Digital satire as more than dissent: Inside the CJP uprising rewriting Indian politics

The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) became an overnight internet sensation among Gen Z; its Instagram page amassing an unprecedented following of twenty million within a week of its launch on 16 May 2026. With it, Abhijeet Dipke, the page’s creator, also catapulted to viral fame. He had started the page as a satirical response to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s remarks comparing unemployed Indian youth to ‘cockroaches’ and ‘parasites’. The CJP struck a deep chord with Gen Z - the first generation of true digital natives who, rather than merely constituting a demographic category, inhabit a collectively claimed, age-defined global identity and with characteristic irony, have wholly embraced the nomenclature of cockroaches. This identification has migrated seamlessly into everyday digital expression: many reels and videos now open with greetings such as ‘hello, fellow cockroaches’ or individuals introducing themselves as ‘X, a proud cockroach’ – becoming a vernacular of solidarity for the generation.

The core demand of this faux party has been the resignation of the education minister, Mr. Dharmendra Pradhan following the leak of NEET (a national standardised medical entrance exam) undergraduate paper a few days earlier. Dipke could have stopped at the #ResignDharmendraPradhan hashtag or the petition asking for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation at Change.org (which was promptly taken down after crossing a 39 million signatures the last I saw), but chose to borrow the grammar of formal politics by launching CJP as a vehicle for his student protest. Things moved fast once Dipke returned to India in the early hours of 6 June 2026, thereafter holding multiple protest rallies in different Indian cities, starting with New Delhi, and spreading to Pune, Lucknow, Amritsar, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Jaipur. Acting as a pressure group, at the time of writing this piece, CJP supporters are on an indefinite dharna at Jantar Mantar and have vowed to continue the aandolan if Dharmendra Pradhan does not resign.

A slow brewing transnational student movement
What caught my attention was that Dipke, a thirty-year-old Indian international student (the subject of my current research) at Boston University was spearheading this satirical party. Dipke was not the first one to call himself a cockroach online. In fact, on X, within hours of this news making headlines, many dissenting voices critical of the current ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), appended ‘cockroach’ to their names. But Dipke, like a visionary, went a step further and started the CJP page on Instagram and X, as if foreseeing how the slur would resonate with millions of Indian youths like him. And true to it, Indian youth responded overwhelmingly. In the last few days, the protests have only intensified, with students not just in Indian cities but also abroad (Berlin, where I am currently based, is a case in point), joining in.

That Chief Justice Surya Kant inadvertently laid the foundation of the CJP is also ironical. When a student at Birkbeck, University of London, asked Chief Justice Surya Kant, who was delivering a lecture there on artificial intelligence and international law on 4 June 2026, about growing hostility to ‘dissent within India’, he was cut off mid-sentence by the moderator. The following day, the Indian High Commission in London issued a statement condemning what it called ‘indecorous audience behaviour’ a phrase that, intentionally or not, confirmed everything the student had tried to ask about. Impervious to the storm he indirectly brewed, it is worth pausing on the specific word the Chief Justice used.

In the years before the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which more than 800,000 Tutsis were killed, government-aligned radio stations spent years calling them inyenzi or cockroaches. Genocide scholars and the record of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is unambiguous about what that language did: it stripped a group of its humanity in the public imagination. Nazi propaganda used a parallel word Schmarotzer or parasites to target Jews and other ‘inferior’ races. It is worth asking how its most senior judicial officer reaches for the same vocabulary that twentieth century propagandists used to prepare populations for violence. That India’s Chief Justice thought nothing before calling his country’s youth as cockroaches and parasites, is not just callous, but point to the utter disregard the ruling and arbitrating class now has for its own people.

