By Dhruba Jyoti Goswami
It began in a courtroom, during a routine hearing that most Indians would never have noticed. On 15 May 2026, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, while presiding over a bench examining a contempt petition related to fraudulent professional credentials, made an oral observation that was sharp and colourful, as judicial observations sometimes are. He said there were “youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession,” and suggested that some of them turn to social media, RTI activism, and journalism to “attack the system.” He called them “parasites of society.”
By the following morning, those words had travelled across every corner of the internet, and India would never quite hear them the same way again.
The Chief Justice clarified the very next day that his remarks had been misquoted and misunderstood. He said his criticism was directed specifically at individuals who enter respected professions like law using fake and bogus degrees, and that it was “totally baseless” to suggest he had criticised the youth of the nation. But here is the uncomfortable truth about words and the age we live in: clarifications travel slowly, and outrage travels fast. By the time the correction was issued, a 30-year-old political communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke had already done something unexpected. He asked, on X, a simple question: “What if all the cockroaches come together?” And then he launched the Cockroach Janta Party.
Within 78 hours, the movement’s Instagram account had crossed three million followers. Within five days, it had surpassed ten million, overtaking the official follower counts of both the BJP and the Indian National Congress. As of this writing, the CJP has amassed over 22 million followers, with its slogan “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed” draped across memes, AI-generated imagery of suited cockroaches standing at political podiums, and volunteers dressed in cockroach costumes cleaning the banks of the Yamuna River. If you were designing a movement to confuse and unsettle the establishment, you could not have done it better. The CJP is funny and angry at the same time, which is perhaps the most potent combination in democratic politics.
But before we get caught up in the spectacle, it is worth pausing and asking a harder question. Why did millions of people gather so quickly around a joke?
The answer, if we are honest, is that the joke was never quite the point. People do not flock to a symbol because they believe in the symbol itself. They flock because the symbol gives shape to something that was already sitting inside them without a name. When a sarcastic movement, born from a single courtroom remark, attracts twenty-two million followers in three weeks, it is telling us something that we should take seriously. A large population of young Indians was waiting, perhaps without knowing it, for exactly this kind of outlet. They were not waiting for a party manifesto or a policy document. They were waiting for someone to say, out loud, that they existed, that their frustration was legitimate, and that the system that produced it was worth mocking.
That is a signal, not a trend. And signals of this kind deserve more than a news cycle. Those of us who grew up in the Northeast know something about what happens when frustration finds no legitimate outlet for too long. It does not disappear. It organises.
India today has one of the youngest populations in the world. It also has an unemployment problem that has stubbornly refused to respond to electoral victories or economic announcements. The NEET-UG paper leak scandal, which the CJP has now folded into its list of demands including the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, represents something even more corrosive than a single administrative failure. It represents the breach of a promise.
Young people study for two, three, sometimes four years for competitive examinations that determine the entire arc of their lives. When those examinations are compromised, it is not merely an administrative lapse. It is a message, received clearly by an entire generation, that the system does not value their effort as much as it claims to. Institutional trust, once damaged, does not repair itself simply because investigations are announced and dates are rescheduled.
The story of the Chief Justice’s remark also carries a warning that applies regardless of one’s political sympathies. Words carry different weights depending on who speaks them, and in what room. An ordinary person using the word “cockroach” in conversation produces nothing beyond that conversation. But when the occupant of the highest judicial office in the Republic of India uses that word in open court, those words immediately acquire constitutional dimensions. The judiciary is not just another institution. It is the one institution that citizens are supposed to be able to trust when every other door is closed. When its language carries even the impression of contempt for ordinary young people, the damage to that trust is real and lasting, regardless of what was actually intended.
It is worth noting that the CJI’s clarification was reasonable in content. The distinction he drew between fraudulent credential holders and unemployed youth in general is a meaningful one. The problem was not the distinction itself. The problem was that the original remark, as heard by millions, did not sound like it was drawing that distinction. And in a democracy where millions of people are already feeling economically marginalised and institutionally ignored, even the impression of contempt from high office lands with tremendous force.
