A 30-year-old postgraduate student, Abhijeet Dipke, has shaken up the Indian political establishment. His nine-day-old Cockroach Janata Party or CJP has got politicians of all hues scurrying around—some in anger and panic and others in anticipation and hope. In the first category are the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders. They see a foreign conspiracy, predictably. A minister suggests that the CJP’s followers are from “Pakistan and George Soros gang”.
Another BJP MP refers to Dipke’s Aam Aadmi Party background to warn the Opposition: “Will you take help from foreign powers to break the country?”
The Intelligence Bureau sees the CJP as a threat to national security, prompting the government to get its X account blocked.
The Opposition falls in the second category—delirious in anticipation of the youth turning against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, finally. The CJP’s popularity—over 22 million Instagram followers within nine days—gives Opposition leaders hope. They are rushing to try to co-opt these cockroaches. The Karnataka Youth Congress is distributing “I am a cockroach” T-shirts. Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav sees in it a seed of revolution against the BJP.
ज़ुल्मी हुक्मरानों से कह दो आज
बंदिशों में कब बंधा है ‘इंक़लाब’#BJP_बनाम_CJP pic.twitter.com/QJ3FyNc4W2
— Akhilesh Yadav (@yadavakhilesh) May 21, 2026
Indian National Lok Dal legislator Arjun Chautala has declared himself the “first cockroach MLA”. His newly created email ID is cocrochmla@gmail.com.
How realistic the hopes of these Opposition leaders are is a matter of debate. Yes, the CJP’s instant popularity shows the youth’s disillusionment with the Modi government. But is it going to benefit the Opposition? Many believe it won’t.
After all, millions of young people endorsing a newly floated satirical platform is also a manifestation of their exasperation with mainstream parties and politicians—including the Opposition.
Framing the rise of the cockroach
Many political observers are tempted to look at the CJP phenomenon in the context of actor Vijay’s success in the recent Tamil Nadu Assembly elections, and also what happened in Bangladesh and Nepal. The same instances, however, sound a cautionary note about the CJP.
Let’s look at the Vijay phenomenon first. Unlike the CJP that remains a social media phenomenon so far, Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) drew its core strength from his cult status, assiduously built through decades of reel-life image-making. The TVK had a well-built organisation in the form of thousands of fan clubs. They came in handy in the elections. While the youth did vote for Vijay overwhelmingly, it wasn’t necessarily and completely a reflection of their disillusionment with established parties. It could very well be attributed primarily—if not fully—to Vijay’s star power, with disillusionment probably playing the role of a catalyst.
It is worth noting that while the TVK secured 35 per cent votes, the two major Dravidian parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All-India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), together secured over 45 per cent (plus 13 per cent that their allies got). In the 1983 Andhra Pradesh elections, NT Rama Rao’s Telugu Desam Party also got about 46 per cent votes. It was not a Gen Z revolution. It was NTR’s star appeal buttressed by his ‘Telugu Vari Atma Gauravam’ (Telugu people’s self-respect) slogan rooted in Rajiv Gandhi’s insult to Andhra Pradesh chief minister T Anjaiah the previous year.
The Gen Z revolution in Nepal and Bangladesh is often brought up in the context of the CJP. First of all, there is no comparison between a fledgling democracy in Nepal or a democracy-turned-autocracy in Bangladesh and the robust, vibrant democracy that is India.
The revolutions in our neighbourhood, however, provide a context to the CJP’s likely relevance in the future. The National Citizens’ Party (NCP), founded by the leaders of the 2024 students’ and youth uprising, flopped in the Bangladesh election, securing only five of the 300 seats in parliament. This was because the party entered into an alliance with the old, discredited Jamaat-e-Islami, defeating the very spirit of the uprising. In contrast, why did Balendra Shah ride the Gen Z protest to become the prime minister? He joined hands with the Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a four-year-old outfit with an existing organisational structure with a nationwide network and resources. That’s what Hungary’s Peter Magyar did by joining a four-year-old party, Tisza, in 2024 to oust Viktor Orban from power. The RSP and the Tisza were new parties with the semblance of an alternative to discredited mainstream parties.
Clearly, the Cockroach Janata Party, despite Indian Gen Z’s ostensible craze for it on social media, has a long way to go before it can challenge established parties in the electoral arena. It needs a credible alternative in the form of an existing party organisation to translate that craze into votes. BJP leaders may suspect that the AAP could offer a potential political platform for that translation. But the AAP has become just another mainstream party today, far from an alternative platform that can win the confidence of the cockroaches. Without an organisational network on the ground, the CJP’s potential electoral impact remains a matter of conjecture. There lies the hope of the Opposition parties to tap into the ostensible grievances of Gen Z.
