An ai-generated meme produced by the party. (Cockroach Janta party/Getty)
Once again, the young in India are misguided. Every generation, it seems, must discover afresh that it has been hoodwinked by the ruling class, and, in response, throw itself into some new crusade for radical renewal that arrives already exhausted, mistaking irony for ideology, performance for politics, and self-mockery for self-government. The upshot of such undirected disaffection, almost invariably, is that the movement proves a damp squib. Lather, rinse, repeat. Such is the tragedy of a great deal of student politics — not only in India but across much of the world.
The latest object of cathexis for India’s unhappy youth is the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Its prospects, non-existent as they are, matter less than its provenance. The CJP is not an Indian eccentricity but the latest expression of a wider Gen-Z convulsion. Across the Global South, from the students who felled Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh to their coevals in Nepal, Kenya, and Madagascar, a generation trapped between economic stagnation and digital overstimulation has discovered the pleasures of rebellion. Yet rebellion is easier to summon than purpose. For every movement that matures into a political force, dozens dissolve into little more than a collective tantrum conducted through hashtags and megaphones. The significance of the CJP lies less in anything it is likely to achieve than in what it reveals about the poverty of the political imagination of a generation coming of age amid pervasive unemployment, institutional sclerosis, and digital hyperconnectivity.
The story begins with a meme. In May, Chief Justice Surya Kant, during a hearing concerning fraudulent professional credentials, remarked en passant that unemployed young people drifting into journalism and activism resembled cockroaches. The entomological insult ricocheted across the Indian internet. Within 24 hours, the CJP was born. Its mascot was the eponymous cockroach, smartly besuited; its slogan “the voice of the lazy and unemployed”; its natural habitat, the teeming meme swamps of the Indian internet. Within days, the movement had amassed millions of followers, transforming an offhand judicial insult into a political identity.
The architect of this improbable insurgency is Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old sometime comms man from Maharashtra and now, by his own telling, another superannuated recruit to the ranks of India’s educated unemployed. Dipke read journalism in Pune before moving to Boston University to pursue a master’s degree in public relations. Before discovering fame as India’s chief cockroach, he did time in the digital trenches, helping develop the populist Aam Aadmi Party’s meme-driven social media operation. By his own account, the CJP began as a Kafkaesque half-joke. Within days, however, a satirical website hastily assembled from Boston had become the toast of Indian newsrooms.
The CJP’s runaway success owes much to its status as an empty signifier: it possesses not so much an ideology as a vibe. In this respect, the party is very much a product of Dipke’s intellectual formation in PR. It is anti-establishment without being systematically anti-capitalist, oppositional without being programmatically Left-wing, and youthful without being especially radical. Its rhetoric revolves around a familiar omnium gatherum of grievances among educated urban Indians: joblessness, corruption, the persistence of political nepo dynasties, and the sense that the country’s gerontocratic political class has ceased to speak the language of younger generations. The movement’s genius lies in its ability to convert these diffuse frustrations into a collective identity. To call oneself a cockroach is at once an act of self-deprecation and solidarity.
The grievances animating students are, to be sure, far from imaginary. India produces millions of graduates each year while struggling to generate enough sensible employment to absorb them. Millions of young Indians enter university expecting social mobility, only to emerge as the immiserated caput mortuum of the credential economy: examined, certified, and yet no closer to the prosperity they were promised. Public recruitment examinations, meanwhile, are routinely engulfed by allegations of paper leaks and malpractice. Last year’s controversy over the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) — the fiercely competitive examination that serves as the principal gateway to medical education for more than two million Indian students each year — became a national scandal after allegations of leaked question papers and irregular scoring procedures cast doubt on the integrity of the process.
The broader crisis of educational credentialism is impossible to miss: ever more degrees chasing ever fewer opportunities. It is hardly surprising that the CJP struck a chord with this generation, giving it a carapace beneath which to nurse its dashed hopes and accumulated disappointments.
Yet what remains striking is how little substance accompanies the symbolism. The movement has flirted with demands ranging from education reform and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to judicial independence, safeguards against voter disenfranchisement, stronger anti-defection laws, and greater representation for women in political office. Taken individually, these are not unreasonable demands. The problem is that they amount less to a political program than to a catalog of civic frustrations.
The movement possesses grievances in abundance, enemies in plenty, and memes beyond counting. What it lacks is any coherent account of power, class, or institutions — the very stuff of politics. One searches in vain for a theory of the state, a vision of economic and cultural transformation, or even a stable hierarchy of priorities. Does it have anything to say about caste, the deepest hierarchy in Indian society? About confessional violence and Hindu vigilantism? About a political economy built on an extraordinarily narrow tax base and a state too fiscally weak, and too unwilling, to provide adequate healthcare and education? The CJP knows what it dislikes; it is far less clear about what it wants.
