Growing Fan Base of Cockroach Janata Party in India

"Indians live like cockroaches and die like cockroaches", argued Jayant Bhandari in an X post in April this year. "They vote for bottom of the barrel cockroaches as rulers, who rightly treat them as cockroaches", he added, faulting the people of India for this state of affairs. More recently, Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant said during a hearing that certain unemployed youth were "like cockroaches" who enter professions with fake degrees or become social media and RTI activists attacking the system.  Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian graduate of the public relations program at Boston University, picked up on it. He posted on X on May 16: “What if all cockroaches came together?” Dipke created a political party, named it Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a parody of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and established a website that quickly gained tens of millions of followers, according to the New York Times. 

Cockroach Janata Party Logo. Source: CJP Website

Dipke embraced “cockroach” in the party’s name to reinforce the fact that the insect, which arouses visceral disgust in many people, is also nearly indestructible. “What was thrown at them as an insult, now they are carrying it with pride,” he said. 

The group of Indians described by the Indian Chief Justice as "cockroaches" is made up of over 100 million young people aged 15-29 years who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) as estimated by the World Bank. They make up the world's largest NEET population in any country. Such massive numbers threaten the country’s demographic dividend, risking long-term economic stagnation, widening gender disparities, and severe social instability. They represent a massive reservoir of untapped human potential that drains productivity. 

As a result of failed policies and lack of opportunities at home, India is driving its best and brightest to the West, particularly to the United States, at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2023 study of the 1,000 top scorers in the 2010 entrance exams to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) — a network of prestigious institutions of higher learning based in 23 Indian cities — revealed the scale of the problem. Around 36% migrated abroad, and of the top 100 scorers, 62% left the country, according to a report in the science journal Nature.  Nearly two-thirds of those leaving India are highly educated, having received academic or vocational training. This is the highest for any country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

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