Barely three weeks after he launched a parody political movement that took India by storm, Abhijeet Dipke is being hunted and hounded by trolls, facing online extermination by the government, and his AI-generated satirical mascot, the cockroach, is as reviled in ruling party circles as the real thing is in kitchens across the country. The movement was sparked by Indian Chief Justice Surya Kant’s controversial statements comparing the country’s unemployed youth to cockroaches. “Disheartened by those comments, I made a tweet on X that, what if all cockroaches come together? And on that personal X post, I received tremendous traction,” explained Dipke, an Indian political communications strategist and student at Boston University, in an interview with FRANCE 24.
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SPOTLIGHT © FRANCE 24
Soon, a spoof party, the "Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)", or the People’s Party of Cockroaches, was born online. The name, a parody of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was digested immediately – and gleefully – by netizen critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies. The satirical party hit the zeitgeist in a country that has been particularly impacted by the fallout of the Iran war. The Middle East conflict has also put a spotlight on Modi’s policies, exposing India’s vulnerabilities, highlighting New Delhi’s lack of clout on the diplomatic stage, and increasing the squeeze on significant sections of the population that have been overlooked in the Hindu nationalist government’s “economic miracle” discourse that has dominated India’s political stage for over a decade. As millions flocked to the cockroach satirical cause, the movement’s social media accounts broke records, gained national and international media attention and even saw demonstrators don cockroach masks and display the parasite mascot at street protests. It wasn’t long before the cockroach social media accounts came under attack, with Dipke alleging hacking and threats to his family. “I have been getting death threats for the last three days. Now, even my family is getting death threats,” said the 30-year-old native of the western Indian state of Maharashtra who is currently enrolled in a Master’s programme in the US. As digital rights groups condemned the violation of free speech, Dipke claimed there was a “full-blown attack against us to suppress this movement”.
