“Modi, your dictatorship, won’t last, won’t last,” yelled Abhijeet Dipke as he motioned at the crowd to repeat the slogan.
Dipke, the founding president of the Cockroach Janata Party, meets thousands of faces every day. At first glance, the party’s name sounds like a joke. In many ways, that is precisely the point.
On May 15, during a hearing in India’s Supreme Court, Chief Justice Surya Kant said that unemployed young people in India move toward activism and attack the system like “cockroaches.” Kant also said that it was the “unemployed” who questioned the government like cockroaches. So Dipke came up with the name “Cockroach Janata Party” – combining Kant’s epithet with the name of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – and invited people to join the parody political brand, with the cockroach embraced as a proud political metaphor.
What began as a viral digital movement quickly evolved into something more revealing. After garnering more than 20 million Instagram followers through memes and satire, Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) began raising questions about unemployment, governance, accountability, and political representation. It is creating an alternative form of political participation and digital dissent that is thriving largely outside traditional party structures.