There is a long history to such movements. India’s cockroaches belong to a familiar global species: the anti-political protest movement. Its natural habitat is not the factory floor or the party branch meeting but the social media feed and, occasionally, the street. It thrives on symbolism, irony, and virality. It excels at expressing discontent while remaining conspicuously reluctant to define what should replace the existing order. One can trace its lineage through the Occupy movement that sprang up after the Crash, whose ecumenical language of the “99%” captured widespread anger at inequality but, precisely for that reason, struggled to convert protest into durable political organization. It appeared again in the movements of Spain’s indignados and France’s gilets jaunes, whose denunciations of an austeritarian political class resonated with millions but proved more adept at rejecting the system than articulating a coherent alternative.
What unites these disparate episodes is not a shared ideology but a shared style — a sophisticated repertoire of symbolic resistance. The CJP is perhaps the most Indian expression yet of this broader tendency. There is a certain irony here, for India has no shortage of traditions of radical politics. The 20th century produced movements whose ambitions were nothing if not grand. Nehruvian socialists sought to remake society through planning, dams, steel plants, and new cities. Naxalite guerrillas, meanwhile, took up arms in pursuit of land redistribution. Student radicals once debated Mao and Marx with a seriousness that now feels almost retro. For all their defects, India’s socialists and communists at least possessed a utopian conception of the future. Above all, they believed politics was about power. The meme movements de nos jours, by contrast, often appear content to remain permanently in the realm of gesture.
The CJP’s closest antecedents are therefore not the communist and socialist movements that once dominated India’s forests and campuses but a different lineage altogether: the great anti-political mobilizations organized around moral renewal rather than social transformation. The most important precedent is the JP Movement of the Seventies. Like the cockroaches, it emerged from genuine anger at corruption and misgovernment, mobilized students on an enormous scale, and presented itself as a revolt against a political class that had lost the plot. Yet Jayaprakash Narayan’s celebrated call for “Total Revolution” was, upon inspection, a remarkably nebulous doctrine. It was at once non-partisan and anti-Congress, hostile to Marxism yet willing to paralyze the administration, committed to direct democracy while proposing unelected “struggle committees” to police elected representatives. At times Narayan gestured towards collective ownership; elsewhere he dismissed land redistribution and collectivization as impractical. The inconsistencies in the event mattered little. Narayan himself was unusually candid about this, remarking at one point that what was needed was “the end of all ideologies.”
A similar story unfolded four decades later with India Against Corruption. Anna Hazare, a kind of JP redivivus, channeled widespread disgust with graft and elite privilege in the 2010s. Once again, the promise was not a new political vision but a cleansing of public life. The movement presented itself as standing above conventional politics, transcending the stale divisions of Left and Right. The immediate result was the birth of the Aam Aadmi Party. The broader consequence, however, was a further delegitimization of the political class and the strengthening of authoritarian Hindu nationalism. As experience elsewhere has repeatedly shown, from the Five Star Movement in Italy to Lava Jato in Brazil, anti-corruption anti-politics often ends by clearing the ground for the far-Right. Meloni, Bolsonaro, and Modi are all, after a fashion, beneficiaries of the populist, anti-political movements that preceded them.
Gandhi himself was, in many respects, the original anti-political politician. His Olympian moral authority rested on an obsession with a peculiarly unhinged conception of non-violence that left him all too ready to sidestep questions of class. Faced with demands for land reform, he preferred conciliation to expropriation; confronted with caste, he sought to soften rather than abolish it. He chipped away at the enormities of untouchability while leaving much of the broader architecture of hierarchy intact, and urged landlords to behave a bit more nicely towards peasants rather than advocating their removal as a class.
The CJP belongs squarely within this desultory tradition. Properly speaking, Dipke is one of Gandhi’s bastard heirs. His party’s politics are less ideological than therapeutic. Society is imagined not as a terrain of competing interests but as the victim of elite incompetence and indifference. The remedy is therefore not economic redistribution but moral renewal. In this sense, the movement possesses an elective affinity with conservatism. For all its youthful rhetoric and anti-establishment posture, it leaves many of the deepest structures of Indian society curiously untouched.
This would matter less were India not simultaneously home to people engaged in rather more consequential forms of dissent. While the CJP dominates headlines and timelines, there remain students, journalists, academics, and organizers whose encounters with the state have been anything but playful. Theirs is not the politics of memes but the politics of consequence, where the price of opposition is measured not in likes and reposts but in years lost to courts, prisons, and legal limbo.
Consider Umar Khalid, the former student leader who has spent years incarcerated under anti-terror legislation. Or Sharjeel Imam, arrested after speeches critical of the Modi government. Or those caught up in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions: the scholar Anand Teltumbde, the trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, the poet Varavara Rao, among many others.
Yet public attention is finite, and absurd, algorithm-friendly spectacle perforce has a tendency to monopolize it. The CJP thus embodies a wider paradox. It is at once a protest against political failure and a symptom of it. Most likely, it will disappear as quickly as it arrived, joining the ever-expanding graveyard of internet phenomena that briefly convinced journalists they had glimpsed the future. Dipke may think otherwise. But I suspect it will take more than a few memes — and considerably more than a cockroach — to break the hegemony of Hindu nationalism.
Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
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