visibly and selectively dominated the polling process. One section of the public fell into a stunned silence, wondering: This much happened, and the country's youth said nothing?
Then there is the story of Coastal Energen — a company whose owner was imprisoned for 31 months on fabricated charges, against whom no evidence was produced, while his company was quietly swallowed by others. This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. When the state can imprison a citizen without evidence and absorb his enterprise, it is not justice that is being served. It is intimidation.
In a country like this, democratic imagination does not just weaken. It is murdered. Slowly. Methodically. With a gag and a blindfold.
The Cockroach Janata Party is not a policy document. It is proof that despite everything — despite the media surrender, the institutional capture, the electoral manipulation — the democratic spirit has not been fully exterminated. Cockroaches survive the apocalypse. Perhaps that is the point.
Nav Pratirodh: The New Resistance
A common criticism of CJP is that real politics happens on the street, not on Instagram. This criticism is not wrong. But it is dangerously incomplete.
Consider: Narendra Modi's rise in 2014 was not purely a street movement. WhatsApp University carried fabricated histories into millions of homes. A compliant media built a 24-hour personality cult. The street was only one element of a carefully engineered political machine.
If the ruling establishment can use social media to build and consolidate power, why must the opposition and the citizens be restricted to only marching boots and lathis?
Democracy is not a single exercise. It is a bouquet. Someone marches. Someone sings. Someone makes a YouTube video. Someone builds a satirical party with 15 million followers. All of these are democratic acts. The question is not which form is more legitimate — the question is why the government fears even the satirical ones enough to ban their Twitter handle.
The Godi Media's Comfortable Silence
When the Chief Justice's remark went viral, how many editorials did India's mainstream press write? Count them. Take your time. I'll wait.
While the CJP gathered 15 million followers, India's television studios — those same studios that will devote forty-eight hours to a Pakistani press conference or a celebrity divorce — found no airtime to address whether it was appropriate for a sitting Chief Justice to describe citizens as parasites, or cockroaches, in any context.
At the same time, the Congress party was on the streets of Rajasthan — demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over two separate NEET examination paper leaks. Students cheated. Futures stolen. A government that can conduct a moon mission apparently cannot secure a question paper.
That protest received no coverage in godi media. But if 15 million social media followers amplified it, perhaps the government would feel the weight of that silence becoming a noise it could no longer ignore.
The media's fear of criticizing the judiciary and the government in the same breath has made it useless to the very public it claims to serve.
A Warning to the Opposition
The rise of the Cockroach Janata Party is not just a rebuke of the BJP government. It is a rebuke of the opposition too.
If one young man in Boston — Abhijit Deepke, building a satirical Instagram account — can mobilize 15 million people in five days, what exactly is the Congress doing? What is the Samajwadi Party doing? What is the entire edifice of Indian opposition doing that it cannot create a single moment this electric?
The public is anxious. It is looking left and right for the opposition and finding it only occasionally — flickering like a streetlight at 3 a.m. The opposition must expand its canvas of democratic imagination. It must learn the grammar of the new resistance — not replace street protests, but amplify them. Use every tool. Speak every language. The cockroach survived because it adapted.
Criticisms
- The Modi government's instinct upon seeing 15 million citizens form a satirical political party was not reflection, not dialogue — it was to ban their Twitter handle. This is the action of an administration that is allergic to dissent even in its most theatrical form.
- Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has presided over a catastrophic failure of examination integrity. NEET paper leaks have occurred not once but twice on his watch. He has not resigned, has not been asked to resign by the Prime Minister, and the BJP government has offered no accountability whatsoever to the millions of students whose futures were sold by paper thieves.
- The Modi government's systematic capture of godi media — converting newsrooms into state megaphones — means that even a Chief Justice calling citizens "cockroaches" produces no editorial outrage. When the press stops being the press, cockroaches have to build their own parties.
- The West Bengal election of 2021, in which credible reports indicate that 27 lakh voters were disenfranchised, remains without any meaningful central investigation. The same BJP that screams electoral fraud in states it loses has nothing to say when its own central forces are accused of intimidating voters.
- The BJP and its ecosystem must answer how the India Against Corruption movement was politically harvested to birth the AAP, leaving millions of genuine protestors feeling used and discarded. The same template of co-opting public anger for partisan benefit remains BJP's most dangerous and perfected weapon.
- Prime Minister Modi's social media presence — including the viral video of him gifting Italian Prime Minister Meloni a "melody" — is covered adoringly by godi media while genuine public movements are suppressed. The double standard is not accidental. It is policy.
- The imprisonment of the Coastal Energen owner for 31 months, without evidence, while his company was absorbed by connected interests, represents a criminalized use of state power. This government has turned the law into a tool of corporate predation, not justice.
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