To the Cockroach Janta Party: Yes, We Are Cockroaches With No Spine

The Cockroach Janta Party is not a rebellion against power, it is a rebellion against the weakest available target that still looks like power.

Minorities, and broadly marginalized youths must restrain the temptation to fuel an internet adventure that is yet to reveal a clear ideological stance.

In 2021, standing on the floor of Parliament, the the Prime Minister mocked millions of protesting citizens, officially labelling them “Andolanjeevi” and “Parjeevi” calling them literally parasites. During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, state machinery treated millions of walking migrant workers as expendable, turning hoses on them at borders. Across multiple election cycles cabinet ministers have led crowds in chanting to shoot “traitors,” while state governments have routinely bypassed the courts to bulldoze the homes and livelihoods of political dissidents and minorities, eventually turning the bulldozer itself into a celebrated mascot of governance and dehumanization.

There is a long list of such dehumanizing acts (not just remarks) by the political incumbents in last 10 years. No Boston University graduate launched a Political movement overnight. No membership form went viral and no opposition politician rushed to join the Cockroach party. The insult was not a one-off courtroom remark by an unelected judge. It was a sustained, documented, multi-year campaign of dehumanization by the elected incumbents and the media ecosystem. But the response from the very demographic that is becoming the Cockroach Janta Party’s base was/is a Pindrop silence or even worse enjoyed it.

The celebrants of the New Party cannot escape this uncomfortable truth. If they do not come clear on this , their claims to be a genuine force of democratic resistance is hollow. They would be asked Why did a single remark by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant trigger a political movement within twenty-four hours, while years of documented dehumanizing hate speeches by Ministers in the country produced nothing?

Selective Outrage

The answer is as simple as it is damning. The CJI is a safe target.

Surya Kant holds a constitutional office. He does not command a political army. He has no IT cell. He cannot unleash the Enforcement DirectorateEnforcement Directorate (ED)India’s federal financial investigation agency, widely criticised for being deployed against opposition leaders and civil society under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. on his critics. He cannot order income-tax raids. He cannot get you trending as “anti-national” on prime-time television. Mocking the Chief Justice on Instagram carries no political cost. It gets you likes, retweets, and profile pieces in English-language media. It feels radical without being risky.

Coming to its founder Dipke, he is not a spontaneous angry youth. Between 2020 and 2022, he served as a social media strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, working inside the Delhi Chief Minister’s office and the Delhi Education Department. He holds a master’s in public relations from Boston University. He is a professional narrative architect.

The CJP launched with a logo, a five-point manifesto, satirical membership criteria, and a social media infrastructure that was suspiciously polished for something allegedly born of spontaneous rage. If the cockroach metaphor is about being unglamorous, the party’s backend looks remarkably like a startup pitch deck.

Dipke spent two years inside the AAP apparatus. During those two years, did the AAP ever launch a sustained national campaign against the BJP’s anti-Muslim rhetoric? Did Dipke, as its social media strategist, craft viral content about bulldozer justice, about “goli maaro,” about the weaponisation of the NRC? If yes, show it. If no, then his outrage at the CJI’s remark is not principled indignation. It is professional selectivity.

The pattern is consistent. Outrage flows toward targets that offer maximum virality with minimum personal or political risk. A judge who cannot retaliate is ideal. The occupant of the country’s highest elected office, who commands the entire state apparatus, is not.

The Missing Victims

The CJP’s manifesto demands banning post-retirement Rajya Sabha seats for Chief Justices, 50% women’s reservation in Parliament, accountability for exam paper leaks, and action against voter deletion. These are reasonable demands. They are also the demands that literally no political party would publicly oppose. They are safe. They are designed to offend nobody.

What the manifesto does not contain is the entire story.

There is no position on the citizenship law which for the first time in India’s history makes religion a criterion for citizenship. There is nothing about FCRAForeign Contribution Regulation ActLaw regulating foreign donations to Indian NGOs. Amended in 2020 to impose severe restrictions, effectively cutting off funding to thousands of minority-led and human rights organizations. restrictions that have strangled minorities civil society organizations. Nothing on hate crimes. Nothing on demolition drives. Nothing on the systematic erasure of Muslims from the vocabulary of national aspiration on regular basis.

In a country where the head of government himself has called citizens infiltrators from the campaign stage, where his cabinet colleagues have led chants to shoot them, where state machinery has demolished their homes and shops as collective punishment, a “youth movement” that can only find its voice when a judge uses an unpleasant word is not a movement of the dehumanised. It is a movement of the comfortably aggrieved.

