NEW DELHI (WNAM MONITORING): A new cockroach-themed youth movement has gone viral in India, attracting nearly 23 million followers, after the chief justice’s remarks were widely interpreted as comparing unemployed young people to pests.
The Cockroach Janata Party identifies as a “satirical political party,” and its name bears similarity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been in power since 2014.
The movement started to gain momentum right after Surya Kant, the Supreme Court’s chief judge, said in a May 15 hearing that there were “youngsters like cockroaches” who had no employment and turned to social media and activism instead.
While on the next day Kant clarified that his “cockroaches” remark referred to fake degree holders, not unemployed youth, the CJP was already live on social media and within days became viral, with its members defining it as a “political movement built for the young, the unemployed, and the chronically online,” which “gives a voice to those the system forgot to count.”
As its Instagram account amassed over two times more followers than the BJP, it has also drawn conspiracy accusations, with Kerala BJP President Rajeev Chandrasekhar telling local media on Saturday that the cockroach movement was a “classic influence operation with an objective to create destabilization.”
Upholding the same narrative, Education Minister Sukanta Majumdar said that “49 percent followers of the Cockroach Janta Party on social media are from Pakistan” — India’s neighbor and historic archrival. The CJP has denied the claims.
“Obviously, the BJP is scared because it shows people’s anger with the government, and shows that they are not as popular as they claim … It shows frustration with the system,” Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, told Arab News.
“What this indicates is anger with the system, which no political party has mobilized.”
The anger and frustration are both about employment concerns and a sense of disenfranchisement.
A State of Working India report published by Azim Premji University earlier this year showed that 67 percent of all unemployed youth aged 20-29 are graduates. In 2004, graduates constituted just 32 percent of the unemployed.
The youth’s frustration over unemployment is coupled with distrust in formal political parties, as well as the arrival of meme-based politics as a form of political expression, according to Prof. Afroz Alam, head of the Department of Political Science at Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad.
“The CJP moment should not be romanticized as a revolution, nor dismissed as a joke. It is a political warning. When young citizens begin to laugh at power, it often means they have stopped fearing it,” Alam said.
“The government’s anxiety is understandable. A conventional opponent can be attacked through ideology, leadership or corruption charges. But a satirical movement is harder to control because it mocks power without seeking permission from power.”
The CJP is not yet registered with the Election Commission of India, and while its immediate impact may not be electoral, it has “already disturbed the language of power” and may force political parties to take youth unemployment, examinations, recruitment delays, and representation more seriously, Alam said.
“It may also push Indian politics further into the arena of satire, digital symbolism and emotional mobilization. The important point is that CJP may not win seats, but it can shape conversations. In politics, before votes move, language moves.”
