During a hearing in May, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant presided over a Supreme Court hearing regarding lawyer designations, and he made an appalling comment that he would soon regret. While scolding a lawyer, he compared unemployed young people who turned to journalism, social media, and youth activism to insects. Reports from the Indian Express Newspaper reported him claiming that “there are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession.” Widespread outrage broke out as young people on social media spread the word as his words pointed towards the greater socioeconomic inequality and corruption within the Indian government. Chief Justice Kant argued that he was misunderstood and that he was only referring to people that practiced law with fake degrees, but it was already too late.
Within 24 hours, Abhijeet Dipke, a political strategist and Boston University graduate living in the US at the time, launched the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). At first, the party was simply a joke and Kant’s words were just a meme; the name itself, Cockroach Janta Party, is a reference mocking the current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), its logo is a cockroach on a phone, and its slogan, “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed,” seems to agree with Kant’s comments. However, the CJP Instagram account gained millions of followers within days and its logo started to represent a social media uprising, India’s first Gen-Z protest movement. Soon the account surpassed 20 million followers, double that of the BJP’s.
While the older generations and mainstream media weren’t paying attention, the memes slowly started to become more political and the page provided a community for the younger generation to sympathize over their shared struggles, specifically in education. In June, the papers for the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) were leaked, and the entrance exam was cancelled. The NEET exam is essentially India’s equivalent of the SAT, but specialized for the field of medicine. It is India’s single national-level entrance examination for students seeking admission to undergraduate medical, dental, and other medical programs, and is extremely high-stakes, spanning 200 questions over roughly 3 hours. Roughly 2.2 million families spend anywhere from two- to ten-thousand dollars a year, putting a heavy financial burden on millions of students.
For the first time, CJP activists took their outrage to the streets, and demanded that Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign. For weeks, thousands of students camped at Jantar Mantar, Delhi’s main site for protests while tens of thousands more posted about the systemic breakdown of the Indian education system. On July 20, tens of thousands of students decided to march on Parliament and were stopped by tear gas and batons. Reports show that 178 were injured, 118 of them officers, and police accused protesters of throwing stones. Five days later, Pradhan resigned. India’s first Gen-Z movement, which started as just a meme against the word ‘cockroaches,’ had now forced a cabinet minister to resign and transformed into a glimmer of hope for the younger generation.
The government, led by the strongly opposing BJP, claimed nearly half of the CJP’s followers were from Pakistan, and accused them of being anti-nationalists. Dipke responded decisively with analytics from the social media page showing that 94% of the movement was in India, raising tensions and inciting even more polarization between the government and the youth.
Just when the party was at a tipping point, India’s Election Commission removed 130 million names from voter lists. CJP activists began protesting demanding that the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar resign from office just like Pradhan. The CJP was furious, yet the Commission simply responded saying that the names that were removed belonged to people who died, moved, or couldn’t be traced, and that anyone wrongly removed could just as easily re-register. Despite near daily protests, the Delhi police unwarrantedly removed Jantar Mantar from the list of approved protest sites. CJP leaders Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das led thousands to the Jantar Mantar and a few climbed the barricades anyway, and were arrested. Wide civil unrest broke out, and on Monday, October 19, the court extended their detention period for two more days, set to be released on the 21st. On Friday, October 16, Dipke was detained and Al Jazeera reports that more than 1,000 people have been detained in connection with the recent protests. The CJPs legal representative, Ratna Singh, told reporters that “This is an absolute mockery of the judicial system.”
Nonetheless, the party is legally just a social media entity; they aren’t registered as a political party, and its leaders are young and indecisive to run for election. A former activist of the party has already split off to form a rival faction, accusing Dipke of abandoning the movement’s student-led roots, a jab at his old connections with the opposition Aam Aadmi Party. A popular Indian content creator states that “Gen Z has a tendency to get over trends as quickly as it gets on them,” insinuating that the party was simply a social media stunt gone viral.
Furthermore, Dipke has rejected all comparisons to youth uprisings in neighboring countries. Maybe it’s because he wants to claim credit for being the first, or because he wants to remove himself from being associated with more radical movements, but the connections and similarities are hard to avoid. In July 2024, students in Bangladesh protested a quota that reserved government jobs for descendants of 1971 independence fighters. The protests left nearly 1,400 dead, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country after about a month since the initial outroars. In September of 2025, the government banned social media which set off protests against corruption, accusing the government of silencing voices and the press, ending with their Parliament building on fire and Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned shortly after. Even recently, waves of violent riots in France have led major cities vandalized and turned upside down, with nearly 2,500 individuals arrested nationwide.What started in September as high school teenagers blockading their schools over education budget cuts like in India, has grown into nationwide protests over the cost of living, and this past weekend riots and looting have destroyed cities such as Paris, Lyon, and Marseille.
On Sunday, BJP minister Kiren Rijiju accused opposition politicians and “anti-India gangs” of plotting anti-nationalistic sentiment and violence inspired by Bangladesh and France, and said a change in government should come through elections, and not violence. So far, the CJP is still just a youth-led movement, but it started as a meme of a cockroach, and it could soon become a party of millions.
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