The genuinely dehumanized, the street vendor whose cart was bulldozed in Jahangirpuri, the family whose house was demolished in Khargone as “punishment” for a riot they may not have participated in, the Assamese, Bengalis and Gujrati’s whose names were deleted from the NRCNational Register of CitizensA citizenship verification exercise conducted in Assam that excluded nearly 1.9 million residents, disproportionately affecting Bengali-speaking Muslims who were left to prove their citizenship or face statelessness., do not have the luxury of launching satirical political parties from Boston University dorm rooms. Their dehumanization is not a meme. It is not a membership form. It is not a trending hashtag. It does not come with a logo.

The Category Error

There is a deeper structural absurdity that the CJP’s supporters refuse to confront.

The CJI is not a political actor. He is a constitutional functionary. His remark was contemptuous, but it was an oral observation during a hearing on senior advocate designation, not a campaign speech at a rally. He does not seek votes. He cannot be voted out. He issued a clarification the very next day.

Compare this with the Banswara rally. There was no clarification. There was no retraction. There were, according to Human Rights Watch, 109 more speeches just like it by the same leader. The “infiltrators” line was not a slip. It was a strategy, repeated and refined across 173 rallies by the highest elected official in the land, designed to win an election by casting an entire religious community as a demographic and civilisational threat.

If the Cockroach Janta Party’s supporters cannot feel the weight of this asymmetry, they are not fighting dehumanisation. They are curating it.

The Comfortable Rebel

Perhaps the most dangerous product of the CJP’s politics is its insinuation that “all parties are the same.” The BJP, the Congress, the TMC, the SP, the DMK, all equally corrupt, all equally hopeless, all equally complicit and presently there is no political party which can provide an alternative politics.

This is not political sophistication. It is political anaesthesia.

Are all parties imperfect? Obviously. Has the Congress decayed institutionally? Without question. Has the AAP collapsed under its own contradictions? Visibly. But to suggest that the Congress’s policy drift is equivalent to the BJP’s deployment of the ED against opposition leaders with industrial regularity, its hollowing out of the Election Commission, its passage of laws that specifically target religious minorities, is to perform a false equivalenceFalse EquivalenceA logical fallacy that treats two fundamentally different things as morally or politically equal, often used to avoid taking a position by declaring ‘both sides are the same.’ so staggering that it functions as active propaganda for the dominant party.

When you persuade a generation that no alternative exists, that every party is equally rotten, you do not create revolutionaries. You create abstainers. And in a majoritarian democracy, abstention is a gift to the majority. The BJP does not need the CJP to support it. It only needs the CJP to convince its followers that opposing the BJP is pointless. The CJP is performing that service perfectly, free of charge.

Consider the contrast once more. One hundred and ten Islamophobic speeches by the country’s highest elected leader. A cabinet minister chanting “shoot the traitors.” Bulldozers deployed as instruments of communal punishment. And the Cockroach Janta Party responds to: a judge being rude about unemployed people.

This is not the behaviour of a movement that has been pushed to the wall. This is the behaviour of a movement that has chosen which walls are comfortable to lean against.

The Real Test

There is a simple test for whether the Cockroach Janta Party is a genuine democratic movement or a PR operation dressed in the language of resistance.

• Can it name the head of government’s documented hate speech against its own citizens and declare it a greater act of dehumanisation than a judge’s courtroom remark?
• Can it add the repeal of the citizenship law to its manifesto?
• Can it call for the prosecution of the cabinet minister who led “goli maaro” chants?
• Can it say, plainly, that Indian minorities are being systematically targeted by the state, and that this is the defining civil rights crisis of this generation?

If it can say these things, it will lose followers. It will be called anti-national. It will face ED inquiries and IT raids. It will stop being fun and start being frightening.

If it cannot say these things, then the Cockroach Janta Party is exactly what I and many more are suspecting: a rebellion manufactured for comfort, a meme with a membership form, the political equivalent of protesting bad cafeteria food while the building is on fire.

Minorities, and broadly marginalized youths must restrain the temptation to fuel an internet adventure that that is yet to reveal a clear ideological stance. Joining a movement that remains deliberately silent on systemic caste and communal violence is not an act of solidarity; it is an act of self-erasure. Until this party explicitly names the state forces crushing India’s most vulnerable, marginalised communities have no business acting as its foot soldiers.

The cockroach, we are told, survives everything. But survival is not resistance. Adaptation to misery is not transformation. The kitchen has been burning for years. The cockroaches only noticed when the chef called them a name.