Ashraf Engineer
June 1, 2026
Sometimes the establishment says something so revealing about how it thinks, and so contemptuously, that it simply can’t be put back into the bottle. There was one such moment on May 15, 2026, when Chief Justice Surya Kant remarked: “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession.”
He later insisted he had been misunderstood, that he was referring to people who obtained positions through fraudulent degrees. Perhaps. But consider the setting: the Supreme Court and the words that came to him were not “struggling youth” or “those affected by a changing economy”. Instead, he thought of cockroaches.
Within 24 hours, Abhijeet Dipke, a political communication strategist and Boston University graduate who had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, launched the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) on social media. The claim: “Voice of the lazy and unemployed.” The eligibility for joining: unemployed, chronically online and able to rant professionally. The name itself was a surgical strike on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the acronym differing by precisely one letter.
In less than a week, the CJP had 20 million Instagram followers, more than double the BJP’s 9 million and well ahead of the Congress’ 13 million. A party that didn’t exist a fortnight ago had outrun, on social media, two decades of political history and organisation.
India has had many protest movements over the past decade and a half. The India Against Corruption wave of 2011, the farmers’ agitation, student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Milia Islamia… Each reflected genuine rage. But what’s different about the CJP is not scale or speed, although both are remarkable, but tone.
The register that previous movements hit was injustice and demand. The CJP speaks in the register of contempt; not the establishment’s contempt for youth but youth’s contempt for the establishment’s contempt. Instead of asking to be taken seriously, the CJP said it would not take the establishment seriously. That way, it has succeeded in puncturing to some extent what years of earnest petitioning failed to do.
Where are the jobs?
There is a solid reason for this movement. That story can be partially told in numbers.
Azim Premji University’s ‘State of Working India 2026’ report found that unemployment stood at nearly 40% for young people aged 15 to 25 and at 20% for those between 25 and 29.
India’s youth population aged 15 to 29 stands at 37 crore, a third of the working-age population. These are not lazy people. They were told that education was the passport to dignity. So, they studied. And then found the gate locked.
The report stated that 1.1 crore out of 6.3 crore graduates aged between 20 and 29 were unemployed in 2023. A mere 50% of young male graduates find employment within a year of reporting as unemployed and only 7% secure permanent salaried work. So, the credentials exist but the jobs do not.
An entire generation was made to believe that merit would be rewarded, but we do not have the honesty to admit that the reality is different.
Dipke has been candid about what drove the movement’s scale. “Nothing of this was intentional. It is the younger people who were actually very frustrated. They don’t have any outlet. They were really angry at the government,” he told the international media. He also noted that the movement’s popularity reflected a broader shift: “Five years ago, nobody was ready to speak up against Modi or the government. The times are changing.”
It’s the reality of the second statement that is keeping the BJP awake at night. That’s because there is truth in it. The Narendra Modi era has been a period when dissent feels costly. Young people, navigating a precarious employment environment, were also navigating an atmosphere where speaking out could lead to trolling, abuse and even imprisonment. The fear was real.
Something seems to be shifting. The CJP’s overnight army of 20 million is not simply expressing frustration about jobs; it feels like it is expressing a change in the country’s emotional weather. The fear of being labelled anti-national, weaponised so effectively for so long, could well be losing its grip on at least this segment of the population. They are not afraid of being called cockroaches; instead, they have made it a badge of honour.
A scared response
The establishment’s response has been, let’s say, instructive.
Within days, the CJP’s X account was withheld in India following what seems to be a directive from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, citing national security concerns. The CJP’s website was blocked as well. Dipke alleged that his Instagram accounts were hacked, and that he and his family received death threats, including messages asking him to shut down the party or join the BJP.
Let’s sit with that for a moment. A satirical movement was deemed a threat to national security.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the blocking was “deeply unwise” and that the movement “is raising serious issues of the youth”. Dipke himself asked: “Why is the government so scared of cockroaches?”
A government confident about its record on employment, on the economy, on the aspirations of young India, would have either ignored the CJP or engaged with it. Instead, it got rattled and, in doing so, confirmed the suspicion that the cockroaches were onto something real.
‘The Week’ compared it with the India Against Corruption movement of 2011, which many credit with laying the groundwork for the Congress’ defeat in 2014. That movement was sustained by years of mobilisation. The CJP, by contrast, ignited in days and remains largely digital. Whether it sustains or dissolves, the magazine observed: “…its sudden rise has exposed something deeper: a growing section of Indian youth feels politically unheard, economically anxious and emotionally disconnected from institutions that claim to represent them.”
A rising anger
Across the world, the post-COVID era has been defined by a peculiar kind of youth rage. It’s not so much ideological as visceral. In Bangladesh, in South Korea, in Kenya, young people have taken to the streets or to digital platforms in fury. What unites these movements is not a manifesto but the experience of having been promised a future and receiving instead a reality worse than when the promise was made.
We are told constantly that we are among the world’s fastest-growing economies, that we are on the cusp of Viksit Bharat, that we have a demographic dividend… And yet, less than 7% of male graduates secure permanent salaried jobs within a year of graduating, as mentioned earlier. The dissonance between the narrative and the lived experience is now too large to hold.
The CJP’s manifesto is not without substance. The demand to cancel licences of media houses owned by Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani in order to have a truly independent media is hardly satire. It’s a critique that commentators have been making for years. The difference is that the CJP said it to 20 million people in the language they use every day.
In many ways, the movement not translating youth anger into political language was a masterstroke. It kept that anger in youth language: ironic, self-aware, darkly funny. The political class so far has not known how to respond.
While the CJP has got everyone thinking and talking, we must also be circumspect. Digital movements can burn bright but fade fast. The CJP has no grassroots structure, no electoral machine, no route to power as conventionally understood. Dipke himself has been careful to distance it from comparisons to the uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal, insisting the CJP will work within constitutional bounds.
I feel that that is the wrong lens to view it through. The CJP’s value is not in what it will do but in what it has revealed: a significant portion of India’s youth no longer believes the official story and no longer accepts the official silence on unemployment. That is something.
The cockroach survives and is difficult to eliminate because, like humans, it is incredibly adaptable and resilient. In the cockroach, the CJP was handed a great metaphor. Like it, the CJP can morph and adapt because it is nimble.
As things stand, cracking down has only made the government and the BJP look stupid, and justified the CJP’s stand. The crackdown, hackings and threats are challenges, but the sentiment the CJP has crystallised cannot be easily exterminated.
