“When the Revolution becomes a joke, even a joke can start a Revolution”.
That’s what I wrote in the founding statement of the Communist Party of India (Mohammad Rafi), launched fifteen years ago, along with some friends, as a new satirical online political party.
That prediction seems to have come true now with the formation of the Cockroach Janata Party or CJP, which started as a sarcastic joke in response to a callous statement by the Chief Justice of India calling unemployed Indian youth ‘cockroaches’.
In just a few days, despite being a political force with no traditional structure, no television empire, no billionaire backers, no caste arithmetic, and no ideological pedigree the CJP has spread like wildfire through Instagram reels, memes, street humour, animated stick-figure satire and online discussions.
All this may appear ridiculous to the old political class, but beneath the absurdity lies something profoundly serious. It is what can be called the revolt of the rejected, the ugly and the invisible.
The cockroach has become a political symbol because it represents the people India’s ruling elites refuse to see. Invisible workers, farmers, students, women, unemployed youth. These are the “cockroaches” who keep India running while being treated as disposable by those who rule it.
The establishment laughs nervously at the symbolism. But it should not laugh too much. Because this is not merely internet comedy. It is the beginning of a moral revolution.
And the ruling establishment , especially a BJP ecosystem that routinely dismisses protesters, activists, dissenters and the poor as “parasites, anti-national nuisances or obstacles to development” , is deeply afraid today, as it should be. Because history shows that when the invisible begin to see themselves collectively, power starts trembling. The cockroach survives everything. Empires do not.
The extraordinary rise of the CJP from zero to twenty million Instagram followers is primarily a symptom of a much deeper crisis: the collapse of public faith in the entire electoral and political process. Ask yourself a simple question: when was the last time you saw or heard of a politician who genuinely works for his constituency after getting elected? (I am not talking about distribution of plum contracts to his coterie of chamchas and friends)
Across the country, people increasingly feel that elections have become an expensive theatrical ritual whose outcomes change little in their daily lives. Politicians promise revolution before elections and royal entitlement afterward. MLAs and MPs live in enormous bungalows, travel in massive convoys, surround themselves with security, and treat public office not as service but as inheritance. Democracy has become less a mechanism of representation and more a gated club protecting itself.
The ordinary citizen experiences the Indian Republic very differently. They experience endless unemployment despite degrees and examinations. They experience collapsing public healthcare. They experience rising prices. They experience broken infrastructure.
They experience corruption so normalized that bribery is considered procedure. They experience governments obsessed with spectacle while vacancies in schools, hospitals and courts remain unfilled for years.
Nowhere is the anger of India’s youth more visible than in the repeated leakage of examination papers, especially the recent NEET examination controversy. In early May this year, millions of students, who spend years preparing for brutally competitive exams in tiny rooms under impossible pressure, discovered that question papers were purchased by those with money and influence. Re-examinations ordered after public outrage only deepened the sense of injustice because they confirmed what students already suspected: the system itself is compromised.
An entire generation of young Indians is beginning to ask: What is the point of hard work in a rigged society?
This question is politically explosive, because the rage is not simply about one exam. It is about the feeling that every institution has become transactional. That merit has been auctioned. That democracy itself has been outsourced to wealth, networks and manipulation.
The CJP emerges from this anger. Its symbolism matters because the cockroach is the perfect metaphor for modern India’s invisible majority. This invisibility is not natural , it is politically constructed. The workers, farmers, women, indigenous peoples, workers and youth who sustain society are systematically ignored even though they form the backbone of the country.
India’s political system glorifies billionaires, celebrities and strongmen while treating the people who clean the streets, grow the food, transport the goods, stitch the clothes and build the cities as background noise. But like cockroaches, the invisible are everywhere. And like cockroaches, they survive despite systematic hostility.
This is why the symbol works so powerfully among young people. The cockroach is mocked, hunted, sprayed, crushed and insulted , yet it persists. It cannot be eliminated because the entire structure depends upon its labour. The invisible run the visible world.
In some ways, the emergence of the CJP resembles the recent rise of newer political formations like that of Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam phenomenon in Tamil Nadu. The appeal lies not merely in personality but in rejection. Young voters increasingly reject existing, well entrenched parties, institutions and political languages. They are tired of dynasties, cynical coalitions, ideological hypocrisy and permanent corruption masquerading as governance.
They crave disruption. They crave sincerity. They crave a politics that speaks about jobs instead of communal hatred, hospitals instead of hashtags, education instead of televised nationalism.