The young people who support CJP perhaps instinctively understood this history, calling themselves cockroaches but with a subversive twist - they have a generation owning the label. While the digital support to the movement is massive, the recurrent jab that only a handful students turn up at the ongoing Jantar Mantar protest site, also fell apart after the 20 July 2026 Chalo Sansad call which saw a massive turnout. One reel after another showed how students from all over the country embarked on a journey to Delhi in support of CJP’s call. Supporters who could not reach Delhi, turned up in sizeable numbers in different Indian cities, as well as in cities in the UK, USA, Canada and Germany.  With humour, passion, fit checks, and a clear-eyed view of this government’s failure, Gen Zs have been disseminating their videos on social media, sometimes from the protest sites, at other times, from their homes, thereby dissolving the virtual-physical dichotomy.

As CJP gains unprecedented transnational momentum, how should we understand the protests that started against an insult? As I argue, CJP protests have now morphed into a full-fledged student movement, perhaps one of the most consequential one India has produced since its turn to the right. Directed primarily at the rot inside India’s higher education system, it is no accident that it was started by an Indian student who went abroad to study. In Berlin, where I am currently doing fieldwork, a recent Indian graduate from a private Indian university referred to himself as a cockroach, surviving in the city by working in the gig economy as a delivery worker. He is away from his family only because ‘no one (Indian youth) wants to stay in India’. The idea that Indian education has failed its youth reverberates across borders. But while education is the primary target, thinking of the CJP as only a higher education centred movement would be a misrecognition of deep-seated youth discontent, amoeba like in form, expansive and continuously expanding.

Post-ideological but decidedly anti-right
The sheer virality of CJP saw a slew of media articles examining this phenomenon within days of its launch. While mostly analytical, this UnHeard piece traced its anti-political lineage to Jayprakash Narayan’s total revolution and India Against Corruption (IAC). Such comparisons are understandable. Before embarking on his journey from Boston to New Delhi, Dipke had asked his followers on X and Instagram to gather at Jantar Mantar, carrying ‘..a book and our Tiranga. Offer flowers to policemen as a gesture of compassion and gratitude. We have to lead this movement with love and peace.’ In another instance, Dipke was repeatedly slapped at June’s Jaipur protest by BJP supporters and he chose to respond by reaffirming his stance for the protests to remain peaceful.  This language may be reminiscent of the moral overtures of Jayaprakash or Anna Hazare or even Gandhi, but apart from the movement’s adoption of the virtuous grammar of Gandhian politics, castigating the movement as ultimately apolitical is misguided.

Unlike Gandhi, Jayprakash or Hazare, Dipke had not disavowed entry into formal politics. In fact, its supporters almost already view the CJP as a political party whose chief constituent are the students and youth of the county. Students have articulated on the protest site that their ‘demands’ have not been met by the existing parties and they want to ‘give CJP a chance’. As the CJP followers blew up on Instagram in May, at the Carnival of World Cultures in Berlin, an Indian man in his thirties had disclosed how he supports the CJP and asked his friend, if he did so as well. The friend replied that he is a German citizen and cannot join it, alluding to the provision of foreign citizen’s non-involvement clause in Indian party politics. Like a party, CJP has also released manifestos; its earliest one reading like satire: its membership required ‘being unemployed, physically lazy, chronically online, and capable of professional ranting’. But in June, they also released a more serious exam manifesto.

When an indefinite protest on Jantar Mantar started on 20 June 2026, in its third day the CJP movement found support from the Bhartiya Kisan Union (Charuni faction) – one of the groups that we a part of the farm laws protest, soon followed by the umbrella organisation, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM). A week into that protest, and with their demands of Pradhan’s resignation not being met, protesters escalated the pressure on the government. Sonam Wangchuk, 59-year-old Ramon Magsaysay awardee and climate activist from Ladakh and the only known face of the protest, went on hunger strike along with several students.
Wanchuk’s hunger strike added immediate gravitas to the movement, and activists across the political spectrum excluding the right lent their support to the movement, with many including Arundhati Roy, Mahua Moitra, Sanjay Singh, Brinda Karat, John Brittas, and Yogendra Yadav visiting the protest site. On 18 July 2026, as he rapidly lost weight, the Delhi police dragged Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site and hospitalised him, thereby breaking his fast.  This also marked the moment when the movement entered its current and most antagonistic phase.