That’s why the Modi government’s crackdown on the CJP is dismaying. India is not Nepal or Bangladesh. These so-called cockroaches on social media are not national security threats. They’re not even a threat to the BJP so far. With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche for distorting his apocryphal quote, you don’t become a hero if you kill a cockroach. PM Modi should, however, get their message: all is not well.
“There is seldom just one cockroach in the kitchen. You know, you turn on the light and, all of a sudden, they all start scurrying around,” said Warren Buffett.
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PM Modi needs a reboot
These cockroaches of the CJP are a sounding board. PM Modi must get his house in order. To say that his international trips—100 visits to 80 countries in the past 12 years—are structured to get employment and global exposure isn’t good enough for his young critics.
Nor is the distribution of 51,000 employment letters to the youth, as the prime minister did on Saturday, through the 19th Rozgar Mela. Since October 2023, 12 lakh youth supposedly got employment letters through 18 Rozgar Melas.
The optic is obviously not working for the cockroaches. As Modi prepares to enter his 13th year in the PMO, it’s probably time for a reboot, as the government seems to be suffering from a lack of imagination. The same old Rozgar Mela! The much-hyped Prime Minister Internship Scheme (PMIS) has turned out to be a flop. As my colleague Udit Bubna reported, during the first pilot round that began in October 2024, companies made 60,866 internship offers. Only 8,760 candidates eventually joined, and 53.6 per cent of them exited the programme midway through the 12-month tenure. Only 3,417 candidates from the first pilot round completed the entire internship. In the second pilot round, over 300 companies made 71,195 offers. Only 7,300 candidates physically joined, and one-third of them dropped out before completing the full internship period. The third pilot round, with an increased stipend and tweaked criteria, was launched in April. The outcome is awaited.
The PMIS was followed by an employment-linked incentive scheme. We haven’t heard much of it either.
Does anyone remember the Skill India mission? The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship was created in 2014. In the next decade, there were four ministers. Rajiv Pratap Rudy headed the ministry from November 2014 to August 2017 before being dropped. Dharmendra Pradhan held the charge for the next 21 months before it was given to Mahendra Nath Pandey. Pandey held charge for two years and 37 days before the ministry was handed back to Pradhan, who headed it for close to three years before PM Modi decided to give it to an alliance partner, Jayant Chaudhary, in June 2024. PM Modi seldom talks about the Skill India mission now.
The NEET-UG paper leak has come as another painful blow to cockroaches—almost as hurtful as the wound caused by the apple that the cockroach-protagonist’s father threw at him in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Education minister Pradhan is fending off the Opposition’s attack on his own. There are things he can’t say in his defence. For instance, after the 2024 NEET-UG paper leak controversy, a committee headed by K Radhakrishnan had recommended a transition from the paper-and-pen format to a computer-based test to remove the possibility of leaks. Its implementation was stalled due to opposition from the health ministry headed by JP Nadda. Pradhan must take all the flak because he can’t talk about the role of his former party chief.
I would rather not talk much about big, key ministries. There must be a reason why PM Modi no longer talks about India being ‘Vishwa Guru’. The worsening situation in Manipur strikes a discordant note with the government’s triumphalism in internal security discussions.
Economists, including those who have been associated with the Modi government, are talking about the risk of India joining Turkey as ‘Fragile Two’ economies. What has gone wrong with India’s growth story that both foreign and domestic investors are hesitant? The Middle East crisis is three months old. If capital inflows consistently slowed down since 2023, as economists point out, what were our policy makers doing? PM Modi asked his ministers last week to carry out reforms. Who or what stopped them until now?
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Dipke turned the light on
All I am driving at is that a 30-year-old student in the US has turned on the light in the kitchen. PM Modi can now see what Warren Buffett meant—there is seldom just one cockroach. The PM needs to clean up the house.
He needs to start from the PMO. As the Gujarat chief minister, he wouldn’t waste his time reading the files. In an old video clip of his interview, which is circulating on social media again, he said that his inner voice told him that he couldn’t run the government by doing ‘academic studies’ (of his files).
“File naam ki cheez padhana yeh toh meri prakriti me hi nahin hai (reading something called a file is not in my nature at all),” he had said.
That should explain why he tasked his trusted civil servants to run the entire government from the PMO. It’s too much to expect retired IAS officers to reimagine governance. That explains the return to Manmohan Singh-era’s austerity measures. The same goes for ministers who see Opposition-bashing and Modi-chanting as their principal portfolios. Unless PM Modi drastically revamps his team to clean up his house, cockroaches will continue to scurry around in the kitchen.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)