But this moment also carries danger. History warns us that anger alone does not create transformation. More than a decade and half ago, the Arab Spring electrified the world because ordinary people suddenly discovered their collective power. Dictators who seemed eternal fell within weeks. Yet many of those revolutions were later hijacked, militarized, externally manipulated or crushed because movements built on spontaneous outrage often lacked durable organization and constructive political vision.
The same danger confronts the CJP today. A country as vast and unequal as India cannot be transformed through Gen Z-style flash protests alone. Nepal-style eruptions of youth energy may shake the establishment temporarily, but they cannot by themselves solve structural problems rooted in caste hierarchy, corporate capture, bureaucratic decay, communal polarization and economic inequality.
Yet dismissing these new eruptions would be equally foolish. Because they are shifting the discourse and that matters enormously.
For decades, Indian politics has been trapped in cycles of hatred, division and spectacle. Public debate has increasingly revolved around religious polarization, identity manipulation and emotional outrage while material realities deteriorate. The genius of the CJP symbolism is that it redirects attention toward everyday suffering. Jobs. Exams. Hospitals. Transport. Corruption. Public dignity. The right to exist without humiliation.
Even the attack on VIP culture and ‘nepo kids’ is politically significant. Indians across ideological divides are exhausted by rulers behaving like monarchs and their offspring like princes. Entire cities are halted so ministers can travel in convoys. Ambulances wait. Workers lose hours. Students miss exams. Citizens are pushed behind barricades to clear roads for those supposedly elected to serve them. The symbolism writes itself: democracy has become the old feudalism with election branding.
For the CJP to go from a social media sensation to a real movement will surely take time. And though online activism will still play a role, its success or failure will not be decided on Instagram. Memes are not movements. Its real test lies elsewhere.
Can followers become organizers? Can outrage become solidarity? Can symbolic protest become constructive action? The last one, is the decisive question. Because the revolution India needs is not merely destructive.
Movements cannot remain permanent carnivals of outrage. They must mature into cultures of participation and responsibility. The CJP, whether real, symbolic or satirical, will ultimately succeed not because of follower counts but because of what its followers do in the real world.
India does not simply need more angrier citizens (there are enough on X). It needs organized citizens. Citizens who repair schools instead of only tweeting about them. Those who create study circles for poorer students or help unemployed youth access opportunities. Citizens who build local accountability networks and resist communal hatred in daily life. Citizens who create cooperative economies, public libraries, health initiatives, women’s safety groups and labour solidarities. Those who build the organisational basis to take on India’s many challenges.
Those are the real revolutionary acts. The humble cockroach has survived for millions of years because it understands teamwork, cooperation, adaptation and persistence. India’s invisibles must do the same. Every act of practical solidarity weakens the culture of cynicism on which corrupt politics thrives. Creativity must turn into construction. That is the only way a movement survives co-option. Otherwise the same old political operators will infiltrate, manipulate and absorb the energy until nothing changes except slogans.
In an ideal world the Indian opposition should step forward to help the CJP grow as a well-rounded, mature, national movement, because it the voice of the youth championing important public causes. It should not be seen as a potential electoral rival but as a potential pathbreaker giving new direction to the entire polity.
The early signs though indicate, instead of understanding the hunger for political imagination among young people, large sections of the opposition remain trapped in paranoia and intellectual vanity. Whenever a new movement emerges, many opposition figures react not with sympathy but suspicion. Is he a CIA agent? A Chinese plant? A secret BJP project? A corporate puppet?
This behaviour resembles a footballer in the middle of a game who suddenly finds the ball right under his nose, before an empty goal. And instead of scoring, begins interrogating the teammate who passed it! The Indian opposition often prefers cynical commentary to participation. Analysis to courage. Sarcasm to imagination. The result is paralysis.
Meanwhile the ruling BJP establishment, despite its own insecurities, understands spectacle far better. It understands emotion. It understands narrative. It understands how to convert identity into mobilization. The opposition frequently does not even understand hope. And yet hope is exactly what millions of young Indians are searching for.
The hope that politics can once again become meaningful or that public life can be ethical. That leaders can behave like servants rather than kings. That institutions can function fairly. That honesty should not be a disadvantage. That citizenship should mean dignity. That the young have a real future and not a dystopia to look forward to.
India faces the possibility of economic, political and moral collapse if current trajectories continue unchecked. Jobless growth, institutional decay, environmental destruction, communal polarization and elite detachment are creating dangerous conditions. A democracy cannot survive indefinitely when citizens lose faith in fairness itself.
The revolt of the cockroaches is therefore not a threat to the Republic. It is perhaps the last chance to save it.
First published in countercurrents.org on 25/05/2026