Now, here is where the picture grows more complex, and where honest commentary must resist the temptation to choose a side.
Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the CJP, is a political communications strategist who previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party. He flew from the United States to Delhi to lead the Jantar Mantar protest and applied for permission at the last moment, despite the fact that Delhi Police guidelines ordinarily require advance notice of at least seven days for such events. He had also urged supporters to gather at the airport, an invitation that, had it been taken seriously, could have created a security situation at one of the country’s most sensitive public spaces. These are not the actions of someone entirely unfamiliar with how political events are managed and what kind of attention they generate.
This raises a question that does not diminish the legitimacy of the underlying grievances, but must still be asked. Was the primary purpose of the Jantar Mantar protest to demand accountability on paper leaks? Or was there also a secondary calculation at work, one that assumed the government might refuse permission or make arrests, thereby generating a narrative of suppression that would amplify the movement further?
The government, it appears, read the situation clearly. Delhi Police ultimately granted permission as a one-time exception, the protest went ahead peacefully, and climate activist Sonam Wangchuk joined the dharna in solidarity. By allowing rather than blocking the event, the administration denied the organisers the martyrdom narrative that might have poured additional fuel onto an already blazing fire. Whether this was strategic wisdom or genuine respect for the right to protest, the effect was the same.
But the day also saw “Azaadi” slogans, and the gathering of several anti-government groups under a single platform. The old political saying applied itself almost inevitably: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. A genuine public grievance became a tent large enough for groups with entirely different motivations to stand under together. It is worth naming that plainly, so that we are not startled by it later.
Here is what responsible observation requires us to hold simultaneously, without collapsing into either cheerleading or cynicism.
The paper leak crisis is real. Lakhs of students, many of them from small towns and economically struggling families, prepared for years only to find that their examinations had been compromised by people who should have protected them. The government should have acted with far greater urgency than it displayed. Accountability for that failure is not only legitimate to demand, it is necessary.
At the same time, the CJP’s rapid growth and the diversity of its supporters warrant a degree of watchfulness. When a movement grows this fast, it inevitably attracts not only people who genuinely care about the original cause, but also those who see in it a convenient vehicle for something else entirely. Asking whether a protest could be used for purposes beyond its stated goal is not the same as being anti-student or pro-government. It is simply the responsibility of citizens who want the system to improve rather than just collapse.
And then there is the deeper warning that the CJP carries, regardless of its future trajectory. We have seen in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Indonesia how quickly social media-driven youth movements can disrupt governments and destabilise institutions when the underlying frustrations reach a certain depth. The CJP’s founders themselves have pointed to these examples. India is not immune to this dynamic. Political stability built on electoral victories can sometimes create an illusion of social stability, and the two are not the same thing. A government can win elections comfortably while a generation of young people slowly loses faith in the institutions those elections are meant to sustain.
The movement’s website was taken down at one point. Its X account was withheld in India. Its founder says his Instagram accounts were hacked. Whether these were coordinated acts of suppression or routine platform enforcement actions, the effect is the same as it always is when information is restricted in the digital age: suspicion grows, sympathy deepens, and the movement acquires the one thing that no online campaign can manufacture on its own. A grievance.
Websites can be taken down. Pages can be suspended. Trends fade. But if the frustration that gave birth to them remains unaddressed, it returns. It always returns. Sometimes it returns angrier, and sometimes it returns wearing a different face. The cockroach, as biology will tell you, is famously difficult to exterminate.
India is at a moment where the young are watching carefully and speaking loudly, even when they are speaking in memes and costumes and irony. Dismissing that as a social media fad would be a serious mistake. Understanding it, and responding to it with genuine institutional reform rather than platform management, is the harder and more necessary task.
The warning signs do not always arrive in the form of marches and manifestos. Sometimes they arrive laughing, trending, and dressed as insects.
These are serious times. We would do well to listen.
The writer is a Sales Professional. Views expressed are personal.
