The Cockroach and the Constitution
The India Commentary view
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By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2026-05-26 10:42:08
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The India Commentary view
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The Chief Justice of India called unemployed youth cockroaches. The government then blocked the satirical party they formed in response, citing national security. Between those two acts lies everything that is wrong with how the Indian establishment currently relates to its own citizens.
Begin with the remark. On 15 May 2026, CJI Surya Kant, irritated by a frivolous petition, said that youngsters who could not find employment or a place in their profession were 'like cockroaches' - some becoming media, some social media, some RTI activists, all of them attacking the system. His clarification the next day - that he had meant only those who enter professions with fake degrees - did not repair the damage. It never does. The word had already travelled at the speed of injury. The clarification followed at the speed of a press note.
The clarification also fails on its own terms. Cockroaches are not corrected or rehabilitated. They are exterminated. That is what the word means. That is what it has always meant. A Chief Justice can legitimately express displeasure at frivolous petitions. He cannot, without institutional cost, describe a class of citizens as vermin - regardless of which subset he subsequently claims he had in mind.
Then came the Cockroach Janta Party. Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications student in Boston, founded it on 16 May. Within four days it had surpassed the BJP and the Congress on social media. Twenty million Instagram followers. Over 350,000 sign-ups. The satire had a demand list - free media, jobs, anti-defection reform - that was not satirical at all. It was a political indictment wearing a costume.
The government's response was to invoke national security. The IB advised the blocking of the CJP's X account. The website was taken down. Accounts were hacked. A PIL sought a CBI probe. The CJI, when the matter came before him, said there was no grave urgency in the CJP petitions. Correct. There was no urgency in them. The urgency was entirely in the government's overreaction.
That overreaction has a context. The Indian establishment has watched Bangladesh's student movement bring down Sheikh Hasina. It has watched Nepal's youth rewrite political arrangements. It knows what a generation of educated, unemployed, digitally organised young people is capable of when it decides it has been patient long enough. The cockroach, as India's intelligence bureau surely knows, is remarkably difficult to exterminate. It has survived conditions that finished off considerably larger creatures.
India's democratic framework has, historically, been capacious enough to absorb dissent and satire without treating them as threats. That capacity is being tested. The Supreme Court exists to protect the constitutional right to free expression - including the right to mock power, to form satirical parties, to call yourself a cockroach if the Chief Justice has already done it for you. When the state invokes national security against a meme party, the problem is not the meme. The problem is the state.
The young will not be exterminated. They will not be fumigated. They will, however, remember who tried.
