NEW DELHI: A new cockroach-themed youth movement has gone viral in India, attracting nearly 23 million followers, after the chief justice’s remarks were widely interpreted as comparing unemployed young people to pests.
The Cockroach Janata Party identifies as a “satirical political party,” and its name bears similarity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been in power since 2014.
The movement started to gain momentum right after Surya Kant, the Supreme Court’s chief judge, said in a May 15 hearing that there were “youngsters like cockroaches” who had no employment and turned to social media and activism instead.
While on the next day Kant clarified that his “cockroaches” remark referred to fake degree holders, not unemployed youth, the CJP was already live on social media and within days became viral, with its members defining it as a “political movement built for the young, the unemployed, and the chronically online,” which “gives a voice to those the system forgot to count.”
As its Instagram account amassed over two times more followers than the BJP, it has also drawn conspiracy accusations, with Kerala BJP President Rajeev Chandrasekhar telling local media on Saturday that the cockroach movement was a “classic influence operation with an objective to create destabilization.”
