‘Cockroach Janta Party’: Top Indian judge’s comment sparks satire, protest

Controversial remark by Supreme Court’s chief justice triggers a political movement, with tens of thousands of mainly Gen Z users signing in.

New Delhi, India – Abhijeet Dipke has barely slept in the last 72 hours, fielding waves of messages on social media after a casual joke took an unexpected turn.

The 30-year-old, a recent graduate in public relations from Boston University in the United States, finds himself leading a sweeping satirical political movement – the so-called Cockroach Janta Party (“janta” is people in Hindi) – being joined online by thousands of people with each passing day.

On Friday, India’s chief justice of the Supreme Court, Surya Kant, said during an open court hearing that “parasites” were attacking the system, and equated the youngsters to cockroaches “who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in a profession”.

“There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists and other activists, and they start attacking everyone,” he said.

Kant later clarified his remarks, saying his comment related to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees, and did not target India’s youth, whom he called “the pillars of a developed India”.

Yet, his remarks drew considerable ire, mainly from Gen Z internet users as they battle large-scale unemployment, inflation, and bitter religious divides after 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

As outrage escalated across social media, Dipke posted on X on Saturday: “What if all cockroaches come together?”

He followed up on his joke – and the desperately frustrated emotions behind it – by setting up a website and social media accounts for the Cockroach Janta Party – a play on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – on Instagram and X.

‘Like a breath of fresh air’

The Cockroach Janta Party’s Instagram account has crossed 11 million followers in three days, and more than 350,000 people have signed up for the party’s membership via a Google form. In contrast, India’s ruling BJP party, touted to be the world’s largest, has 8.7 million followers on Instagram.

Among the people who have signed up are political heavyweights, including Mahua Moitra, an opposition parliamentarian from West Bengal state, and Kirti Azad from neighbouring Bihar, also a former parliamentarian.

Ashish Joshi, an Indian bureaucrat who retired from federal service earlier this year, was among the earliest to sign up for the party after he read about it on social media.

Chief Justice Kant’s word, therefore, hit a raw nerve.

His comments came in a week that saw nationwide protests by young students over exam paper leaks, forcing the cancellation of a government-run medical entrance test.

“Chief Justice’s comments reflected deep-rooted prejudice and antipathy towards activists and youth in general,” Prashant Bhushan, a prominent lawyer at India’s Supreme Court and a rights activist, told Al Jazeera.

“This is also precisely the mentality of this present government.”