The Cockroach Janata Party is my generation’s attempt to reclaim the promise the Republic made to everyone

A participant wears a cockroach mask as supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party gather for a protest demonstration in New Delhi. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

Written by: Amulya Dhawan

4 min readJul 6, 2026 06:52 AM IST

First published on: Jul 6, 2026 at 06:21 AM IST

The Cockroach Janta Party began as a satire page, floating a half-serious idea in response to the Chief Justice of India’s remark dismissing a generation struggling to find employment: What if we built a fraternity of our own? Within a day, it had gone viral. Since then, I have worked as a media volunteer, and the first thing I learned is that none of us made this happen. The idea spread because years of suppression finally found a language.

Consider why a tweet about coming together was the thing that caught on. We are a generation conditioned to experience one another as threats, taught that scarcity is natural and suspicion is the only rational posture toward our peers. So when someone proposed, half in jest, that we might instead form a community, talk to each other in our pain, stop being called parasites in isolation, it landed as a glimmer of something we had been denied.

This is the part I can speak to from inside, and it is not flattering in the usual way. People within disagree, fumble, and revise themselves in public. There are ideological differences, and rather than papering over them into cohesion, the attempt is to work through them. Mistakes get corrected out loud. Young people sometimes reproduce the very paternalism we say we are against, the reflex of a gerontocratic order that treats youth as a thing to be managed.

The sympathetic observer reads this as immaturity, a movement not yet ready for itself. When the movement reveals its internal ruptures, it is not failing to transcend the society that made it. It is rendering that society legible. The social and political cleavages in the room are reflections of those outside it, which need to be brought to the surface and resolved.

A movement that presented itself as already pure would be repeating the oldest lie in Indian public life, that emancipation can be declared from inside structures one has not yet worked through. The cockroaches refuse that lie. Theirs is a reflexive politics still forming, one that takes its own compromised formation as the first thing to be reckoned with. They stay in the argument, on exclusion, on who gets spoken over, on what representation actually requires, because this definitive act of working-through is at the fundamental core of reform.

There is a hesitation in the language of asking for space, because asking concedes that the space is in someone else’s gift. Ambedkar warned, on the eve of the republic, that we were entering a life of contradiction, a political democracy laid over a social order that denied the equality it proclaimed.

The examination hall was supposed to be one of the few places where contradiction was resolved rather than reproduced, the rare site where the accident of birth would yield to demonstrated effort. When a question paper leaks, the resolution collapses, and the contradiction Ambedkar named arrives as a lived discovery that the one promised ladder out of inherited disadvantage was rigged at the top. The youth is demanding to simply reclaim the redemption of that promise.

And it is not only the young. The collapse of the education system is the collapse of a society’s basic promise: That jobs and schooling are the route to upward movement, and the people who come to protest that understand that the promise was made to all of them.

The CJP is vulnerable and still being built. But I would not exchange its visible struggle for the composure of the babu-uncle bureaucratic culture of subservience that brought us here. The cockroaches are creating what resonates with the youth: An honest reckoning with how far social reality still sits from the equality the republic promised, and how hard it is to become something other than what you were made to be.

The writer is a rising third year student of Political Science and Sociology at Ashoka University. She currently volunteers as a Media Coordinator with the movement led by Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)