The movement’s post-ideological stance and its resolve to avoid platforming divisive issues (like Umar Khalid’s incarceration) can be read as circumstantial as well as strategic - a way to pre-empt both the wrath and the subversive tactics of the present government, as witnessed during the JNU protests of 2015 and 2016, or, later, during the Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019-20 and the Farmers’ protests of 2020-21. Yet to designate it as apolitical would be widely off the mark, as its loosely defined agenda is decidedly anti-right-wing. In fact, a more insidious form of resistance is taking root among many Gen Zs: an inter and intra-generational political rupture. Both online and at the protest venues, the youth have spoken about challenging, arguing with and defying their BJP-supporting parents, friends and colleagues. Gen Z youth who have never been political before in their lives and many of them grew up in households where their parents, often comfortably middle-class and squarely Gen X, are enthusiastic Modi supporters, are breaking ranks.

Rather than being apolitical, their movement is a clear reflection of the politics of its time, echoing the widening gap between a government’s failed promises to its youth and a generation’s lived reality of foreclosed opportunities in their own country. It is unsurprising that many Indian youths are now leaving the country to study abroad. They watched Dhaka and Kathmandu flare up on Instagram in real time in 2024 and 2025.  Earlier cohorts of frustrated Indian youth had no reliable way to discover that their private disappointment was, in fact, a shared and structural condition. But Gen Z does. At a time when Hindutva has found peak support, particularly by the earlier generations of Indians globally, Gen Zs are ‘..not doing mandir masjid politics or vote chori politics. This generation is asking questions, demanding accountability’, as actor Prakash Raj told the NewsMinute during the CJP rally in Bengaluru’s Freedom Park.

Unsurprisingly, another form of politics, that of care and solidarity is also crucial to this movement, and students at the protest site and online are repeatedly heard saying how the current government is only interested in ‘Hindu-Muslim’ issues, blanketly repudiating BJP’s communally divisive politics of hate. Those opposing the movement are quick to ask how ‘lakhs’ are being spent on keeping the Jantar Mantar protest site functioning. CJP supporters have instead pointed to the Sikh and Muslim supporters who have come forward to provide food and other supplies as a sign of bahichara as protesters sit in scorching Delhi heat to continue their demand of Pradhan’s istifa and widespread educational reforms. Since 19 July, as the numbers in Jantar Mantar swelled, random Indians are using delivery platforms to feed the protesting students. Many commentators on reels also extended monetary support to the youth to travel to Delhi for the 20 July protests. When met with heavy police brutality, doctors set camps for the protestors in the capital and advocates came forward providing free legal services to those who might be locked up in jail.

Again, as a reflection of the politics of its time, the CJP’s popularity is through digitally amplified word of mouth and a strict avoidance of mainstream media. Even as mainstream media barely covers the movement, there reporters have been heckled by protestors who have constantly chanted ‘godi media go back’ (godi, literally meaning lap, the term Indians increasingly use for mainstream news channels obediently to the government). One protester at Jantar Mantar, in a cockroach mask, told Newslaundry in Hindi: there isn’t a press anywhere in the world as compromised as India’s’. It is as much a generational verdict as a political one for a country that calls itself the largest democracy, but where its fourth pillar is weakened to the extent that it currently ranks 157th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. Many videos from the protest sites have emerged, exposing godi media by showing how interviews are staged with ‘protestors’ or shamed for using deflectionary tactics that takes the focus away from the student demands.

Right now, the government’s stand appears to be non-wilful tolerance of the movement, yet it has not shied away from heavy handedness. In its early stage, protesters alleged that authorities tried to thin out the crowd by cutting off water supplies, sanitation, and lighting, yet the protests have continued. The digital crackdown has been no less revealing. MeitY directed the withholding of the CJP’s X account in India under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, posing it as a threat to national security. The matter was taken to the Delhi High Court, which recently ordered its restoration. Similar invocations of national security were deployed in attempts to suppress the online petition demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, and multiple coordinated attempts were made to hack the CJP’s official Instagram account. But after the Sansad Chalo call, the movement for the first time saw what state and police brutality can look like. Yet, the students are now showing greater resolve to take this government heads-on.

