Congratulations, You're a Cockroach: The Birth of CJP
Every so often, India produces a political moment so absurd that you have to double-check the date to make sure it isn't April Fools'. This is one of those.
On May 15th, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant was hearing a matter about "bogus advocates" — lawyers practising in Delhi on fake or unrecognised law degrees, some of whom, by his own account, never set foot in a law college and simply obtained a degree sitting at home. He was reportedly considering a CBI investigation into roughly 48,000 such lawyers nationwide. In that context, he said: "There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them? There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don't get any employment and don't have any place in profession." He went on to say some of them become media, some become social media or RTI activists, "and they start attacking everyone."
Read in full, it's a comment about one specific, narrow problem: lawyers gaming the system with fake or unrecognised law degrees. But once media reports clipped it down to a few lines and stripped out the CBI-investigation, fake-degree context entirely, it read as something else on every timeline it landed on — a sitting judge branding an entire generation of unemployed youth as cockroaches. That was never the actual subject of the remark. It was about unlicensed lawyers specifically. The clipped version simply travelled faster than the correction ever could.
The person who capitalised on that gap between context and headline was a 30-year-old named Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist with a master's from Boston University, previously with the Aam Aadmi Party, who looked at the biggest insult a judge could accidentally hand an entire generation and thought: say less, I'm building a party out of this. Membership criteria, and I am quoting this accurately: unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to rant professionally. On purpose. As a badge, not an apology.
I'd love to tell you this fizzled out the way most internet jokes do. Instead, the account crossed three million followers in 78 hours and ten million in under five days — a growth rate that would make most actual political parties weep quietly into their manifestos. That speed made plenty of people, reasonably, ask whether the virality was fully organic or partly engineered. Nobody's proven either version definitively. What I can tell you is that Arundhati Roy wrote fondly about "young roaches riding in on the rain," which tells you everything about how fast a slur became a symbol, and nothing at all about who was pulling strings behind it, if anyone was.
Here's the twist that makes this whole origin story properly ridiculous: two months later, after the protests had already forced a cabinet resignation, CJI Kant went on record calling the entire episode "completely out of context," reiterating that his comment was about fake-degree lawyers and "never about the youth." By then it didn't matter in the slightest. Dipke himself, addressing his supporters after the resignation, actually thanked the Chief Justice by name: "If he hadn't called us cockroaches, I wouldn't have come to India. This movement would not have started." Read that twice. The founder of a movement that toppled a minister publicly credited the judge whose misquoted remark started it all — and appears to have meant it sincerely, not as a jab.
That's the part I keep returning to, more as a personal reflection than a political one. I remember "cockroach" being an insult with real teeth. If you got called that in college, you absorbed it quietly and moved on. A decade later, apparently, it's a costume worn on purpose, in public, with a laughing emoji attached, and occasionally with actual gratitude toward the man who handed it to you. I don't think that shift is inherently good or bad. I think it's just real, and it made me feel — suddenly, almost violently — old.
For those first few weeks, though, let's be honest about what this actually was: a joke with excellent production values and no direction whatsoever. Millions of followers, an avalanche of memes, and if you'd asked any single "cockroach" what, specifically, they were protesting, you'd have gotten a shrug. Supporters called it organic momentum finding its feet. Critics called it a viral stunt in search of relevance. Both were being said, loudly, in real time — and both were probably a little bit right.
Then it found a cause. And a joke with that much reach, once it's pointed at something, stops being funny very fast.
— Pooja