A satirical political movement in India calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has exploded across social media, amassing more than 22 million Instagram followers in under a week — more than twice the following of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Now the group says its website has been blocked and its X account made inaccessible inside the country, raising fresh questions about online freedom in the world's most populous democracy.
The movement was sparked after India's Chief Justice Surya Kant reportedly compared unemployed young people to cockroaches during a public remark. The justice later clarified he was referring to people with "fake and bogus degrees" rather than India's youth more broadly, but the comment had already ignited a wave of satirical anger online. The group's founder, Abhijeet Dipke — a political communications strategist and student at Boston University in the United States — seized on the insult and launched the CJP as a parody. Its name deliberately echoes the BJP's full name, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or "Indian People's Party", with CJP standing for a tongue-in-cheek "cockroach people's party".
The CJP is not a registered political party and makes no pretence of being one. Its mock membership criteria include being "chronically online" and possessing "the ability to rant professionally", and it claims to be "the voice of the lazy and unemployed". The movement has used AI-generated imagery to spread its message and inspired the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach — Hindi for "I too am a cockroach" — which has spread widely. Young volunteers have shown up dressed as cockroaches at clean-up drives and street protests in recent days.
Dipke confirmed that the group's website is now inaccessible both inside India and elsewhere, and that its official X account — which had gathered more than 200,000 followers — is withheld in India "in response to a legal demand", according to a message displayed to users attempting to access it. He also claimed that both his personal Instagram account and the group's account were hacked. Writing on X, Dipke said officials had "taken down our iconic website" and asked why they were "so scared of cockroaches", adding: "Cockroaches never die."
The group's rapid rise speaks to a broader current of frustration among India's young population. With roughly half of the country's 1.4 billion people under the age of 30, unemployment, inflation, and the cost of living have become pressing concerns, yet many young Indians feel overlooked by mainstream politics. Whether the CJP remains a viral joke or crystallises into a more sustained form of civic pressure may depend, in part, on whether its digital presence can survive official scrutiny.