Discontent as a basis of movement
In an era in which memes are recognised as a legitimate unit of political communication, CJP’s satirical name, their cockroach mascot, their manifestos and vast digital following together constitute an emergent digital political culture through which dissent is made legible for a generation raised inside platforms built for exactly that kind of compressed expression. Social media combined with a rapidly growing Indian student population abroad has simultaneously broaden the vista of Indian youths who are suddenly aware of what higher education can look like elsewhere and what it delivers at home. While CJP’s core demands may concern the NEET-UG paper leak or the CBSE evaluation irregularities that followed it, the youth uprising around education is anything but incidental. That the issue of higher education has immense political currency can be understood by how NEET paper leak (happening with regularity every year since it was made mandatory in 2019) has become an issue for both the Congress and the Left parties in 2026.

For successive generations of middle-class students, competitive exams like the JEE functioned as an impersonal gatekeeper of a better future - one that claimed, at least in principle, to be indifferent to inherited privilege. However, this generation of upper-caste, middle-class youth now face unprecedented competition, as more students than ever, many of them first-generation learners, have entered higher education, who in turn soon realise that this promise was never meant for them in the first place. Beneath the immediate anger directed at a single compromised examination lies a more gradual and consequential recognition: that a degree no longer reliably converts into employment, a promise that India made to its youth following liberalisation and privatisation of its higher education. The employment data reflect this discontent succinctly. The Azim Premji University report found that nearly forty percent of graduates under twenty-five are unemployed, noting that ‘the rapid expansion in the number of graduates has not been matched by commensurate growth in graduate employment’ (pg 18). United in their bleak view of the future, Gen Zs have found a language and platform for their grievances. This condition of precarity finds its most exact symbolic expression in the nomenclature the movement has adopted for itself. Cockroach chapters are springing up far and wide, including one here in Berlin.

CJP has made Ambedkar as their movement’s icon, and azadi as their slogan. While not clearly articulating it, Gen Zs understand that India’s politics, education and social fabric need an overhaul. The caste and class profile of this movement’s supporter matters, and can easily complicate a story about a unified Gen Z uprising. Talking to 24-year-old Saheli (name changed) in Berlin, I learnt how she and her friends are all rooting for CJP even when they encounter pro-BJP supporters among their peer group in the city. For her, distance gave them clarity and being away from India’s tightly controlled social media algorithm showed her the realities that she would not have otherwise known. So, to dismiss the CJP as either apolitical or exclusively representative of urban, upwardly mobile, upper-caste students would be to suggest that Gen Z identification is not broad based. Moreover, it would presuppose that higher education as a pathway to social mobility concerns only a narrow section of Indian society - a proposition flatly contradicted by the aspirations of India’s rapidly expanding middle class, for whom education remains the primary, and often the only route to a life of dignity and security.

CJP’s future
It would be a mistake to read the CJP as simply the latest sequel to India’s long romance with anti-corruption politics. When Anna Hazare sat at Ramlila Maidan in 2011, corruption meant something fairly concrete: bribery, red tape, money changing hands to grease a transaction. The fix on offer was institutional, a powerful ombudsman, and the Jan Lokpal, fastened onto an otherwise functioning state. Gen Z differs from this politics in that they do not believe the state is functioning. The BJP, inevitably, is the implicit target, not because the CJP is secretly a Congress or AAP front (although Dipke has been Aam Aadmi Party’s social media volunteer earlier), as some BJP figures have suggested, but because the BJP is the only government most of this generation has ever known.

What will happen to the CJP once Dharmendra Pradhan resigns? It may not survive, in its current form, and the CJP may or may not contest an election. But its durability as an institution was never really the point. What it has demonstrated is that a generation raised inside a broken system has finally found a shared language for its anger, and that language travels across borders, faster than any government intension to block it. This Gen Z led movement refuses to fit old categories of apolitical versus political, satire versus protest, virtual versus physical, or domestic versus diasporic. And this is exactly what makes it a bellwether for how young Indians will do politics going forward.